NL 1/2
Hero has 180 or so in choppy session. Villain just sat down and bought in for 200. I don't know him.
Hero has 89 in Big Blind
Villain is in MP he raises to 7. In my game the raise to 7 can be a pair or it can be nothing or two broadway cards or J10.
Standard raise this day at the table is 10 to 15.
Button calls 7 so does SB and so does HERO.
Pot $28
Flop 710Q
How should I proceed on this flop? Should I lead out? Should I check to the raiser even though I'm not sure it's a real raise? What's best practice? I do seem to donk bet in these situations. Would leading out for 20 be wrong? How about 30 or do you prefer a check?

The Q & T otf hits a lot of hands, so I'd pray I get to CRAI.

In raised pots, I prefer to lead out and then shove if raised.

What I don't like to do is check raise and get 1/3-1/2 of my stack in and then miss the turn OOP. If I play a big pot I want it to be all in on the flop and bet/shove works better for that. If you bet and he doesnt raise, and you miss the turn at least the pot is much smaller.

So I prefer to bet.

Yeah I led out for $20 here and just got one call. I hit an 8 on the turn which lessened my equity. What do you think I should do with the turn bet? The pot was $68. Do you think I should have led for $30 and overbet pot slightly instead?

$20 flop bet is fine. Id check the turn now and see what he does. If he bets, its just a math problem.

I'm really not following the advice in this thread so far. Sounds like a lot of "I like to do this" with no real justification.

First of all. Fold pre. As I've discussed in this forum at length, and proven definitively with math, suited connectors are worthless hands multi-way, out of position, with low SPR's. Calling here is a textbook leak.

I like a raise if we're deeper, but we're not so fold.

As played, on the flop, leading doesn't make any sense. Yeah, you can get called by worse, and you can fold out hands that totally missed but might be better than yours (Ax for example). But ultimately, if we have 15 outs, we're an equity favorite, and should really be trying to get a lot of money in on this street. Betting $20 and getting called seems like a disappointment.

Or, if our bet is raised, then we probably don't have as much equity as we think. Sets have a 30+% chance to increase to a full house. Bigger flush draws and made straights also have us in bad shape. If our donk lead is raised, this short, we have no fold equity.
So shoving over someone who does this seems like a sure fire recipe for getting our stack in bad.

As played, I'm trying to check-raise the flop and get $45-$65 in on this street. Then I'm open-jamming all turns.

I always thought you want to play multi-way with suited connectors? Heads up i always fold them but when there's 4 or 5 callers I usually call in the hopes of winning a big pot. You disagree? I'm not trying to be argumentative. I honestly don't understand.

Agree

Closing action for this price folding here is criminal

How is this low SPR? Looks like over 6 effective. This hand plays fine MW...sure I'd rather be OTB but again folding this hand is utterly absurd

Tend to agree...this seems like a good c/r spot tho I'd want to know OPs expectation of OR betting here
We are never in bad shape here so w/e

ProPokerTools Hold'em Simulation

90,090 trials (Exhaustive)

board: 7TQ

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
8d9d	51.62%	43,485	6,038
QT, 77, TT, QQ, KJ, 89, AQ, KQ, QJ, J9	48.38%	40,567	6,038

Agree

It’s interesting that you’ve come to this conclusion (I’ve read the other main thread where you outline your thinking) but I think it’s worth asking the question: when the top poker players/instructors/writers are routinely playing/recommending playing suited connectors multi-way, out of position, and with ‘normal’ stack depths, can you really be certain that they are all wrong, and you are right?!

Not trying to be argumentative, just think that is a worthwhile question

Well then let me educate you grasshopper.

First, make SPR your new religion. Learn it. Live it. Love it. Here the SPR is low. That means that subsequent betting is going to be large relative to remaining stacks driving commitment decisions very early on in the hand. Your 9-high simply can't stand that kind of pressure.

Yes you win some big pots when you hit, and that probably feels like the payoff for all the money you leaked when you missed. But you're going to miss ALOT, and the calls you make will most definitely outweigh the pots you win when you only start the hand with 180. Do the math...you'll see.

When you play passively, the only way you can make money is by realizing your equity. Here, you are most certainly an equity underdog. So in order to profit, you need to over-realize your equity. You can do that two ways:

1) Be way better at value-betting than everyone else. So when you hit, you get max value more often. In this particular hand, this is impossible because you started with so little money.

2) Win without showdown. That means make the other guys fold. Here you're out of position, against 3 other players. To get folds, you are going to have to seriously ratchet up the aggression, and flatting pre-flop is not a good start.

To summarize, suited connectors make money when they over-realize their equity. That means play them when you're DEEP, so you can make lots when you hit. It also means you play them in position, so you control the size of the pot. It also means that you play them aggressively, to maximize your fold equity (this also helps build a big pot for when you hit on later streets).

Really the play with SC's is to make an aggressive move pre (including 3-bets) to narrow the field. Then c-bet favorable flops and exploit your opponents post-flop folding mistakes (their biggest leak). Then barrel turns/rivers when you have strong equity (which should be fairly often with SC's). And you do all this when you're deep enough to do all this betting without committing your stack, and doing so in position so you can decide whether or not you want to commit your stack.

The moral of the story here is that SC's and other drawing hands (gappers and such) are total garbage when your stack is under 150BB's. You don't hit often enough, and the low SPR forces you to commit too many chips as an underdog.

+many

Call pre is marginal but getting 25-1 IO, I am ok with it.

Who says this?

While I agree philosophically with Owl that you need to be more selective when choosing to play SC's OOP when we aren't very deep, I do not agree with being a slave to SPR's. Sure, I think it is a good metric as a "check" before making a close pre-flop decision, but after that I think it is mostly worthless as once you get to the flop, the action/decision tree can be so wide that you simply cannot be married to any one potential line if you have more than say 50 blinds.

this will only be called by better
you lose big pot and win small pot
if you want to play for stacks lead flop
GII bad is what you prescribe on turn

Well I’ve read about 20-30 instructional poker books. They all tend to agree with each other about most things. Obviously most of these books talk about how to play suited connectors in all kinds of spots. My memory is that none of them have recommended folding pre in the kind of spot that is being discussed in this thread.

To make sure I’m not going mad, I just had a quick look at Jonathan Little on Live No Limit Cash Games - the theory, chapter 3 Pre flop, Playing from the Big Blind. Paragraph 4. It says to call in pretty much this exact spot.

Obviously Super System was a big advocate of playing suited connectors in many spots.

I’d be interested in whether you can point me at any material from any reputable poker author that would recommend a fold in this spot... not wanting to be confrontational, I’d genuinely be interested in seeing if there is anything out there along these lines?

Name one

Quote please?

Super System is the worst poker book on the market right now. Literally, the worst. If you have it....burn it.

There's this....
http://www.crushlivepoker.com/articles/suited-connectors-in-the-blinds

There's also pretty much every syllable ever written on the subject of SPR and making a plan for your hand. Ed Miller has like 7 books on this.

show me a reasonable range where we are getting it in bad OTF such that we only "lose a big pot and win a small pot"

Little says to call with reasonable suited connectors in the B.B. when there has been a raise and multiple callers. He doesn’t mention sizes of the raise, but in the spot in this thread, the raise was small, making the call especially mandatory IMO.

Another book I really like is the one on pot limit and no limit poker by Stewart Reuben and Bob Ciaffone. I’ve read other books by these two which have also been very good. Their book was the first time I read about the 5-10 rule about stack depths when playing the speculative pre flop hands. Both these guys have been very successful players. This book has some very condensed (excellent) writing about principles and concepts, so it doesn’t exhaustively address what to do in every kind of positional situation in the way that the Little book does.

I don’t have my hard copy poker library with me, just the Jonathan Little book on Kindle. I’d think Harrington would address SCs from the B.B. (he addresses most things!) - maybe someone else out there can have a look for that?

I agree, I don’t like Super System in that I think most players would lose trying to play such a super aggressive style nowadays (unless maybe they were super expert players). But surely we’d agree that Brunson has been a top player! I mention the book as it would suggest that SCs do have some decent playability in general. But I don’t want to get hung up on the merits of SS here, that’s a side issue.

The 5-10 rule seems to have become accepted/received wisdom. I do think you have a perfect right to question it - but I think AllTheCheese provided really good math and logic in the other thread, which I found very convincing re the playability of SCs in this spot. I saw that you weren’t in agreement with his math and logic. 120 posts in that thread has not yet provided consensus between you two so I don’t want to re-open new math/logic discussions here, I guess people can just read that thread for themselves!

Nevertheless the fact that the 5-10 rule is still widely accepted does give it some credence IMO (in addition to Cheese’s math justification of it etc)

The Bart Hanson article was interesting. I don’t heard of him before so I don’t know how reliable his advice is. The article was really quite short and seemed to express some general opinions without really any math to back it up (something you usually demand from the likes of AllTheCheese etc)

Bart talks about SPRs usually being low in typical small stakes games, but I’ve found my typical games to have typical stacks of ~70-100bb which I think provides plenty of manoeuvrability (for c/r’s, lead/jams etc on flop) and leads to the 5-10 rule being met. I don’t know what games Bart is thinking of where stack depths are so short?

I’d be interested in hearing of any other books/articles which agree with Bart’s views?

I like Miller a lot. I think the Sklansky/Miller book on NLH is great. I can’t recall reading anything in there advising not calling with SCs in the spot we’re talking about?

Actually AllTheCheese and I did come to an agreement that using the most optimistic estimates possible, the EV of a pre-flop call line is under 0.5BB's. See post #86 in that thread.

Also, you don't understand SPR. Desireable SPR's for this kind of situation is 15+. It would be like 10+ if we were in position. And we would want the betting lead.

5-6 is incredibly inadequate for this situation

The book is called "Professional No Limit Hold 'Em Vol 1"

You should just call it "The Bible"

Please don't. That book is really not that good unless you are a beginner.

the bart hanson link was excellent i haven't read that before but thanks

you misread my post

owl said better to peel one off and GII on turn
I state better to GII flop

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Folding this hand pre with nearly 30x implied and closing the action is simply laughable and I can't even believe it's being debated with a straight face


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