Quote:
Originally Posted by Paolo C
Thanks for the feedback. Why do you say you should shove or fold when a raise reaches 10/15% of your stack? I’ve never heard that before.
This is actually complicated. There are kind of two modes you play poker in. One is passive/speculative, where you're conceding that your range of hands is inferior to your opponent's, but you're calling anyway hoping to improve later in the hand. The problem with doing this for 15% of your stack is that the payoff is not going to be big enough. For example, if you call with something like 22, you will hit a set 1 in 8.5 times, but you're calling for like 1/6th of your stack. Trying to speculate is clearly not going to work.
So the other option is to be aggressive, and there are two reasons why just blasting your stack in preflop is the best way to go about being aggressive here:
1) When you're out of position, all else being equal, it's nice to have the hand over as quickly as possible, because being out of position is an inherent disadvantage. When you jam preflop, you're negating your positional disadvantage.
2) It's trying to inflict the biggest disadvantage on your opponent. Seeing flops is nice, they can radically improve your hand. Not getting to see them sucks.
From an intuitive point of view, the thing to understand is that when being aggressive in poker, if your opponent doesn't know what to do, then you've done your job well. If your opponent has an average sort of hand in their range and is like "easy call" or "easy fold", that means you ****ed up. If they're like "god, this sucks, I don't want to call or fold really" then you've achieved your aim. When spots come up when you're playing when you find yourself on the receiving end of this, try to understand how your opponent achieved this and then emulate it. If you imagine being the LAG in this hand and having an average kind of hand - say 66, or KQ - you'll see what I mean. You don't really want to fold it, but you don't really want to call it, either. That's mission accomplished.