This thread is mainly inspired by the current PAHWM but I've seen this in plenty of other places too.

I seem to read a lot of threads where Hero is deep-stacked and facing an aggressive action. Maybe it's a preflop raise, maybe a re-raise, maybe some kind of aggressive flop or turn play, whatever it may be.

There always seems to be some contingent of players whose response is to play passively in order to "keep Villain's range wide", which isn't inherently a problem in and of itself. The problem is that sometimes they go on to say, "I don't have a raising range in spots like this when I'm this deep. I just call or fold with everything."

This seems to me like it deserves its own thread. I don't really understand how you could say you raise with literally zero hands, including the nuts, in any spot.

I'm starting this thread hoping to start a discussion with people who play like this sometimes (because as far as I know, I never do). What are some examples of spots where you "don't have a raising range"? What is the logic behind intentionally taking options out of your playbook? Because most of the time people say this, it sounds like nothing but weak-tight play. But maybe I am missing something and it can be sound sometimes.

Two examples where it may be correct to apply the above: if up against a wide opener who folds too often to 3bets but makes a lot of mistakes post flop, it is often correct to flat him with your entire range to get him to make big mistakes especially if it'll often go heads up......or if against a very good player 200+bb deep and OOP....sometimes it may be correct to flat even AA as he can make life a living hell for u or set mine against u or otherwise just play very well against your range. Other than a few exceptions....yes never raising pre is just weak tight or weak passive play

I disagree about the second example, and it's debatable, but I think the bolded is absolutely flat wrong.

If someone is folding too much to 3bets, you absolutely should have a 3betting range and it should contain a lot of bluffs. EDIT: That doesn't mean you can't also just call with a lot of what would normally be your value 3betting range--it just means we should have some 3betting range.

Perhaps I can ask you why do you think it's necessary to raise against maniacs that are making bigger bets than your normal bet sizing?

I got an answer.

When we lack the knowledge of our opponents' value range boundary and/or we cannot properly identify the correlation of their bet sizings with different ranges of their hands, we are essentially manipulated into expanding our bluff catching range by merging with most of our value range.

In other words, we do not have adequate information, and therefore we play conservatively.

These kind of scenarios usually happen with random maniac walk into the room, and most are simply not prepared to adapt.

I think what he's saying is that there are bigger mistakes V can make post flop. Think of some theoretical opponent who opens a lot, but folds to 3 bets pre, but will barrel without discretion post flop, even in spots where your range crushes his hand.

A bit of a stretch maybe but this is more common the deeper you get.

For the moment, I'm going to ignore the individual "play the player" situations. One can always construct a villain where limp/calling is the right play.

There are several players alive and in the past that were recognized as "good" whom almost never raised pf. Therefore, it is a viable strategy. When you read about it, you realize that there are certain playing conditions going on.

First, the table is filled with skilled players. People aren't calling IO hands without IO. They know your range for a raise and if it is polarized. Stacks aren't going in with TPGK.

Second, the game is extremely deep by today's standard. The buy in is often uncapped. Nobody is short stacked (in this world, with less than 100BB). The bottom range is 300BB min.

As stacks and player skills get deeper, the value of starting hands begin to merge. Few hands are going to show down, so it doesn't really matter most of the time what you had. If it does go to show down, a starting hand improved. Therefore, the value of AA declines considerably. At 300BB+, even a 3bet leaves enough room to set mine.

If you have to improve to win anyway, there's a logic to seeing as many flops as possible as cheaply as possible. If you aren't 3betting and the game is deep, your range is huge in position. You want every flop to have the potential to have a monster.

That said, these conditions almost never occur in LLSNL. Even if you build a big stack, you'll be lucky if even 1/2 the table has 100BB, let alone be deep stacked. Not raising AA is going to be generally mistake.

But lots and lots of hands go to showdown at a 300bb deep table. It doesn´t have to mean playing for stacks. AA wins tons of sub 150bb pots getting 2 or 3 streets of value having raised pre. Just because the villain has an extra 200bb behind doesn´t mean he will autofold your 3/4 pot bets when he has TPGK, nor that he will always raise you with or without the goods.

I resemble this remark.

For me, it's probably a lot of what others have stated above, and maybe also just my general uncomfortableness playing deep with tricky/aggro players.

Overall, and I'm guessing the better regs in my game know or suspect this, I have a pretty tight normal 3bet range. The standard AA/KK/AK, expanded a little against looser openers. I have this tight 3bet range cuz typically people at my table don't fold to 3bets; heck, I've seen 3bets go 5ways at my table sometimes, and this is even with lol shortstacks. The bottom line, when I 3bet at my typical ~100bb table, I'd better damn well have the goods cuz ain't nobody folding, so I'm simply doing this for pure value and making the hand extremely easy to play postflop. Sure, I'll throw in the odd light 3bet every once and a while, but the situation has to be exactly right (and these situations simply don't come up all that often at a loose table).

So now transfer this to a deep table. With the table deep, I'm almost never able to setup an SPR that I'm happy with stacking off against with a 3bet (or even with a raise). So with my big hands, all I've done is tabled my hand and now I'm playing postflop at the mercy of whatever two cards my opponent has with lottsa postflop play left, for huge stacks. Yes, I guess I could go the opposite route and start 3betting light at this type of table, but again, no one is folding, and all I'm doing is getting myself into even more situations that I'm uncomfortable with (i.e. playing lottsa hands with a meh SPR postflop in a deepstack game with tricky players). If I've identified that as one of my weak spots / spots I'm not comfortable in, why would I increase the percentage of times I get myself into these situations? So I don't. And if I can't get a good result preflop (by getting a smallish SPR with a big hand HU or 3way at most with lottsa dead money), then I simply play it slow and see a flop with a hugenormous SPR and simply see what happens (where I'm only going to play a big pot if I desire). As others have stated, the hand values really come down in deepstack, so even though my number one choice isn't going to a 6way flop with AA, if I can't satisfy my preflop goal, then I sometimes have to sigh accept it.

Also keep in mind that slowplaying big hands like AA preflop sometimes enables us to get all the money in preflop (or setup a desirable small SPR) when the table is aggro loose and 3bet I'm-gonna-run-you-over-sucka happy. It really doesn't take more than a single slowplayed AA hand to work out like this and make our whole session extremely profitable.

GbutIsuckatdeepstack,soifyoudon't,maybeyoushouldpl andifferentlythanIdoG

It's not that I never 5b/6b/gii range etc, it's that I wanted to leave all of villain's bluffs in his range as well. Against a "good Lag", which is what I suspected the villain from my PAHWM might be-he wouldn't be getting it in for 350bb's with less than the nuts. I preferred to keep my range a bit wider (TT/JJ+/AK) as well his range. I wanted to leave him with initiative to keep firing on a ton of boards where I still do well vs his range.

A big pair doesn't necessarily mean we need to get all of the money in the pot. My line may not have been max value (maybe it was? I didn't have more than 20-30 minutes of playing with him), but I did still manage to extract ~155 bb's from him with what turned out to be essentially a bluff catcher.

As Venice pointed out, as we get deeper and play with more skilled opponents, the value of one pair hands goes way down (obviously pre-flop is a different scenario-AA is still the nuts).

* Some of my thought process stems back to a misplayed hand where I 6b pre 600 BB deep OOP vs a really really good pro (I imagine the best player I have played with). I have combated this mistake by slowing down in some spots vs aggro opponents and turning my hand into a trap or bluff catcher in this case when I don't think they will shovel more money in without the nuts (by calling it off that is)

Also, I disagree about a good lag getting it in bad for 300+ bb's without serious meta. I will see them get 100 bigs in light when it's not even really a huge mistake after the 3b light and call a shove with a "bad hand" that has enough equity for the call. Unlikely the case when they are 4b/5b/6b etc with still enough behind making it incorrect to get many of those hands in.



***looking forward to this thread btw. nice op

I agree

I agree.

How the hell can I agree with both of you???

Because both of you are right however Vernon, I think you are forgetting one fundamental truth of LLSNL poker...

A lot of our villains will never adjust to us.

Ideally, against a player that opens wide and folds to a 3-bet we absolutely want to widen our 3-betting range against said opponent however its not like this villain will think to himself, "hey, that guy keeps 3-betting me therefore I'm going to start 3-bet calling with more of my opening range".

that rarely happens live. What happens is the guy just keeps folding all the hands we crush and then when he finally calls our 3-bet, its with QQ+, AK but then Hero is leveling himself thinking, "aha, he finally is adjusting to me by widening his 3-bet calling range...".

No. No he's not. He's not adjusting anything...

On the flip side, these loose aggro openers will often carry their aggression post flop if they retain the initiative. And there is a subset of these villains that just have god awful post flop games. It is these sepcific villains who we want to flat their opening raises with almost 100% of our value range and this goes doubly so when we are deep.

come flop, our hand is underrepped yet superior to theirs and they will never see it coming when we lower the boom on them.

The downside to the above is that we keep their range pretty wide so post flop we can get into trouble if villain isn't terrible post flop. However, if villain is terrible post flop then the above is like printing money.

Conversely, there is nothing that makes me sadder than to be up against one of these spewtards that raises $20 preflop, I 3-bet to $55 with AA and they fold Against these players, I will 3-bet them with 54s - QJs, 64s - KTs, 22 - TT because I will often get villain to fold a hand in which he has decent equity against me with. However, when I have him crushed (i.e. I have KQ+, JJ+), I want him in the pot and retaining the initiative with a hand I likely dominate. To be clear, this is a special subset of aggro opening villains. Most LLSNL players have a pretty wide 3-bet calling range if they raise. But there is a special subset of aggro spewtard that raises wide but folds most of his raising range to 3-bets.

This is how you can agree with both of us.

slim is saying that if we aren't getting calls from that wide opening range, we shouldn't be 3betting for value with a wide range, since we just lose value with the bottom of that range when he folds.

I'm not disputing that point. I'm just saying that we should be 3betting something--not a wide value range, but a polarized range weighted toward bluffs.

Widening your value 3betting range against the player slim describes is a mistake, but adding bluffs to a 3betting range is absolutely the correct move against someone who is folding too much.

So he is right in his point that we should not often be 3betting our value hands, but he is wrong that that implies we should never 3bet with anything.

Now if the described player ever does adjust by calling more, then we have to change our 3betting range--but as you point out, dgi, I'd have to see that start happening before I did it. (And if other players start cold-calling our 3bets, we can go back to a "normal" value range, this time hoping we get cold-called instead of called by the original raiser.)

As for the rest, I want to mostly keep sitting out for a little while and listen to what the rest of you have to say. Just a few little things to add myself for now:

Definitely some good points by venice in here so far, and I can absolutely picture the game dynamic he is talking about and understand the theoretical reasons for not raising in that kind of game. However, if someone is super deep stacked and knows no one else is raising, wouldn't that game be ripe to start making pot sweetener raises with lots and lots of hands in position, so that you tend to play bigger pots in position than out of position?

Also, miami, while the thread was inspired by your PAHWM, I don't mean to be picking on you. I've seen a lot of other times when this mentality shows up too; it's equally inspired by the responses in that thread than it is by the actual hand.

The only situation (that i know of) where there should be no 3 bet range would be when OOP vs a very good -- very creative / tricky / large ballz ---(basically the superb all round player) and you are ~280bb+ deep AND you currently do not have enough information exactly to exploit his particular tendencies when leveraging a deep stack IP.

Live poker makes getting that info. a long time process since hands like these present themselves infrequently. So until then we have to defer to the positional advantage.

I agree. If villain is a great player ( good hand reader) and we have been playing very snug in the session and we are OOP, then not having a raising range is one way of becoming "balanced"

Vernon-I take no offense at all. I actually think this is a great topic for discussion and will end up in the best of llsnl thread if done the way I think it will be.

There are definitely spots where it makes sense to not have a raising range.
Off the top of my head, reasons include:

1) Raising is a dominated strategy against every part of your opponent's range.
2) Your overall range does better by just calling strong hands.
3) Your range is capped.


Eg A) You 3b in position. Flop is A77r and you get led into.

Eg B) I remember posting in this thread which I think has a good example: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...llain-1252079/

Eg C) You will not always have the nuts in your range. If your range is capped and your opponent is polarized, you probably won't have a raising range (generally speaking).

Before it gets too off-track, I want to specify that people are starting to answer a more general question than I am asking in the OP.

I am not saying that there are no spots where it makes sense to have no raising range. I am specifically asking about the logic that we have no raising range because the stacks are "too deep".

Saying "I have no raising range because we are short enough that Villain's next bet, which is definitely coming and could be done with air, will be a shove" doesn't count. Saying "I have no raising range because I am playing my nut hands by going for a backraise" doesn't count. Saying "I have no raising range because my range is capped, my opponent knows it, so he'll know my line is weak" doesn't count.

I'm specifically asking about the logic behind "I would have a raising range in this spot if the stacks were shorter, but this deep I'm only calling or folding with everything in my range, including nut hands".

Who actually said this and when?

Why would someone NOT raise with nuts, especially when deep?

It doesn't have to be a HUGE raise, but saying to NEVER raise is just insanely idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever.

I've been trying to think of a concrete example of times this might be true and I'm having trouble, because this is a really strong statement that seems like it should almost never be true. Can you explain this more?

The simplest example I can think of is the typical setup for LLSNL.

With 300bb effective with complete unknowns at the table, UTG opens to 8bb, there are a couple callers, Hero 3b to 25bb, blinds fold, UTG 4b to 60bb, callers fold. With ~100bb in the pot and 35bb for Hero to call, 5b raising here would be suicide since against an unknown in LLSNL, the big 4b is [KK+] 99.9% of the time.

Raising here is a dominated strategy. With AA you can raise. But the rest of your range is completely dominated. So Hero's range is uncapped, but his range is dominated.

Note, this is the typical situation where you have no reads. This is a table full of nominal 50-125bb stack mouth-breathers, and 2 or 3 deep stacks 275-400bb (including Hero).

This is very confusing. You have demonstrated a situation where folding is a must. Tons of situations call for folding. Is this significant to speak of it being a non-raise situation? Of course there is no re-raise range other than AA---- KK maybe. So how is this situation worth bringing up? If i lead out with second pair on J 9 4 and get raised, this is a non 3 bet situation for sure. But thats not relevant to this thread. Right?

You don't think this thinking is a bit too rigid? Isn;t it possible villain 4 bets with AKs? How about QQ? Isn't it possible villain flats the 3bet with AA some percentage of time?

I understand you said a table full of unknowns, but my points aren't based on reads or projecting my own thinking, rather it's based on typical psychological factors that drive these actions all the time.

I may very well fold to the 4bet if I was hero in your example with alot of hands I 3bet with...but position plays a huge component in this decision. my fold to 4bet frequency with hands other than AA is much much much lower when in position than when oop

There are many HH here in LLSNL where this very situation is described and the replies are mixed.

I merely posted a (trivial) example to the question.

Also... I find I get it in badly when I say to myself, "he could have AK here". If I never had that thought again I'm sure my profit would increase 5%.

If you go past huge generalizations, trying to define where you would never have a 3 bet range or re-hit range etc is cookie cutter strategy. Specific situations (hands) cannot be defined IMO due to the fact that every hand has a different set of facts.

If anyone can produce hands that make this topic relevant than maybe its worth the read.

My example was the only specific one that i can think of where you do not want to escalate the pot even with AA preflop. OOP, very deep and against a superb creative player. (top player) Not the run of the mill grinder like many may think of when good player is stated. I cannot think of any other situation where we dont escalate with the nuts unless some weird dynamic is going on within a specific hand and you need creative play to extract.