2/3 NL

Hero ($600ish) with A5dd on button
UTG+1 straddles to $6
Hero raises to $20
Villain in BB calls ($100)
Straddler calls ($150)

Flop:
AK8ssx

Checks to hero who bets $40
Villain calls, straddler folds

Turn:
4x

Villain jams
Hero ???

Should I just be getting it in with top pair weak kicker? Is this ever a fold? Should SPR be the main factor in approaching this flop and turn?

Pot is laying $182 to call $40 if my math is right, so you only need to be good right now like 22% of the time to make the call 0EV (and you could potentially improve to the best hand on the river).

I don't think you can ever fold.

SPR is an older concept intending for flop play. It's a concept that is used to plan for turn and river betting strategy using commitment level of your effective stack relative to pot size. In this case, you were clearly committed on the flop.

However, problem with this hand is that you were opening to 3.5bb with 16.5bb effective stack while holding A5s.

Would you open to $7 with $33 in a 1/2 game holding A5s?

He has $60 left behind him. Short stackers while can be annoying change the range of hands I’m willing to get it in with top pair sht kicker is still a super easy call for $60 more... think about it this way, if he didn’t jam the turn you would for him right?

With these shortish of stacks, I'm not convinced raising speculative hands is best preflop. We often just setup way too small SPRs which we don't want with this hand. I'd open limp the Button and play some postflop poker. With $300+ stacks or whatever, sure, raise to hopefully take it down preflop or with a cbet; but really short like other stacks are here, we're simply spewing far too big a percentages of stacks into them when they have better.

And flop shows another problem. The board is drawy and we have TP and the SPR is <= 2 against both opponents. We're likely committed, and yet very uncomfortably so, due to preflop. I mean, with these lol stacks, you could argue for simply a shove on the flop (which is only a little more than a PSB against the shortish stack, and against the bigger stack a $40 bet only leaves $90 left in what will be a $140 pot, are we ever folding?).

As played, on the turn the pot is $140 and this guy is only jamming $40. $100 stacks go in pretty damn easy in my game, so there's no way we can fold here, especially since he could easily be making a last ditch effort with a draw ("I'm never folding so I might as well jam myself").

GcluelessNLnoobG

If that is a serious question, then no I would never raise to $7 with $33 effective stack sizes. I am just going to get too many callers. I would say my mistake then was not being aware of callers ahead of my raise that would just call with no knowledge of SPR.

To your first point I totally agree. I think my flaw that I realize is that I am being fixated on this mentality of "I have a very playable hand in late position, therefore I will raise" with no regard to what the button or blinds could potentially do. I guess trying to steal the blinds is a bad mentality too due to short stack sizes? I should only be raising with TT+, AQo+ with the stack sizes in front of me?

You'll get very different opinions on this.

Half of this forum is of the mind of raise vs fold preflop, and never ever open limp, especially on the Button. The other half, not so much so. I'm in the latter camp.

The bigger the stacks, the more you can get out-of-line / mix it up preflop. The smaller the stacks, the more you should really be nitting it up, or otherwise you'll find yourself in these situations where you are very uncomfortably committed.

GimoG

Why would it not be a serious question? Not sure if you realized that $6 straddle with $100 effective stack in 2/3 is the same as $2 dollar blind with $33 effective in a 1/2 game.

When you raised to $20, you are basically making a raise of $7 with $33 behind. So I am not sure if you even understand the concept of SPR to be committing yourself with A5s.

In an entry level forum, it is not a bad idea to promote positive EV concepts, and one of which is to avoid tendencies of playing junk hands. When one limps, it isn't to "balance" a strong range; it is almost always to play junk hands for the sake of playing a hand.

So the idea to always to raise or fold is actually a great blanket concept that would help majority of LLSNL players who simply play too many hands preflop.

I see what you mean. My bad I'm still learning. But yeah it makes sense. Thanks for the input.

I actually think this is a terrible idea as it mostly just gets novice players into horrendous situations of multiway raised pots (which is very common in loose games) with extremely marginal hands where they then have to make commitment decisions as early as the flop.

Even against the shortstack, we still have about 17:1 IO against him (and 25:1 against the lol "deeper" straddle). Open limping and seeing a cheap flop in position here with a speculative hand can't hardly be a bad thing; has to EV, no? Whether it's more EV than raising, well, I'm guessing that's a pretty complicated question to answer.

GcluelessNLnoobG

It would be an interesting exercise to record how many hands we actually win when we limped preflop. I'm guessing from my own experience it wouldn't be many at all.

Sure, I don't think anyone would disagree with you. However, the more important question would be how much money do we make when we limp.

The problem here is the flop play. How many worse hands will call this flop bet? If the answer is not very many, you need to consider why you are betting.

It isn't. Here's why. You're about 20:1 to hit a big hand on the flop. Sure, you could hit a draw, but the stacks are so small that you're getting paid off enough to justify dumping more money in the pot. Even when you hit the big hand, you can lose occasionally to a bigger hand. Therefore, this is a raise or fold hand, depending on the table. Most of the time it will be a fold, because LLSNL players don't fold to one raise. They'll call no matter what the odds because, "seeing a flop with a speculative hand can't hardly be a bad thing; has to be +EV?"

Occasionally if I'm at a table where my image is good and people are just good enough to fold to a raise with their limped hands of trash, I'd raise. That just isn't often.

Gold in three sentences. Since the ace is one of the suited cards, the odds you're up against a FD decreases considerably. Lots of people will call with Axs. Not so many with Kxs or SC. Most of the Ax hands aren't folding on the flop and a lot of them are ahead. Your hand is relatively stable. Little need to protect it.

1/2 and 1/3 players who limp too much don't win, only the house does with the rake. My god, it's so amusing to watch hands I'm not involved in consistently end up with $20-40 pots unless there's some sort of cooler involved, while the pots I'm involved in are generally in excess of $100-150 nearly every time. I can't fathom working a limp range into my game and trying to beat the game for less than minimum wage. I'd make more flipping burgers.

On top of that, it would seem counterintuitive but I think in limped pots, it can provide the perception to bad/rec V's that that your range once you bet is even tighter, since you're a passive player who limped pre and all of a sudden you're betting into the board. On the flipside, because I have a wide range that I raise with pre, I can get V's to be more disbelieving and come along deep into pots because I flopped a set of 3s from an UTG+1 open on a T83 flop.

I just can't get behind having much of a limp range unless you've got a couple of very specific scenarios in play which don't occur very often.

And as stated above, yes, you generally want to check back your medium strength hands. A pair of As with a rag kicker nearly always falls into that classification unless you have a very loose image and you have a very fishy/sticky player involved in the pot that won't believe you when you bet. You will generally get more value out of a hand like this when it checks through and you're able to bet the turn after it checks through again. At that point, people will be more likely to call you with 2nd/3rd pair. Just make sure you tend to keep thin value bets small, though.

And folding a limp to a raise is criminal imo. Yet players do it all the time.

On the other hand, if you are going to call a raise why not raise in the first place.

Good point. However I think the answer would still be not that much overall.

When we hit a big hand in a limped pot usually no -one else does. Of course if we are up against spewtards then we can print money. Not sure if that happens often enough to justify all the limps we miss with though.

Yup, I actually was not disagreeing with your point, just making sure we were talking about money and not pots.

You missed the point.

If you are shifting from "limping" to "raise or fold," the proper adjustment is to dump a lot of the junk hands in the limping range, especially if you are a novice.

The whole idea behind raise or fold for novice players is eliminating bad situations with marginal hands. It is not simply turning your limping range into raising range - and if this is how a novice adjusts to raise or fold, then naturally it will be far worse than just limping.

Here? It depends. Anywhere? Again, it depends.

However, if H is considering only raise/fold in this spot, he wouldn't be in a bad position to value own himself. More than likely he would realize that A5s is too weak to be raising with such low effective stack sizes and choose to fold.

Discussing A5s value as a speculative hand is a relevant issue if you re facing an EP or MP raise which usually means facing a tight or tightish opening range against which A5s fares relatively badly. In that case, with a low stack size which doesn't provide odds and depending on the player, A5s is a 3bet or a fold.

Things are different if we are facing a limper or limpers, which probably mean we are facing someone playing 30-50% of his hands and usually the weakest part of the 30-50% of the hands they play, which again renders the whole question of whether A5s is speculative mute. In most those instances A5s is ahead of most limpers' ranges and whatever slight range disadvantage we may face is balanced by our positional advantage.

Nevertheless, what we have here isn't a limper, it's a straddler. This essentially means that we are facing someone who decided to add a third blind to the game and double the game stakes. His range isn't 10% or 15% or 40% or 50%. It's a 100% ****ing percent. We are in the button. We aren't raising anyone, we are ****ing opening the pot from the best position at the table, a position from which we are supposed to be raising more than 30% of our hands.

Stack depth doesn't matter here even if it's low. Let me put it this way. If you measure the stack depth with one of the measurements terms used in tournaments, i.e. Harrington's M, our effective M is 13 vs the straddler and 9 against the BB.

Do you think that when good tournament players find themselves in the Button with those effective stack sizes, they don't raise with A5s? If anything, in tournaments you are far more likely to face a 3bet resteal in that stack size, which might give you pause -although not enough of a pause not to raise A5s. But this isn't the problem we are likely to face in the lowly 1-3 game in which people's passiveness will allow us to see a flop and play our hand in position, all factors which would allow us to not only realize our equity but diminish the equity of our opponents.

Last but not least, we want to raise, because straddlers tend to defend wider than when they are in the big blinds out of some misplaced honor system which demands to defend their straddle so that they won't get exploited - which actually allows them to get more exploited- which only means that when they call, they do so even more wide exploitable ranges than usual.

So a raise is the right and proper play and there's no discussion that should be had about it.

As far as postflop is concerned, it would be helpful if OP gave us player profiles, along with a description of our own image. If the BB is a nit or tight and doesn't defend his big blind come hell or high water, then a check is probably more prudent. If conversely, we have an aggressive image and we are caught c-betting many times and people have adjusted to us by peeling flops more lightly, or if people are calling stations who chase or hang on their second pair, then a c-bet might make sense. It depends.

Raise more pre. 3x after a straddle is way too small, unless your game is really nitty. I would open more like $25.

Flop is fine. You could check it back if board were rainbow but with the short stacks it doesn't really matter. I think you're probably behind OTT but pot odds are too good to fold. I would only fold if Villain's a nit (unlikely since he's playing a SS).

But we're not just playing to make a big hand. We're going to be in position in like a 2 or 3 way pot, we probably even have the best starting hand, and I'm guessing we'll be able to steal far more pots than our opponents thanks to our position.

GcluelessNLnoobG


Too large of a blanket statement, imo (I limp a lot and I'm a decent lifetime winner; obviously you'll find lots of limping lifetime losers, but most players at the tables are lifetime losers). This is especially true at tables where there of lots of players with your thinking (i.e. limping is stupid), where open limping can be extremely profitable.

GcluelessNLnoobG


You should have very good reason to not fold to a raise; it's the exact opposite of criminal, and probably the biggest leak of lifetime losers.

You're allowed to limp in and evaluate whether calling a raise is profitable (due to the amount of callers, who called, etc.) and then fold if you don't think it is. Of course if your table is very raisey preflop, then you should definitely tighten up your limping range (and perhaps only limp monsters hoping to limp/reraise).

GcluelessNLnoobG


I have zero problem with a novice tightening up his range a lot, especially if he's going to get himself into a world of problems postflop (in either a raised or limped pot).

In this case here, we have Axs on the Button with no one else voluntarily putting money in with 3.5bbs already in the pot. If you're really terrible at poker / a novice, I have zero problem with you folding. I'm guessing most here could make this hand profitable by open limping the Button here, no?

GcluelessNLnoobG

Sorry, bad wording on my part.

I meant the limping itself is criminal in that situation, if you are going to fold it to a raise. Folding to a raise is not criminal. In the games I play in many pots get raised pre-flop, yet I still see multiple people limping. It's just wasting money if you are going to fold imo.