Quote:
Originally Posted by Olaff
Morale of the story: defend against small bets/WAWB/weird lines with just calling.
No, that's not the moral of the story.
That's result's oriented, and you're not WA/WB in this hand.
A quick tutorial with some myth busting on WA/WB:
- In MANY poker hands, if you flip over your actual cards, you would see you are way ahead or way behind vs. your opponent's actual hands. Say for example, as a thought experiment, pre-flop, hands are dealt, and before doing any betting and you flip over your KK to show everyone. Someone else flips over AA. You're "way behind."
- Reverse the hands. Now with AA you're "way ahead."
- OK this is important: That type of "way behind" has
NOTHING to do with the
poker theory concept of WA/WB behind, and people in this forum confuse the concept all the time. Yes, in poker, excluding closer to even-equity draws, it's very common for your actual hand to be better or worse than an opponent's and have little chance to change in relative value by the river.
- Again, that has NOTHING to do with the CONCEPT of WA/WB.
- You experience the concept of WA/WB most commonly when there's a very good chance you have the best hand... and so you want to value bet... but you cannot because villain's range is distributed into two primary segments:
a) Hands that beat you and against which you have very little equity.
b) Hands you beat that against which you have very little equity AND (this is a huge and!) that mostly can't call value bets.
- One fundamental underpinning of the WA/WB concept is that while you may very often have the best hand, you often can't value bet because you do not beat 50% of villain's calling range.
- Secondarily, you may also choose to check and not bet a street to widen your own range in such situations for the hope of getting villain to call with a wider range of hands you beat on a future street, thinking your range is now weaker / you're bluffing more.
- Another key aspect of WA/WB is that villain's range of likely worse hands has very little equity and is not likely to comprise draws. You are not WA/WB when villain's range of likely hands includes draws that are going to have decent equity against you. So another element of WA/WB is that villain has very limit outs when you have the best hand.
- Here's a great WA/WB example:
You hold KK and open from UTG. Villain calls in BB. You put his range on pocket pairs, some broadway, some strong connectors, and lots of middling suited aces.
Flop comes A92r, and villain checks to you.
You are now WA/WB. If you bet KK, villain is very likely to fold every hand you beat. He'll fold his pocket pairs, his connector hands with 9x, and his air. And he will call with all his Ax. There are no draws, so the hands you beat generally have only 2 outs against you. Against villain's range of hands that you beat - Ax+ - you have 2 outs. Way ahead. Way behind. Get it? So what's the play here? Check the flop for sure, soul read the turn, possibly bet for thin value when checked to, etc., etc.
- In this actual hand, OP is saying he feels he's WA/WB. He's not. Not remotely. He just happened to be in a spot where he ended getting it in against a hand that crushed him. That has nothing to do with WA/WB. And again, I totally stand by all my posts ITT - villain's range definitely contains hands like 55, 66 (pocket pairs + draws), 76 (pairs + draws), 99-JJ, maybe QQ (over pairs), etc, as well as hands that beat us. This is not a range against which we are WA/WB because IT GIVES US VALUE. Remember? That's one of the most important fundamental traits of a true WA/WB situation - the inability to get value based on the situation.
- OP, in this hand, did you just ship the turn over V's $40 bet? I think that's really spastic. OR did you raise turn and then call a shove? That's bad too, imo. Turn is a raise/fold for value, and like I said, a call isn't terrible by any means, but I really feel we're leaving value on the table if we don't raise turn small. But we need to raise/fold.