Hi all,

I played the following hand on 888:

$150/$300 Blinds No Limit Holdem - ***
Tournament #119715046 $20 + $2 - Table #2 9 Max (Real Money)
Seat 9 is the button
Total number of players : 8
Seat 1: Hero ( $11,335 )
Seat 2: giedrard ( $5,912 )
Seat 3: Legooolas ( $9,100 )
Seat 4: BEPH9IK ( $4,180 )
Seat 6: currila1 ( $3,524 )
Seat 7: nicetrybaby ( $5,992 )
Seat 9: intelligent7 ( $6,164 )
Seat 10: chelseafan27 ( $834 )
nicetrybaby posts ante [$40]
intelligent7 posts ante [$40]
giedrard posts ante [$40]
Legooolas posts ante [$40]
chelseafan27 posts ante [$40]
Hero posts ante [$40]
currila1 posts ante [$40]
BEPH9IK posts ante [$40]
chelseafan27 posts small blind [$150]
Hero posts big blind [$300]
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ 7h, Qh ]
giedrard folds
Legooolas raises [$600]
BEPH9IK folds
currila1 folds
nicetrybaby folds
intelligent7 folds
chelseafan27 folds
Hero calls [$300]
** Dealing flop ** [ Qc, As, 6h ]
Hero checks
Legooolas bets [$700]
Hero calls [$700]
** Dealing turn ** [ 4c ]
Hero checks
Legooolas checks
** Dealing river ** [ 5c ]
Hero checks
Legooolas bets [$2,302]
Hero raises [$9,995]
Legooolas calls [$5,458]
** Summary **
Hero shows [ 7h, Qh ]
Legooolas shows [ 2c, Ac ]
Legooolas collected [ $18,590 ]

What do you think of every street here, especially the river play? Is it GTO, and even if it is, do you think players fold enough Ax as these stakes? Also, does his river sizing have to make me suspicious of a big value hand?

Just fold this pre. Defending blinds this wide with a call isn't easy to do.

I don't like the river raise. I just don't see what you're realistically repping. If I'm villain with Ax, I'm calling bull**** and looking you up every time.

I think river is c/fold, which is why you should really fold pre, because when you flat with Q7 OOP, you end up in ****ty spots like this more often than not.

Thanks for your reaction.

I was wondering: why do you think my line wouldn't contain any value? Given that I am defending wide, my overall strat would be to play hands like A6, A5, A4, 66, Q6s, Q5s, Q4s, 64s, and 65s the same way (I don't really have a raising range OTF as his range is much stronger).

I want to balance that range out with some bluffs, and I thought Q7 might be a good candidate. Which hands would you bluff OTR?

Also, I am not really sure how wide to defend my blind in these kinds of spots. What is a good way of thought about these kinds of situations? Do other people agree that Q7s is too wide?

On the river, the number of flush combos in your hand is miniscule compared to the amount of random Ax/Qx hands in your range.

I guess theoretically, you should bluff some of those random Ax/Qx combos for balance, but it's definitely not GTO to bluff all of them. I would guess that it would probably be GTO to only bluff your Ax combos with the lone Ac so you block flushes, but even that might be too many combos.

In practice, I think villain is calling here almost always.

Yeah, don't fold this pre. I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you're going to advise that you should fold reasonable hands closing the action getting 4.5:1 maybe you're not ready to give advice. The rest of your post might be ok in practice but has nothing to do with theory and makes a lot of assumptions I'm not sure we can make.

Super standard defend pre. Flop is fine.

River feels closer to a call/fold decision than a shove/fold decision, but I guess there can be merit to bluffing with Qx that have little SD value.

Well regardless of whether you meant to sound condescending you did, so go **** yourself.

First of all, you're not a mod here. How about you stick to giving actual advice here on the hand instead of making ad hominem attacks about who is and who isn't qualified to post on the board?

If you really want to get into a dick-measuring contest about who is and isn't qualified to give advice here, I'll just point out that a lot of red ink pops up when I punch your name into Sharkscope and a lot of green ink pops up when you punch in mine.

When it comes to the actual hand, if you really think you can turn a profit flatting with Q7s OOP in the blinds, I guess we agree to disagree, but the immediate pot odds you're getting are irrelevant. You're just not going to be able to make profitable decisions post-flop, so you face signficant reverse implied odds.

Well, I am a mod here (irrelevant but true) and you should not fold Q7s pre to a minraise from the big blind when getting 4.5:1 (special ICM implications aside). I'm always open to being wrong, but there's no agreeing to disagree about things that are unambiguous. If I scroll down in the mid-high stakes mtt forum I'm listed as one of the moderators. If you pose this Q7 hand to a GTO bot I would bet a lot of money that it'd defend. I don't know how all top players play, but the ones I've seen all defend this and much much wider. For example I've seen pads (€uropean) defend things like 83s and 96o vs utg+1 raises, and I'm not sure he's wrong to do so. I would fold this to a 5x and if antes were 10bb each I would defend with one card. Immediate pot odds are relevant. If you think any of this is wrong, please give me something to back up your claim so I have a chance to change my mind.

Maybe you're a good player overall, your advice about not bluffing the river doesn't seem bad to me in this practical situation, though from a theoretical perspective you should usually have some bluffs when you can also valuejam some hands. As an exploitative measure we can read into his betsize and deduce that he's either bluffing or improved on the river when he suddenly bets pretty large and change our strategy to call or fold with hands like Qx.

I don't know what you punched into google or how well you know me, but I'd be surprised if you found more than 20% of my play. There is a Soepgroente on pokerstars for example, but it's not me. You're not even wrong about me not doing particularly well results-wise the past few years, but such is life when playing gigantic fields with a huge buyin spread with very low volume. A better way to see how you're doing is bb/100, and I constantly monitor that to see where I'm at. But none of that is relevant. If the best player in the world posted that Q7s is a fold he would still be wrong.

I don't deal well with people who make a bunch of clearly incorrect statements and imply with 100% certainty they're correct. This is what Trump does, for example. It makes my condescending ******* side come out. Whether that is appropriate is something we can agree to disagree on.

Whoops I missed the green text. Anyhow, mod or not, but it's not your place to chew me out for giving my opinion and suggest I'm not qualified to give advice.

I don't think telling someone to fold Q7s pre out of the BB is "clearly incorrect". You obviously have a different opinion and that's fine, but unless you want to show me a large sample of hands where you defended Q7s from the BB and can prove exactly how profitable it is, it's hardly unambiguous.

We are 30 BBs deep here. The immediate pot odds may not be completely irrelevant, but they are far less relevant than our implied odds (and reverse implied odds). Q7s makes a lot of marginal hands that carry significant reverse implied odds and makes few nutty hands that we feel good about getting stacks in with.

Even if it is GTO to call, it's a very hard hand to play out of position, and I'm fairly confident that most players will lose money or at best breakeven here if villain is solid. If you're an elite player and your postflop game is airtight, you can probably get away with defending a wider range, but most players don't fall into that category. And even if we do play perfectly, I highly doubt this hand is THAT profitable, so if folding is a mistake, it's a pretty small one, whereas flatting can lead to pretty big mistakes postflop.

Again, I'd love to see a large sample of results playing Q7s out of the BB at 30 BB stacks that shows exactly how profitable it is. But since we don't have that incontrovertible proof, all we have are opinions, so please respect my right to have one even if you disagree with it.

As far as I'm aware, calling Q7s is as standard as raising AQs from utg+1. When I have something like 96o or 84s here I might go "hmm I'm not sure whether I can defend this profitably" but with Q7s I don't even think about it, just like I don't wonder what to do when I have 88 in the hijack and it folds to me. I obviously don't have a database of Q7s vs utg+1 raises 30bb effective hands, but you can look at a broader defense range and see how different people do when they defend more or less. A big change most people have implemented in their game since 2010 is that they defend their bb wider and wider, and it's one of the big reasons tournament poker is tougher now. Either way, you're the one making a claim that goes against the generally accepted way to play/common knowledge, so the burden of proof is on you. Either show me I'm wrong about all this or show me why all these regs are wrong in defending. What would your defense range (calls, 3bets?) be in this spot?

Yeah, sometimes the board runs out KQ7A3 and villain puts you all in on the river and life sucks. We have to make some appropriate folds and calls, but this is where a big part of your potential edge is. Any idiot can 3bet QQ btn vs co and bet/get it in on a 7 high board. The majority of the time we play a small pot though, we call one street with our middle pair of 7s and win vs ace high, we c/f a board we missed, etc.

See this part of your post is good. You quantify your uncertainties, you state what your assumptions are and I can analyze your thought process and tell you where I think the error is that leads you to an incorrect conclusion. In this case, how hard something to play is is not too relevant, what most players win or lose is not very relevant either (certainly you assume you're better than most players in the mtt you play, or you would not register) and the rest is kind of right. It's 30bb poker though, it's not that hard. Our opponent can't put that much pressure on us with 5x potbets or something. Our range is a lot weaker so we don't do a lot of aggressive stuff and we just hang in there and try to realise as much equity as possible/keep the pots as small as possible, once in a while making a monster we get it in with and once in a while stealing a pot with a bluff. All in all we're getting 4.56:1 which means we need to win at least 21.9% of the money. It's hard to imagine a range he opens where we don't have significantly more hot & cold equity than that, so we can absolutely correctly or incorrectly lose some of our extra equity sometimes because of our positional disadvantage and still do better than folding preflop.

I absolutely respect everyone's right to have an opinion in a general sense, but there's no room for an opinion when there's enough evidence to conclude something with reasonable certainty. I can always be wrong, but as far as I'm aware this preflop spot is so automatic it merits zero discussion.

if this isn't a call pre, what are the correct odds that one would need to call? what is a proper defending range?

is there an stack size where reverse implied odds dont matter?

@Soepgroente

First of all, I will admit that I recently started playing poker a lot more after a bit of a hiatus where I was playing a lot less frequently. Over the years, I've played a lot of hands, posted a lot on this forum, watched a lot of videos, etc. and the wisdom that I've accepted as truth is that playing marginal hands out of position sucks because you end up in a lot of situations just like the one in this hand where you have to make ****ty decisions where you will inevitably have to throw away the best hand or call with a worse hand because you're at an informational disadvantage, no matter how good you are. Now if what constitutes standard play has changed significantly and the value that players ascribe to having position has diminished, I certainly may have missed that.

So help me out. If flatting OOP with Q7s really is as standard and obvious as you're making it out to be, surely you should be able to point me to some thread or post where you the mathematics are discussed conclusively. Or you should be able to explain why I'm so obviously wrong. So far, your only argument has been that everyone else does it.

In any case, just because something is the consensus doesn't make it right. Debate and challenging of conventional thinking should be encouraged, as it leads to better understanding and learning for everyone.

There's actually a lot of good information out there (not just on 2+2, but on other poker training sites, including a particular site that advertises on here regularly) about the virtues of defending wide from the big blind.

IMO, the quick answer is that we can defend the big blind very wide because there are antes, we close the action and the min raise gives us a great price to do so.

We only need to realize our equity 18% of the time for a call to be break even, and against even a narrow-ish EP range (AA-22,AKo-AJo,KQo,AKs-ATs,KQs-KJs,QJs,JTs) we have 35% equity with Q7s and will have the best hand on the flop about 23% of the time. Now obviously we won't realize our equity OOP 35% of the time, but I would say that if we play this hand reasonably well we should realize our equity considerably more than 18% of the time.

And the interesting thing is that even as our hand gets worse, our equity doesn't drop that dramatically. If instead of Q7s we have 96o, we have about 32% raw equity and will have the best hand on the flop about 21% of the time. If the villain makes it 3x and we have to have about 27% equity for us to break even with a call, then our weakest hands OOP are much closer to folds (or in some cases 3-bet bluffs) than calls.

And maybe another big change could be made in 2020. Poker players, tournament players especially, are notoriously sheep-like.

"Others do it" is not close to being a good argument, even though I snap defend Q7s. But I am a tournament player...

Defending here with Q7s is totally fine. We're calling 300 more, getting 4.5:1 with close to 40bb's.

Flop, again we're getting a nice price to continue with second pair + BDFD so no problem here and on a lot of turns, we can just x/f to further aggression no qualms. Turn as played - can't do anything different here. River - again, without knowing the tendencies of our opponent, I think this is a risky move in the early levels of an MTT - I agree with your thought process in that we should be mixing in some bluffs here, but considering villain just fired a huge bet and we don't know that much about him, I would fold.

Yeah, we can say it's a mistake calling with Q7s, but in the BB for 1BB getting odds of around 4.5:1, I think it's fine.

FWIW though, I'd prefer to choose a hand like 76o, 54s, 86s etc to defend... as a big % of the time with hands like Q7, T8, J8 etc we're going hit a middling pair and we're probably going to find ourselves in a sticky spot out of position, check calling for a couple of streets against a potentially nutted range and having to let it go anyway. With a hand like 65s, 76s and OK to a lesser extent something like 53s, we'll know exactly what kind of flops we can continue on (9-5-5 for an extreme example with 53s) and we can work out if a call to continue drawing is worthwhile on a flop like J-4-7 with the right numbers.

The worst thing you can do (in any hand, but I think defending the BB moreso) is go into a hand without a plan for post flop. What boards are you continuing on? What if an overcard falls and villain cbets? What if we call and pick up a fd? What do we do if we flop a straight draw etc... just give yourself some clarity so you're not just left splashing around and guessing as to where you're at.

Of course "others do it" or even "all the great players do it" doesn't make it true, but it's worth looking into what the best players do. In 2010 the general wisdom was "be tight out of position" which is not bad advice per say, but now the strategy is much more figured out and a lot more nuanced. Of course we will know more in 2020 than now, but we're just not going to switch back to folding most hands from the bb getting sick pot odds. The math just doesn't support it. I can't tell you whether we will defend more or less than the norm is now, but if the strategy changes it's either that we start calling almost 100% or we fold some hands like 96o that prove to be too marginal. Great fundamentals and math have nothing to do with trends or metagame, they have always worked and they will always work. We're not close to GTO, but a bad reg in 2018 would destroy in 2010 with his or her current skillset.