the issue, obviously, isnt that most of the time they wont have a hand that they would usually call a raise with, however, the fact that by raising every button you create that specific table image and people will play back at you a lot more than usual. so then, when you raise with your 27o and they are 3betting you with j10, then youll understand why it becomes a problem.

No, I don't understand.

Taylor,

Obviously when I'm raising 100% of buttons I'm going to be checking behind on the flop very often. The whole point of the math I'm doing is to demonstrate that the fold equity preflop and the pot equity postflop are sufficient to make raising 27o +EV. This means I'm not relying on ever cbetting when I miss, only putting in money postflop when I do flop well (which is going to be +EV, because hey, I has a pair).

This is actually a benefit metagame wise because villain has to start leading a lot more of his hands for value/protection/bluffs purposes which only helps further define his range when he does check and "builds the pot" when we flop big and makes it more difficult for him to c/r thin for value. There's only so much strength villain can have in his hand range and when we are literally always in the pot, it's a lot harder for him to spread it out well.

Given that the button plays 100%, why not reraise 80%, or something similar, and never call*?

If you're going to play a decidedly stronger range than your opponent OOP it seems more than a little silly to ever give him a flop without putting in more money.

Your opponent would have to be pretty attentive to notice that quickly (like within 30 minutes).

Given that you've opened 100% of your buttons 50 hands (and therefore played for about an hour) it's around 20 times as likely that you're opening 100% of your hands as you opening 95%. But that assumes that both types of players are equally likely in the player pool, and that's not true. For instance, there's probably a lot more than 20 times as many players opening 95% than 100% on the button. And much more that opens 80%-90%.

Add to that most people just pay a lot less attention to early action and small pots and there's a pretty heavy bias not to notice 100% of hands played. Not to mention that most heads-up games last for considerably less than 1 hour.

So for the opponent to quickly notice you're playing every hand you'd have to showdown a lot of crap, and it's not really in the nature of crap hands to be shown down.

Hells no. That's just the boundary where we're certain that he can profit from 3-betting with any two no matter what. You'd have to fold a lot less than that for him to auto profit, due to him actually having good hands and occassionally hitting.

* Yes, not happening IRL, blah, blah.

So if you had to tell your opponent your opening-range and stick to that, you would open 100%, right? But because you don't have to tell him, you sometimes pretend to open 100% and in reality you open 80%; so he will work with the false assumption that you open 100%... But isn't it fairly obvious that you are <100% when you start folding your BTN suddenly? I mean, why not just stick to the 100% the whole match?

xorbie i'm not sure why you ask HU players to convince you why raising any 2 OTB is bad and then when some very good players and HU specialists tell you why it is you can't accept that. you construct your argument out of sklansky-esque fuzzy math, theory, phony ranges and overused 2p2isms and our argument is based off hundreds of thousands/millions of HU hands played against the widest range of opponents.

How much would you be willing to give me payback if we agreed on a match where I'm forced to open 100% of my range to 3xBB and you can play however you want?

Fwiw, it's getting really boring that every 2p2er, it seems, is trying to "counter" theoretical approaches by finding the maximally exploitive approach, for example a 100% 3-bet strategy. Until we SOLVE poker, there will always be some small exploitive parts of our game, and that automatically means there will be a maximally exploitive strategy against us. Playing exploitive adjusting back-and-forth and furthermore discussing this is really not very intersting. I haven't seen one good reason so far from anyone being against 100% BTN raise in this thread, that much I can tell.

While neither bobbo nor xorbie is entirely correct (and no, I'm not neither), for example xorbies math of "27o has about 30% showdown equity against a reasonable range here. This means our showdown equity is .3*.3*6 = .54BB." is something that is pretty much non-applicable, given 27o will just about never ever be the hand we show up with at showdown unless we flop trips and thus way too oversimplified. Against somebody defending 50% of their hands, it's of course not hard to see that from an exploitive approach, you will do better folding 27o, but what's instead is of course important is how much the worst of those 50% of their hands do against the rest of your range, a lot of them are likely HUGE losers and would do better to be folded even IF they knew you raise 72o. This would in turn mean that optimally, we should be raising 72o, but exploitively we could stop doing it and profit more, but if that occurs, he could start defending less hands etc and that exploitive cat-and-mouse game always just ends up with no final destination of course.

I'm not going to get much further into this, but frankly, so many of the anti-100% BTN responses here are laughable.

If you 3bet 80%, and BTN calls most of the time, you play a very big pot oop very often. After the flop the real hand begins and you will have to defend your equity in the pot, which is very v v hard (technically impossible!). This means that if you 3bet 80% and BTN calls with 80% (the exact same distribution hands), you will not get your 50% of the value in the created pot. If there was no betting postflop, you would get 50%, but in the real game it's more likely that you will end up with 40-45% of the value of that pot. And remember, that pot was BIG, so BTN wins a lot!

So folding every BB is better than 3betting 80%!

its hard to pretend to open 100% when people see me folding

the point is i START at one end and if i encounter adjustments i move TOWARDS folding some hands

logic-wise, appealing to authority invalidates any argument. just because some people say it's a bad strategy doesn't mean it's a bad strategy.

good thoughts

for what it's worth, the bolded section is what i mean by people assuming im going 100% when in truth im more along the lines of 80%

yep. a move's effectiveness is only existent if you dont abuse it. if you cbet 100%, open 100%, squeeze a ton etc the profitablity of the move goes down because you now have to deal with counter aggression. its better finding the optimal frequencies of doing such a move rather than trying to force profits via brute force.

oh well it makes sense in my head.

You don't really have an argument, other than from authority.

A few posters have hinted that they play enough hands OOP to make such a strategy unprofitable, but none has really gone out and said so. That's a pretty solid rebuke to the idea that 72o autoprofits from opening from the button.

The only other argument that has been brought up is that it's assumed that someone opening for 100% on the button for some obscure reason is going to gift the bb with a lot of money post flop by betfolding a ton. Which really isn't an argument that holds a whole lot of water.

It's also been said that it's really easy to detect someone opening 100% of their hands and easy to counter-exploit. But just how that exploiting is done isn't really explained. At best, that's an argument for opening 100% of your buttons untill you are detected.

Certainly the fact that almost no highstakes HU player opens 100% is strong evidence that opening 100% isn't optimal, or lacks in exploiting the existing player pool. But it's very far from a rock solid argument that opening 100% is really bad, or even bad at all. After all, looking at the past, top-notch highstakes players have done some pretty bad moves without knowing it before.

I fail to see the problem if our range crushes his.

Yeah, but 1/5 we take home 3bb, or whatever, so that's not super convincing. Especially since the EV of the folds means that we only have to have to keep 44% of our equity against an identical range to be breakeven in the big blind.

For us to do worse than folding 100% of the big blinds is, to put it mildly, improbable.

It's really, really implausible that we go from 50% to 40% in a pot where there's about 5 times the pot left to bet due to position. Without checking I'm pretty sure there are pure shove-or-folds that could perform in that area.

If it actually is true that the positional advantage is that big, it's obvious that the button should open for 100% and pretty much call 100% of the 3-bets, almost no matter the size of the reraise.

you people must play lots better than me, i raise less than half my buttons.

H,

Good post overall. One thing is that when I say people are folding >50%, this is even over 1000+ hands. Anyone paying any attention at all (let alone looking at a HUD in detail) will know I'm raising 100% of hands, they still fold. Maybe not a HU specialist like EC10, but again, well respected HU players, certainly better than I.

The other thing is that, as pointed out, there IS an upper cap on how often you can 3bet. AbsurdHero already pointed this out, but if you 3bet 80% of your range you can't get him to fold nearly often enough (again, you need him to fold pretty often to shove +EV just on the raise, and if you 3bet 80% of hands he can call 80% and he has the positional advantage and you've made almost nothing at all on the 3bet). I think that making back 44% of our equity against a reasonable range here is a really bad assumption.

Raptor man you are burning ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous amounts of money.

edit: I would not be surprised of opening <50% of buttons HU made you an automatic dog to anyone of roughly equal skill and I think it's a testament to how well you must play that you still have a sizeable edge over other players.

edit2: Didn't realize you limp a lot, obv changes things significantly.

no hate, i thought you just werent going to explain it so your sentence was just as good as mine :-)

i will not explain why i don't do it (sorry!) but yes, it does show profit (i agree with you there!) and no, i don't believe it is the most profitable strategy (hence it is not "right," although minraising the btn in vacuums could form parts of the best exploitative strategy against every single player) and no, i don't believe it will show profit against the best players. not out of a stubborn "you can't minraise the button it's sacrilege!" view but born out of thinking about this particular subject a lot.

BTN opens 100% of his hands, and you 3bet 80% of all your hands (this is what I got from your first post), and BTN calls like 80%, how can you say that one range crushes the other?

The fact that you win 3bb 1/5 of the times you 3bet means not much compared to the fact that that 4/5 of the times you created a 20bb pot that is very hard/impossible to defend oop.

I'm too lazy to do the math but it's certainly possible that playing too many hands in big pots oop cost you more than folding every bb... But of course, it's hard to quantify the positional advantage. My guess was that you would go from 50% equity to 40-45% equity... when you both play 80% of all hands and the pot is 20bb and the stacks are 90bb. 40% is probably too much, but on the other hand: if the pot gets bigger and bigger and the BTN has the right of last to act on the river, his advantage could easily be a few big blinds...

Okay now I'm sure I understand you 100% .

My point was that maybe there is no need to change your strategy: the adjustments that your opponent makes are possibly not strong enough to prevent you from opening 100%, even if he tries really hard. What you lose with 72o (when he 3bets more and you have to fold too often to make opening in a vacuum profitable), win you back when you have a hand.

you also incorporate something most people dont do tho, you open limp, so you're in a category of your own!

wat?

MDMA,

I had the same thought as you initially about showdown equity vs. pot equity. A couple things though: first of all, we have position. This means we can always be checking (0EV), and if we check it down very time obviously we have reached our showdown equity exactly. In order for us to not be able to realize our showdown equity, we are going to need to be playing someone who bets a lot, and we are going to need to fold in spots where we were going to win the hand. Think about the flop... if I flop nothing at all (no gutshot, OESD, flush draw, pair+) and you lead, I can easily fold. This is only costing me my runner runner equity (marginal) or my suckout when I have 6 outs vs UI overcards. And consider that a good deal of the time villain leads we actually have <5% equity, so folding isn't actually losing any of the "showdown equity". And consider that when we flop really well (two pair+), we are going to be making significantly more than our showdown equity. And when we just flop a pair or draw, we won't be folding a lot so realistically we aren't really giving up a lot of the equity that we do have.

Again, we don't have a lot of equity, but 27o is actually a hand where we are going to be realizing our full equity a decent amount of the time, because the lack of equity in the first place comes from the fact that you flop diddly squat most of the time and just fold.

edit: Things actually get more complicated when you flop marginal draws because technically if villain is capable of making 0EV bets he is eating into your equity by hedging the bet against the pot, but that's probably more than I want to get into here.

whoa almost a little productivity in this thread

still think 65 to 80% is better/optimal, mostly for balancing purposes