Quote:
Originally Posted by jungmit
But what does it all mean? If u bet and get called u check then gild to river? If u bet flop and turn u check river then fold ? U still gotta play poker. What differnce overall will it make. I think people that play hold em today are so concerned with keeping pots small that they lose tons of money when they actually have the winning hand. This small balls approach to cash games I think is losing money.
Hopefully this will help. Ignore my book (if you have read it), ignore pokersnowie, and just clear your mind for a second.
When you are playing on the flop, your bets and raises need to do some combination of denying the equity and/or making the pot bigger in case you win. If your bet isn't accomplishing either of these particularly well, then you shouldn't bet. No exceptions. Even when you see someone bet their entire range on a 732r board, they're betting their entire range because every hand in their range accomplishes these objectives by betting.
Ok, cool. Now, how well you accomplish these objectives and whether or not betting or check-raising on the flop will be superior with a given hand depends both on your range and how strong your opponent's range is. But it's totally fine to just pick your line on the flop based on the above and then just deal with it when you get to the turn. You don't need to think about every single possible turn and river card and every single possible bet sizing the opponent could take. Sure, the more of this stuff you can take into account on the flop the better, as this will allow you to better figure out if betting or check-raising is superior when two lines look close. But you shouldn't get too bogged down with this stuff. Be confident that you're good enough to pick the correct line now and you'll deal with picking the correct line on the next street when you get to it.
As for the AA3r board when we have JJ, you have to figure out if betting 100%, 50%, 30%, 15%, 0% etc on the flop best accomplishes your objectives of retaining your hand's showdown value, making the pot bigger in case you win, and/or denying equity. It's not easy to do, but as our time traveling friend Arty McFly pointed out, it may be hard to justify a flop bet unless you are putting at least some Kx/Qx/KQ type hands in villains range (since these are the hands which are most important to deny equity) or you're betting very very small as this keeps the opponents range wide and weak and causes us to lose less on average vs AX than we will if we bet bigger.
So if I'm playing, and I have JJ in MP vs a BTN caller on AA3r, all of this goes through my mind. I basically end up with concluding "I'm either going to bet 35% of the pot or less" and I would imagine the EV of this is very close. Maybe some high stakes sicko knows if 30% or 15% or 0% is best against some given range, but I personally don't nor do I really care all that much. I also don't know how I'm going to play every turn or river card, but I know I think we need to either check the flop or make a very small or bet. So I'm just going to take that line and then move on with my life and figure out what I think is best on the turn once I get there. I don't even have close to the whole hand planned out.