Quote:
Originally Posted by gaming_mouse
Matt,
This is the best book on NL poker I've come across, and the one I wish I'd had when I was learning. Amazing work.
I thought the situation you'd discussed before was 3betting stuff like 75s vs stuff like K7s out of the blinds, and you were saying you'd changed your position to believing that K7s would be better because it had higher equity, even though it will be harder to play postflop. Correct me if you were referring to a different point.
In any case, there is a tradeoff between the effectiveness of "ease of play" vs "pure equity." In the 4b example you were just discussing, it seems that the difficulty of playing KQ, especially as a TP, possibly dominated hand, gets really nasty when you've been 3b as UTG. But you are saying the extra equity still outweighs that difficulty?
It is really, really hard to evaluate what hand is better pre-flop since you can't convert equity into expected value. That's why when someone makes a comment like to "chose 98s,87s,76s instead of say KQo is really bad" my thoughts or more or less just "meh." Chinned may be completely right, and I would rather have KQo than 98s now (as explained earlier), but it's not like this is something you can prove, pre-flop probably uses a very mixed strategy, and I'm not sold KQo is better than other hands we can use (such as ATs, KJs, KTs, QJs, AXs, etc).
For the K7s vs 75s, the only thing 75s does better than K7s is it makes some straights. This of course matters, but as of now I'd rather just have better pairs (pairs of kings are better than pairs of fives, and K7s makes pairs of sevens with a better kicker than 75s). If I'm talking poker with someone who understands this and still thinks 75s is better, then that's totally fine with me and not something I'd really get in a disagreement about, since no one actually knows.