UTG100bb
MP 100bb Hero
CO 100bb
BU 100bb
SB 100bb Villian
BB 100bb

Villian is TAG reg, didnt see him do anything OOL yet

Hero has
QJ98

Hero opens to 3.5bb
CO and BU calls
Villian (SB) 3! 18.5bb
Hero calls
CO and BU calls

Flop (75bb)
A88
Villian Jams
Hero ??


I was wondering should we even fold pre? vs a Headsup it is pretty standard call but with no callers behind it is a bit odd.

I am not worried about getting 4bet but since our hand is not very nutty do we need to find a fold here?

On the flop, i think i have to call off due to SPR and also I feel if he really has AAXX, he probably wont jam here, the most small bet.

Thanks!

Stakes?

Unless super low rake this is a fold to 3-bet. As played, you make a good point about sizing on flop. The BDSFD makes this a call for me

vs someone with reg stats and doesn't get ool and plays 6 tables it wouldn't be the worst fold.

I’m not folding this to a 3bet, can we get some consensus on this?

On flop after his jam looks like AKXX broadway( or much worse) BUT speaking from experience this is AA a lot too with just a leveling trap.

I’d say you’re supposed to call alot of the time, but tbh I am not sure on frequency perhaps someone has some insight on this?

How many times had he 3bet in the session?

Honestly just feels like one of those spots you have to rely on all the other bits and pieces to make the decision.

I’m calling if that helps.

*I wouldn’t mind expanding on this hand a little if that’s ok, what’s the play if we are 200bb deep, and he pots flop?

The villain is in the small blind. The small blind is by far the most difficult position to play for most people. Therefore, the weird things can happen in the small blind, but let’s start by making this the most logical and pure as possible.

Calling the 3-bet preflop? These are often rake considerations at smaller stakes. With only a one gap in your rundown hand and it being suited you can probably make the call.

Preflop. So to start off simple and pure, let’s forget about the cold callers for a moment. You open raised in MP and the SB 3-bet. Without any cold callers the SB might 3-bet here 5-6%. AAxx (not including AAAx) is 2.5% of all poker hands so the SB’s 3-betting range is about half AAxx. And I would say the other half of the SB’s range that isn’t AAxx is still Axxx half the time. So about 75% of SB’s range has at least one Ace in it. Okay, now onto the not so simple and pure by including the cold callers. Some people squeeze with a wider range, some people squeeze with a tighter range, especially against multiple cold callers. But if you just want to keep it simple, say the SB 3-bets about 5% here and that 2.5% of all hands are AAxx therefore the SB has AAxx half the time and Axxx 75% of the time.

Flop. The SB jam is weird. Most out of position preflop aggressors who hit an awesome flop will delay cbetting until the turn especially when the pot is already big enough that they can get their stack in easily on any street. So it is judgment time for you. SB’s preflop 3-betting range has AAxx 50% of the time and Axxx 75% of the time and of course includes some 8xxx. The flop jam is weird. It feels like the SB has an 8xxx hand or an AKxx hand is trying to jam to get the decision making process and stress of the hand over for them or to reduce the potential number of players at showdown. Also many people cbet Ace high board a very high percentage of the time even when it isn’t necessarily a good idea like multiway. You had the villain listed as a reg. I call for a couple of reasons including just to gain information on how this player plays that I can hopefully use in future sessions. And this type of hand is why you need a solid bankroll for whatever stake you are playing so that you can make calls like this and keep on playing your stake instead of having to move down.

nl 100


@nootaboos
Yeah, i kind a feel it's if he has it then really too bad but this kind of thinking has lost me a lot of money so.....

Good point what if we are 200bb deep, if we call the flop we pretty much have to call a turn shove isn't it?


@wolfbook
I had the same thought as you for the flop angle, if he bet like small then shove turn or what ever, I might fold on the turn. I might call down now thinking of it because sometimes i see reg(not this reg specifically) repping AAxx hard but vs 3 players....

How often do you think our range is folding to sb squeeze here?

Definitely feasible that in solver world this is a fold. But in the real world, folding this is leaving money on the table that the solver couldn't make back and we certainly can't either. If the rake is so high that this is in practice a fold, I find it difficult to imagine we're +ev and maybe we should play somewhere where the rake is lower. If the rake is high and we tolerate that because our opponents are really bad.... well, then, we can call this because we're going to make back what we lose in our hot and cold preflop equity call by having our opponents put their money in drawing thin too frequently.

Postflop, eh, whatever. Sometimes you're going to have to call it off drawing very slim. I don't find his jam particularly weird, I see this sort of thing happen quite frequently. Would almost be weirder if he checked.

Small blind should be checking this board about 75% of the time in theory. AAxx which I already showed makes up 50% of SB hands should be checking 100% of the time. And then some common sense says around half the SB's other hands are not betting.

A human will check it at a higher percentage of time than that out of position to 3 players. Humans won't pull the trigger on bold bluffs here thereby dropping the bettinng from a human to under 25% of the time. It is a weird bet. It is the 25% of the time exception NOT the 75% of the time rule. The highest likelihood of bets here come from SB having AKxx and 8xxx. And again some common sense can get you to seeing these are hands the SB doesn't have a lot when you eliminate the AAKx and AA8x which are checking. It is weirder to see a bet not a check.

This Omaha sub-forum needs a reality check or least some of the posters need to check themselves before they wreck themselves. Or maybe it is too late for some or at least one in particular.

Definitely too late for me. In the future if wolfbook and I post contradicting stuff you can just pay attention to him as he's definitely right and I'm definitely wrong. Sorry for giving my thoughts.

High rake is the rake structure of most any online site 1/2 and below, so I think this game, and most games that most of us are playing, are considered high rake in the world of solvers.

This distinction of solver world vs real world is a slippery slope as I think in general solver agrees with the heuristics most PLO players have been using for a long time preflop. BTW, I ran this hand through a solver and this hand is a pure fold UTG as first to act, pure raise UTG+1 (this hand), but when it comes back to us after this action it's a call with QJcc98, but a fold with Q9ccJ8 (96% fold 4% call) or Q8ccJ9 (100%) and it's actually not that close as ev of calling is -0.5bb relative to folding. This is real actionable data, and I think it is a lot more trustworthy than feel-based play. It's relatively easy to learn these preflop scenarios offline and yes, you can adapt them slightly depending on situation, but I firmly believe these should be the basline range. So, I think cardiff is totally right and this is a fold, but whatever, we are so much better we can make up the 0.5 bb post flop. If this hand was played live then fine, I buy it, but online I think it should be a fold, but it's a mistake that many of us will make (myself included), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't learn from it.

I want to be a bit pedantic here, because I went through the hassle of creating a fairly realistic 3b! range from the SB in this situation. In my range he has AA 45% and he has A!AA 22%. Of course, after the flop comes down these numbers do change a lot. Now he only has AA 29% of the time and an A!AA 24%.

For anyone who cares: SB 3B range I used (5.72%): AA, RROO$ds, 4567+$ds, 4678+$ds, 4578+$ds, 4568+$ds, KK[6+][6+]$ds!AA!KKK,$R$R$R$Rxxyy,xxyw), $R$R$Rxxyy)


Post flop this is trvial stack off IMO. I'm not at all surprised by the PSB, but I do think from a hand reading perspective it drastically reduces his AA hand rank to something close to 0%. But even if it doesn't I don't think it matters. I think villain would have to be a super imbalanced nit to ever consider anything except getting it in here.

You should fold, or at least consider it. Solver wants to call only if you are QJ suited.
There is a critical thing that I found quite counterintuitive but solve tightens up DRAMATICALLY in multi-way pots, and I think this is what is going on in this specific spot. It wants you to have nut potential, and not having a nut flush is a bit red flag.

• It's a trivial call if you open this hand and SB 3bets and everyone else folds
• Solver also likes a call if only the button cold calls the original raise
• Solver also likes a call if only the button cold calls the original raise
• If SB calls and BB squeezes we should be folding and it's very clear.

For what it's worth, I likely would be too tight in this spot and would have folded the QJ combo as well as the other two combos.

So say opening QJ98ss utg loses 0.5bb/hand in solver world, that means that, when people miss value bets, semibluff bad hands, chase non-nut draws for big bets, pay off with mediocre flushes, and all the mistakes we see even winning players sometimes make, let alone breakeven players, let alone losing players, let alone even the occasional whale, what do they amount to, and where does that ev/hand go? Just because we can find other mistakes that we might make according to solver doesn't mean that 0.5 bb/hand is a gigantic mistake in the context of the mistakes we reasonably expect the population to make.

Deciding that QJ98ss utg is an open is not feel-based play. It is informed by, amongst others, a lot of collective experience from a lot of long-time winning players, and backed up by database analysis. This is all more real and tangible than the theoretical pure fold that a solver likes, against another solver. If the solver was tasked with finding a strategy that maximised winnings against a human population, it would probably play a lot worse hands than this utg, let alone if you gave the solver the ability to create reads. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of winning players do now fold this hand utg as the influence of the solver grows. But the idea that it forms a baseline is a red herring. We have a baseline already.

This made me lol IRL.

Sick thread want to write more but will have to do later

Fair, but to be fair, you and me and everyone else are also going to be making a lot of mistakes in this analogy.

Also fair, and I have no doubt your pre-flop is rock solid, but I'm also sure mine isn't.

I will be folding this, and I feel fine with that. I don't have 10+ years of experience and databases to base my play around. I do have a solver, so that is my baseline.

This is a threshold hand to open with and to play as a 3-bet when it comes back. That's really all I have to say on it. Me choosing to fold it will have little to no impact on my bottom line, you choosing to play it UTG and call a 3-bet will also have little impact on your bottom line.

Same, same, same and kind of same.

Same, same, same and kind of same.

We went same, same, same on everything up until the the kind of same where we both agree it is a trivial stackoff but disagree on when/how it happens. Trivial stackoff on any street yes, but explain it happening on the flop out of position to 3 players instead of checking. You comment, "from a hand reading perspective it drastically reduces the AAxx to 0%." Well yeah eliminating every AAxx can thereby make it a bet, but you also say that after card removal the SB has AAxx 29% of the time.

fold pre, you will get at least one more call and you dont even hit 33% equity if you get one more caller, with 2 more callers your hand is basically garbage

Yeah, hence my comment about being pedantic. I thought your post was great.

My quibble was with the adjustment to postflop range after the ace is in the flop, then the range probabilities change.

Oh okay, I get the AAxx hand read comment now, then we went same, same, same, same. LOL. Thanks brother, I enjoy your awesome posting style.

Yes, the question is which mistakes are easily punishable and which are difficult to exploit, and who makes fewer and smaller mistakes and knows how to punish the others. This is a fundamental skill of poker that solvers don't really teach you.

I've had this discussion with a close friend at length and I have some analogies. I feel like trying to build a solid preflop game from the solver is like learning to drive on a simulator with AI cars and then imagining that will be useful to you when you start driving in real life. Or, it's like learning Latin vocab and imagining that it will have you speaking Italian well. In both cases it will be useful to a point, but it is no substitute for both experience and other types of learning, and if you put too much stock in it, it could give you a false sense of expertise in a subject that doesn't actually relate particularly closely to the real world. Solver analysis is obviously incredibly important these days for being able to beat high stakes games, but using a training site's solver data to drill, i.e. not actually using the solver itself but using its (verified?) output to train preflop is like... trying to decorate your penthouse apartment before the foundations have been built.

The old tools are still the best ones. Resources like books, this forum, coaching, training videos, networking in order to find good players to discuss hands with, etc, will help you much better in the realm of trying to build a solid preflop game, as you will learn the principles behind good preflop play and what makes a good preflop hand. Solvers can be the icing on the cake, but if all you consume is solver output, you're going to get diabetes.

So if we know for sure two other guys are going to call I think this is a fold to the 3b, if we don't know that then it's probably close. Flop you're getting it in and hoping he has AKxx - can't fold.

I'm in the fold to 3b camp. People calling behind is terrible for equity realisation.

In case there was a debate around opening the hand in the first place, I'm definitely opening unless it's all crushers behind.

As for flop its a real gross spot. I think some AA can absolutely pot here but can also see some non-AA hands such as AK.

My initial gut reaction was to stack it off because I thought there would be enough A***!AA but I ran a very basic sim in OO and there are nowhere near enough non AA hands than I thought. I have to make a LOT of assumptions to get it even close to a stack off and even then its just too difficult.

Ultimately I think you will get shown AA too much so we need to fold.

What is OO?

Classic Home Game spot for sure in my area .. bloated multi-way going to the Flop with SPR under 1.5.

With only pot behind I can't see a tight Player trying to get through one or two 8x holdings with only Axxx, so this 'has' to be AA way more than 25-33% of the time in our games. You'd think they would check and see if an 8x bites .. but they don't .. they fire.

And who's to say that a Player behind doesn't have A8xx and we're drawing dead to them?

I'm fine with opening .. and flatting 'this' holding v tight V, but I'm finding myself in a much better mindset when I just let these go even though we've connected above average.

I liken it to staying in a hand with 9786 on T99 .. when are you really going to be good? Not often enough. GL

Where are you getting these 75% and 100% numbers? I looked at a similar board(A77) 3-ways and SB is c-betting 60% of time(1/3 pot) and betting 60% his AA. I could imagine adding another player and playing with utg ranges would lower c-betting, but I couldn't see it going much below 50%.