coffeeyay. trust us, its not that good.

66 does not flop well, does not hit a set more often than your opponent hits a big hand, and does not in any way help your overall range on a Broadway flop in a 3bet pot, as it is effectively air (and thus, you are still polarized, which is a major point for some reason I don't understand). Btw I'm not trying to be an ******* I'm just being concise because I'm on a phone and can't type out examples easily.

I'm still not concerned about balancing my 3bet range during the first hand against an unknown. Sure, as the match progresses and I discover he's decent/thinking/active enough to combat a nitty 3bet 88+/AT/KQ range on the right flops, I'll adjust. I'd still rather do it by adding hands that nail those low flops better than 66, like 65s-T9s, etc. But by that point of the match, if we're really developing an extensive 3bet pot dynamic, I might find decent reasons to 3bet 66 (like if the dude is starting to 4bet shove light, or if he proves to be somehow weak or too spewy in 3bet pots, such that having any pair is a massive advantage.)

And your insistence on talking about all-in equity is still weirding me out.

And no, we don't flop sets 15% of the time. I think it's like 11%-ish. And I don't think 66 is a great hand postflop in an inflated pot OOP. When we don't hit a set and our cbet is called or raised (or villain bets to our flop check) on a Js7d5d type flop, then I'd rather have clearer and wider options by having T8s or 64s or something that flops semi-bluffing power at least on those medium-to-low flops that polarize a nitty 3betting range.

There are tough spots, and then there are tougher spots and, more to the point, unecessarily tough spots. No?

Barry

And fwiw its impossible a great player has his biggest edge in tough spots, since size of edge and difficulty of decision are for the most part negatively correlated.

coffeeyay: Read this post, particularly the last sentence, it's what convinced me.

To polarized 3-bet ranges: T8s is a better type of hand to add to it than 66, just because we're not betting 66 doesn't mean we're polarized, and I agree with lagdonk that it doesn't matter first hand anyway.

Barry: It might be semantics, but I still think saying "unnecessarily tough spots" should just be a round-about way of saying "spots where it is difficult to realize our equity". 3-betting AK puts us in "unnecessarily tough spots" sometimes but that's a silly reason not to do it, so it should be about equity and EV in the hand, not tough decisions.

So I'm still not convinced... I think the reason is there is more than one solution here, and which one is best starts depending a lot on Effective Stack Sizes. Looking at this particular hand, we're 50bb deep so maybe yeah the call value is better than the 3bet value, but honestly i doubt it,I still think your call value is not greater than your 3bet value. Mostly because they don't 4bet very often. when we start talking about 4bets we start really needing to know the If they jam a lot here.

As for post flop I still think having 66 in a bigger pot post flop is really good and more than worth the possible negative consequences of his 4bets. Sorry to keep harping on this, I'm trying to iron out some of my own ideas, I do read and appreciate the criticisms.

By 3betting here we are just putting ourself in a tough spot not our opponent. You make your money by making good decisions, making this play means we are creating an unnecessary situation where will we often be making bad decisions. We should just be striving to put our opponent is bad spots.

I'd imagine if you looked at your database for pot sizes with 66 you'll find a large number of small-medium pots lost, a smaller number of small-medium pots won, and a relatively small number of very large pots won (and lost also, but fewer lost than won). The smaller you can keep those medium sized pots that you lose more often than you win, the better. With 75bb effective stacks, you simply don't need to 3bet to create the very large pots you sometimes win, because stacks will get in with a single raised pot very easily the times you hit a set.

That's kinda hard for me to verbalize and sounds like a mess but essentially I'm saying that when we dont hit a set, we lose more often than not, and when we do hit a set, we win more often then not. Therefore, we will maximize our overall EV by keeping the pots where we have no set as small as possible, and the pots where we have a set as large as possible. Because we're 75bb deep, the pots when we have sets will still reach the largest possible size quite easily. However, when we 3bet, it's near impossible to have a pot smaller than (2*(3bet size)+cbet size) which is a heck of a lot bigger than we'd like the pot to be when we're not going to win it all that often.

barewire imo
good posts

You're thinking about the value of this hand incorrectly. To drastically simplify the better posts in the thread 66 is strong preflop (what you're calling allin equity) and weak postflop.

Yes, we will always flop a pair. No, we are not happy with a pair of sixes on most flops. Exceedingly rarely are we happier with our pair in a 3bet pot than in a pot we flatted pre. The reason I quoted the above is because I think it shows where you're going wrong in your thought process. The only time we'd ever want to 3bet 66 is if our opponent is 4betting a ton, not if they're far more often flatting, not if they're far more often folding.

gold, if this doesn't convince coffee then I think ppl should give up trying to sway him

A+ thread people, really useful for the 3 betting newb that I am

So this argument makes a lot of sense, but when I look in my database that's NOT what I find. I find the opposite. a lot of small to medium pots won, and relatively few big-very big pots won (but fewer medium pots won than lost, about equal very big pots). But I also see a small sample size so I don't really see much and so over the last 6months I've only 3bet and played a flop 22 times, avg unprofitable, but over last year I've 3bet and played 40 flops and now profitably.

I guess because I play really aggressively I see this spot I see a spot here where I am going to win it more often than not and so want to maximize the pot size. I don't really weigh in sets to this, but I see your point that deeper we may want to actually keep the pot size smaller because we win the really big pots.

I'm not saying I'm not swayed by these arguments, it's just it's impossible for either side to be "right" unless we have a "correct" GTO solution to look at and see what it does with 66 in this spot (soon we will...). My instinct says that 66 is a 3bet here but it DEFINITELY depends a lot on effective stacks, and obviously I'm probably wrong in this case

Cliffing that: I see that calling can be more valuable than raising, but I also see that it depends on stacks. The GTO strategy would involve finding the stack size at which it's break even to call or to raise and then look at our stack sizes. For low stack sizes it definitely is best to raise because our pp has so much raw equity, this is clear to me since it is a nash equilibrium strategy to shove all in once stacks are around 20bb. on the other hand you're saying that there are stacks where it becomes better to call. But then once we get stacks high enough we again probably want to raise again so that we CAN extract full value of sets...

I think the "right" answer is then calculable: find that point where the two break even, a type of skate's point, and then see where 75 falls. Obviously it's not a straight forward calculation, and I don't have any time to do it right now, but I think saying it's relative to how good you are post flop is silly because you can't be good at playing 66 in 3bet pots at these stack sizes if you never play 66 in 3bet pots at this effective stack size, and it is completely irrelevant if it's not good in the first place to get into 3bet pots with 66 at this stack size. This sort of addresses my major concern was there was a lot of emphasis on how it's "tough" to play them post flop, which should be completely irrelevant.

if u 3 bet 66, how often does it gets to showdown without you getting 4 bet jammed all in and calling or hitting a set postflop? i think this is somewhat high variance, but if uu don't mind that then thats another discussion. since this is the first hand with no reads, 3 betting this and not hitting a set or getting this all in preflop is a huge guessing game a lot of the times. you're not always gonna hit a dry flop like this and you're stuck with a medium sized pot w/ no reads where you're gonna try to hero call villain down when he decides to float you and barrel turn and river?

3 betting 66 and trying to play it postflop is hard cause most of the time you're drawing to 2 outs and you have to decide to hero call when you don't even know villain's ranges or you're gonna turn 66 into a bluff by the time the river card hits.
its better to get some reads on villains to 3 bet, but if u wanna 3 bet w/ no reads, its better to 3 bet hands that flop well or play post flop better like 8 9 suited where if they 4 bet, we can fold and if they call, we can hit a monster flop or have backdoors to our straight/flush possibilites.

For some reason, this cracked me up.

@dwusbu Lol, I like hard guessing games I guess... that doesn't answer whether it's the most profitable game to play or not.

@rumnchess honestly I think this is true, but the answer to what 66 is gives you also all the answers of what to do with it. IMHO there are very pretty, somewhat intuitive, deep reasons for this being true and for why that's an accurate description of this argument.

This is exactly what you want to do. Tough spot would be one that you feel you are likely to make a mistake. So yes, you should avoid tough spots as a general rule. You want to put yourself in situations where you have an edge, not in spots where you are guessing.

Obviously, if a tough spot comes up often enough, you should work on it so that it's an easy spot.

Spots that are actually tough are easy to play because the equity difference in the two decisions is small, so who cares.

btw I am happy to get 66 in first hand which is one of my reasons for 3-betting against a presumed fish, still convinced by Barewire's argument though.

as far as the database analysis, you'll have to consider all things that go right/wrong when you 3bet 66. you'll not only have to look at the shown down pots (which to me, your description isn't far off from what should happen, maybe you just haven't been paid off as often as you'd like with sets over your small sample) but you'll also have to look at the times you were 4bet and what your profit/loss was there, the times you were raised on the flop and folded, the times you shut down and folded an earlier street, etc. Maybe your database isn't large enough to do this but I'm sure if people were willing you could pull together some convincing numbers.

Either way coffeeyay, your description of stack depth is exactly what I was trying to get at, and I think it's intuitive that 75bb is nowhere deep enough to consider not being able to get paid off on sets. Without doing any complicated (and probably inaccurate due to all the guesswork) calculations on optimal stack depth to 3bet a pair, I think you can do a pretty simple thought experiment on what stack depth allows you to take a standard line OOP to get stacks in (usually c/r flop, bet turn, jam river) and think about how deep you have to be for villain to actually start folding a significant part of the range you get value from when you have a set. For example, even at 150bb deep, we have no issue stacking tptk on K96ss, which is the most common type of spot where we make our big profit with sets.

From experience I'd guess that this threshold is somewhere around 200bb+ deep, which is at a point where 3betting ranges generally get more polarized, more narrow, simply because positional advantage is now through the roof and you don't want to screw yourself by playing a ton of pots OOP. Basically, I don't think there's a stack depth where I'm convinced 3betting this hand is better than defending, without a specific read to say otherwise.

So i guess what I'm still wondering is whereas at 75bb you don't have to worry about getting full value out of sets, you DO (imho, intuitive, whatever) have to worry about getting full value out of over pairs, and so it becomes worth it to 3bet ALL your pairs just to make sure you get value out of your over pairs too... furthermore you're ahead on most flops against most hands since most of the time you have a pair and they don't so it's easy to play post flop--you just keep betting unless you have reads or bad flops or bad turns or bad rivers to tell you not to.

In any case, I do want to thank you for taking me seriously and responding seriously to my case, highly appreciated and it will definitely be +EV for me, so thank you again It will be nice when optimal solutions are known and we can compare to some GTO solution and be accurately be able to say "well this is best, but in this case most people play X and so ACTUALLY, I prefer Y because of reasons A B C." Maybe some day and I'm kinda hoping/know it will be someday soon

I don't understand what you are talking about when you say you need to worry about getting value from overpairs, so I will ignore that part for the moment, instead of guessing.

You are ahead vs, a random range, but you aren't against a random range. You are against a 3bet calling range, which, is more likely to be strong from the start, as well as be more stubborn post flop, so you get floated more and bluffed, or sucked out more, ect. Even when you are ahead.

You have to actually flop the set before you can worry about getting value from it. With 66, the times you don't flop a set there aren't going to be many hands you can actually get value from on most boards.

With AA, there are plenty of hands you can get value from on just about any board.

so you all agree that 66 isn't a hand we wanna 3B OOP without reads. What do you think is ok 3B first couple of hands, 99+, KQ+?