Quote:
Originally Posted by Trix
Thanks for sharing Spladle.
If you CBet 3$ with KK on 885, with a preflop potsize of 5, and both players play a balanced strategy that includes making calling down KK breakeven, aren't you losing ~8$ which is the pot at the point where he check-raises and not 100$ as it is as much his responsibility to make you break-even with 'bluff-catchers' as it is yours ? (Ignoring improvement of either players hands)
A few thoughts:
1) It is extraordinarily unlikely that calling down with KK could ever be breakeven. If it were, that would imply that we should be indifferent to how we play KK against a GTO player, and that is almost certainly untrue. Calling the flop c/r should be HUGELY profitable, as should calling a normal-sized turn bet on most cards. In fact, against some smaller bet sizes I would expect calling many rivers with KK to be profitable as well. What I object to is the idea of calling >20x the pot on the flop when we are losing to >10% of our opponent's initial range.
2) Even if we know when facing the flop c/r that we will be indifferent between calling/folding on certain rivers after certain board run-outs, that does not imply indifference to calling the flop c/r.
3) Even if we were indifferent between calling and folding to the flop c/r, that would not imply that we were losing $8. Being indifferent between calling and folding means that your EV is $0, not negative.
4) Villain's goal when check-raising should not be to make us "indifferent" (between what? Calling/folding, raising/calling, raising/folding, raising/folding/calling?) with "bluff-catchers" (all "bluff-catchers" are not created equal and should not be treated/played the same). His goal should be to maximize the EV of every hand he plays. Doing so will almost certainly result in it being profitable for us to continue against a flop c/r with KK but unprofitable to continue with JTo.
5) You can't ignore the possibility of either player improving. If the turn is an offsuit ace, play from that point forward should be very different than if it's a Q putting up a backdoor flush draw, which should likewise be played differently than if the turn were an offsuit 4. Placing hands into static ranges ("value," "bluff," "bluff-catcher") on the flop is inappropriate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trix
As you otherwise could just call down when he bluffs too much and fold when he don't. (Play poker :P)
Yes, obviously if you identify an imbalance in your opponent's strategy, you can and should exploit it. However, knowing only that an opponent bluffs too much or too little on the flop doesn't actually help you that much when deciding how you should play various hands. You also need to know other things about his strategy as well before you can put that information to use. For example, even against an opponent who check-raises this flop as a bluff a bit too infrequently, it will still be profitable to continue with KK. The value/bluff imbalance would need to be MONSTROUSLY huge before failing to call a flop c/r with KK could ever be right. Furthermore, even if he bluffs a bit too much, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can continue profitably with A2o or JTo; it simply means that many of the hands you
do continue with will be more profitable than they would be if your opponent were playing better/bluffing less (of course, some of the hands you continue with will actually be less profitable against an overly-aggressive strategy than against an optimal one). You are still forced to draw a line somewhere between what you continue with and what you fold.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trix
If you know BB's strategy(CR-Range, c-c ranges), would you still check KK?
That's not enough information to influence my decision. We'd also need to know how he plays after we check back the flop, how he plays after checking twice/three times, how he responds to bets of various sizes on various boards after various actions, etc.
To be clear, btw, betting KK here should be hugely profitable, as should calling a check-raise. The argument for checking is that it will be even
more profitable. There are many hands for which I expect this to hold true. I'm pretty sure that betting with any two cards on the flop here should produce an immediate profit against an optimally-playing opponent, so the reason we develop a checking range is not that we can't bet profitably but because doing so is even more profitable than simply c-betting.
Last edited by Spladle; 12-05-2013 at 11:32 AM.