this is kind of a spin-off to one of the KK threads on the board today. its pretty simple, but its important.

you guys all know what the fundamanetal theorum of poker is, and you use this idea to try and maximize your value and expectation in the hands that you play. however, a lot of people fail to realise, that this does not only apply to the decisions that we put our opponents to, but it also applies to the decisions that we put ourselves to indirectly when we can fairly accurately predict the actions of our opponents.

EVEN IF THERE IS NO VALUE TO BE GAINED BY A BET, SOMETIMES THAT BET WILL YIELD THE HIGHEST EXPECTATION BY VIRTUE OF AVERTING AN FTOP ERROR ON OUR OWN PART.

the classic KK example:

we raise with KK utg and are called by our tight opponent in MP. the flop comes Axxr. since As are a big part of our utg raising range, we believe that our opponent will fold any hands worse than ours should we bet. since our opponent has tight calling ranges preflop, we also believe that our opponent will not fold any hands better than ours, AQ being the worst of which is in his range. therefore, there is no value to be had, and we should not bet, right? WRONG. (maybe) the hand doesn't end here, so your thinking can't stop here either.

for one thing, we know that a reasonable bet yields a profit, because we estimate that our opponent will fold any hand worse than ours, which most of his hands are, allowing us to take down the pot the majority of the time, for a cost of less than even money.

secondly, and this is the more important part, we have not considered the likelyhood that our opponent will force us to fold when we in fact have the best hand. afterall, our hand has no showdown value if we do not actually get to showdown, so if that is a likely enough scenario, we might be better off taking the immediate profit. this is why its so much more common for good players to take passive lines with marginal hands in position as opposed to out of position. the power to check a street behind allows that player to much more easily reach a showdown without being put to an uncomfortable situation, whereas showdown seems miles away when oop vs. an agressive opponent.

in the example above, if our opponent is very passive, then it is more correct than otherwise to play our hand passively. if he would only bet with a pair of aces or better, and we know that, then it is very unlikely that we are forced into making a mistake. if our opponent is very agressive and unpredictable, then it would be more correct than otherwise to claim our immediate profit and avert the possibility of future mistakes in the hand. in general, when we do not take our immediate profit, we should either be planning to fold to a rare bet, or planning to call expected bets to showdown. obviously the board will not always cooperate with our plans, but we should never just freeze up and play in such a way where we aren't either usually getting our immediate profit in our given scenario, or usually getting to showdown in our given scenario.

hope this helps a little.

Nice post.

Just want to make mention for those who may not have picked up on it, the KK example referred to ONLY applies when out of position. Checking behind on the Axx flop with KK is fine.

Very nicely written.

This is spot on and something people really need to think about. All of this talk about "what worse calls and what better folds" doesnt apply to every single situation. While it is a useful concept to follow, there are many times when it doesnt even matter if worse calls and better folds if we are preventing ourselves from making costly errors on later streets.

it could be good or bad in either case imo. although it will be good a lot more often ip.

This is indeed important stuff.

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. FToP makes it very clear that betting such that a worse hand folds is a mistake. Also, whilst what you are suggesting is clearly +EV, it does not maximise EV.

On your second point, the fear of being out-aggro'ed is not really a reason to bet. The way we deal with the aggroness is to widen villain's range and call down lighter - your strategy suggests we bluff to beat a (potential) bluff or bluffs. I don't think that can be right.

I'm more than open to correction on either point.

Nice post.

I think this also gets into the "G-bucks" concept, where basically when considering whether to bet the flop or not, we should consider not only the value of the bet given our hand, but the value of the bet given our entire range. At microstakes it probably matters less than the FTOP considerations you are outlining, but against good opponents it becomes important to avoid exploitability and to get value the times we do have the ace.

This is an important point as well. While in general checking ip with a marginal hand is better, as daycare said, there are definitely spots where checking oop is correct also. If we are against a tight passive villain then there is little to gain from betting an A93r flop with KK. He isnt going to push us off our hand with worse and he isnt calling multiple streets with worse. However, a flop check enables us to get value from worse on later streets.

how do you know that a valueless/bluffless bet can't be the most EV route without somehow quantifying the average profit of the other route? obviously its impossible to come up with a very accurate estimate, but the more skilled and agressive that your ip opponent is, the lower your profit will be.

It's also worth mentioning that an ace high flop is a descent flop to c-bet and that our opponents may be aware of that. So in some cases we can bet KK for value in those spots.

In fact "underrepping" our hand and giving our opponent an opportunity to bluff us off a better hand may very well yield less loss of value than not value betting KK when facing a float-happy opponent. So your statement may be true indeed in some cases but for the wrong reasons.

Anyhow, for microstakes the standard against unknowns without specific history should be to check or check-behind that flop and bet or call IP turn, IMO. So basically the answer to wheter we should bet such flops is... "it depends"

I should mention that I didn't read that post you're referring to so hopefully I'm not reitareting someone.

well the point isn't that doing x is going to be right or wrong. the point is that nothing can be applied to one decision that doesn't take into account the various ways an entire hand can play out, especially when we are taking a route where we want to play the entire hand.

think of it this way. even a hypothetical perfect player cannot always make perfect decisions. he can make correct decisions, but obviously they would often be mistakes if he could see his opponent's cards. if we are trying to show a hand down oop from the flop, if we end up facing 3 bets, in order for us to win the hand, we must make 3 correct decisions, and those decisions must also be perfect in that we also must win when the cards are turned over. its hard to accurately estimate the chances of that happening, but obviously a lot of human factors come into play beyond just ranges at this point.

for example, lets say that in this hand that our opponent is a very skilled player. when we check on our lead and call his bet on the flop, what can he reason? would we do that with a KQ? probably not, because leading is obviously profitable. would we do that with an AK? maybe, but that's not normally our style and he knows that. so, 1/3 of the way to showdown, our ip opponent knows what hand type we have, yet we do not know what hand type he has, or what to expect from him.

i wish to understand why do you think playing KK in position like this is right.

damn, someone got around to posting about this before me.

i skimmed through the thread, but this is definitely something uNL needs to learn.

here's an example written by Sklansky in the latest 2p2 mag: http://twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue37/sklansky0108.php

basically, often when we take an unaggressive action, we ship a lot of bluffing equity to our opponents... 'sometimes, you should just bet.'

Why is this fine? If checked to me I bet the flop for sure.

Betting is not a mistake if the alternative is to check/fold the best hand or let your opponent improve a worse hand to a better hand on the next street.

It's only on the river that making a bet that folds all worse hands is often a mistake (although, to be honest, sometimes it's worth a bet even then just to leave them wondering if you bluffed them, imo).

Depends on villain. A lot of your opponents will call your raise preflop with a small pocket pair or suited connectors and fold every time you c-bet an A or K high flop and they missed but bet any time you check. If you call down, they will give up with worse hands and keep betting better ones. This is a bad spot to be in...

Against hyper agg villains, yeah, sometimes you just got to let them bet middle pair all the way and call them down.

i just hope people dont take it the wrong way. it doesn't mean that we should just bet bet bet whenever its profitable. it just means that sometimes we should avoid scenarios that we generally recognize as unprofitable (like trying to call down with little pocket oop vs. tough player, or whatever), even if it means making a valueless bet.

oh, and here's another example that's a little bit less vague and easier for me to defend:

suppose that not only do we estimate that our tight opponent in the example hand will not call us without a better hand, and will not fold a better hand, but also will not bet a better hand. by not taking our immediate profit, we are simply letting him freeroll for no additional gain whatsoever.

Well, as I said, we avoid bet/folding the best hand by reading our villain and his range better, not by betting per se.

Indeed, isn't this exactly what happens when we check to induce? We are specifically saying to villain: "I am going to use your aggression against you knowing you will bet the next street with a wide range". In this case, we are making a judgement about his bluffing/stabbing range when we check.

Why can't that the case in OP's example? Suddenly everyone seems to be saying that we become incapable of judging his bluffing frequency once we check. This doesn't have to be the case at all - we widen his range to account for our check and his aggression, and act accordingly.

Also, the issue of allowing someone to draw is different as we also make a FToP mistake if we do not bet enough to charge draws. If we could see the other player's hand, we bet exactly the right amount to make him draw incorrectly. Clearly, when a board is drawing checking to try to make value later is an FToP mistake of sorts. So I think allowing people to outdraw us is a separate subset of a problem.




BTW, clearly Sklansky and other good regs here are disagreeing with me, so I accept this is a gap in my knowledge I need to repair. Just arguing for the sake of argument.

damn. what is the time on the edit lockout? i really need to change part of that, because its pretty stupid. the part about the passive opponent that doesn't bet with worse...

I'm somewhat confused with some arguments that are brought up here. For me this a very simple case (in vacuum on an average 50NL or 25NL table) when opponents calling range dominates our KK (assuming he will fold bottom pair or MP). So we do not bet IP because of that (and because we wouldn't want to get checkraised here also, and some like to do that on such dry flops AND because we induce bluffs on later streets) We check OOP for the same reason.

Yes we ship some fold equity but in vacuum w/o reads nor history against an average 50nl or 25nl player or whatever you overestimate his ability to take advantage of that extra FE, ime.

I didnt read all the comments so sorry if Im just being lazy.

One thing I would say is that whilst you might be making a mistake betting an A high flop with KK Ftop wise, given that EV is pretty theoretical in this scenario, winning the pot is obviously a pretty awesome result regardless of what our opponent holds, because we are never really going to be able to maximise our EV.

not only that, but we don't "win" by showing down the best hand either. we "win" by getting called by worse and folding better. we don't "win" when we check due to the fact that betting doesn't "win".

This is way off imo. Buy checking you're doing just that, you maximize you EV in vacuum w/o reads bla bla bla. Unless your "really maximising" means playing as if we know what opponent holds, then no we're not really maximising EV, but you can't do that in poker. Checking IP and OOP is most +EV move.

sometimes...

you're just talking about a default approach vs. unknowns/majority/wutever. personally, my default in the games i play is checking behind ip betting out oop vs. that profile. that's not the point though. the point is that SOMETIMES its going to be better to make a valueless bet and take the immediate profit, based on various different factors.

This is so true with the standard UNL donkey response of,

"ZOMG he checked to me. Time to min-bet my bottom pair"

Sure, betting OOP will make the hand easier to play, but you're still passing on some EV most of the time. I guess it's just a matter of what you think an average unknown is capable of. Apparently I have a different exerience than you do. In my experience; OOP: c/f>c/c>>>betting.

edit: c/f>c/c is a close one.