I don't hate it. I think I would prefer it without the caller of the squeeze. I also would prefer it if the stats weren't somewhat laggy, and over a small sample. As Bobbou points out, this can be v. profitable with a good read. But it takes a good read imo.

I've made this play thrice in the last 5k hands or so. Once I was called by Q6, once by J6, and once by AA (though never with a caller of the squeeze). I think that medium pocket pairs are better than suited connectors to make this play, as evidenced by the ridiculous trash you'll get called by on occasion, and the fact that you're a slight favourite against over cards.

Yes I can imagine squeezing is growing, but this is still a bad spot. LAGs can get big hands too.

He's squeezing 3 players not 2, I think this narrows his range considerably to strong hands.

He's squeezing UTG, UTG+1 and MP, this isn't the same as squeezing CO, BTN, and SB from the BB.

You say UTG is Loose passive, had he been raising UTG much?

I think BTN calls you with 99+ as your hand looks like exactly what it is.

There was a thread yesterday about a similar spot where someone raisng big from the BB with TT against a series of limpers, who got shoved on by the button.
Some people were considering folding TT there, so maybe your bluff gets through, but I said it was an easy call as it's so often a lower PP or some suited garbage.

Just fold to initial reraise. Next hand.

Fancy play syndrome. My math might not be that great, but I believe you have to win this about 4ish times to break even for the times they do call and pwn you. HU is a different matter, and it gets to be a bit better, but not by much. This is 25 NL, people are begging to call you, save this for the higher levels

I can see your reasoning for this play; when UTG flats the 3bet it looks like a big pot for the taking. I just think its so hard to believe that you have a hand here that your not going to fold out AQ+/99+. But I doubt that its massively -ev is suspect it's pretty marginal either way. I suspect you need about 25% fold equity, which I could see.

Meh .. I haven't read all the responces, but it would look ok at a higher stake, question is if it also is ok here.

All in all a pokerstove problem, but it can't be that bad, imo ...

i hate this line. You aren't believable. Any decent player is looking you up for SURE with 88+, and bad players are looking you up with a ton of hands you don't really want to get called by because they are bad players. There's no way you flatted an UTG call in LP hoping for a button or blind raise. It's just not realistic. Your hand looks like exactly what it is. Also, QQ would certainly flat call a reraise and not shove everytime.

You are getting looked up here by at least 1 villain everytime. Villains don't squeeze UTG raises OTB. Blinds squeeze mp and lp raises. That's the "normal" squeeze play. If you routinely try squeezing UTG raises in LP with crap, you are going broke fast.

I'm not interested in the results of this particular hand, because I don't think they really matter. I appreciate you put a lot of thought into this, but at NL 25, fancy plays aren't the way to go. You are getting looked up light here, and the absolute best you can hope for is to be a coin flip. Villains aren't folding for $15-17 more into a $40 pot with JJ. I mean you are really thinking that TT and JJ are folding here to a line that makes no sense whatsoever?

Err ... apart from 88+, what are those hands that you don't want to get looked up by ???????

This is weird, it's true that any decent player will read into this for exactly what it is. But this is uNL and even the TAG's are for the most part playing their cards. I can see 88-JJ / AK AQ folding here quite often. A bad player will often just see this huge raise and go "damn everytime i get jacks someone has AA". Also at the same time he's probably bad enough too never be able to fold JJ, or considers calling a 3bet to be "potstuck"

I really don't like this. I would like to pokerstove this when I get back home from work but reasons being:

1) Your hand is exactly what it looks like. Nobody overcalls with a strong hand vs UTG raise and a cold caller. If you had blanked out your cards in OP, I would have guessed middle pair.
2) The squeezer squeezed three players - one of them being a fish UTG. Less likely that he doesn't have a big hand.
3) I don't think that we have a lot of FE given reason number 1. You get called a lot, 99+, AJs+, AQo+ IMO.
4) Even if the squeezer folds, we still have to deal with the UTG raise by the fish and given that he was willing to call the squeezer I think he is very likely to call a shove by a cold caller in MP.
5) You have a small sample on the squeezer.

I guess my point was, what calls this bet ever that you are happy about? There's not one hand that calls here where you fist pumping. I'm not happy about AK calling, i'm not happy about JT calling. If we are real lucky he might call with 22-77 but i'm not sure. I realize we are ahead of AK, but it's close, and my point is, we are either 55/45 or a 4-1 dog. There aren't many scenarios where we are a large favorite.

If we advocate shoving here with 77 against a raise, call, reraise and call, we might as well reraise/shove any pocket pair against every raise we face...that's really what this amounts to. Except you have more fold equity in my example than in this case. I think you can expect 2 folds in the hand in OP right about never.

I dunno ... UTG is what is troublesome, I really don't like that call .. but shoving over the BTN is fine, imo


All in all I think the hand is so so, but not +EV


Still it is the 88-JJ range that bothers me, flipping is fine imo.

right, this is the classic barely ahead/way behind scenario. I think we agree. I'm not happy about AK calling, but i'm not unhappy either...i'm indifferent. It's just that we're screwed when we get looked up with 99, and we have to have tremendous fold equity to offset the times we are called...and we don't have that here.

*grunch*

Pretty bad imo. A reasonable 3b range for button would perhaps be AQ+/88+ and he will call you with all those hands 100% of the time, as he'll never give you any credit. Your equity is about 35-37%. Let him take it, and do the squeezing yourself next time.

I have to agree that flipping is not just fine but very good because of the money put in by either UTG or BTN. If one folds and one call and we're flipping we're in a very good spot. I wouldn't fistpump vs. AK but I'd happy.

The questions we need to ask ourselves here is:

What is villain's squeezing range here? If we havent seen him do this before we have to give him credit for a decent hand - say AJ+/88+.

When we push, what is villain's calling range?
Same as above, we have very little fold equity.

What is our equity against this range?
37%.

What about UTG?
Oh...yeah...him. He might have a decent hand as well.

So how do we rate the play overall?

Just some quick math (not my strongest point) to see where we are at.
When you shove and villain calls with his remaining 17.9 the pot total becomes 48.15.
I think your equity is about 37%. So 48.15*0.37 = 17.8.
In other words your play is pretty much neutral EV.
The funny thing is if we say that UTG comes along as well and we give him a pretty wide range, roughly similar to buttons, our equity will drop to about 25%. The pot will be 70.05, so 70.05*0.25=17.5. Again our EV is pretty close to neutral EV.
Subtracting the rake will make it slightly more -EV, and so will tightening up our opponents ranges - who knows, maybe btn only 3b with QQ/KK/AA/AK...

To summarise:
Option A) Fold. We lose/win $0 100% of the time. (edited)
Option B) Push. We can probably say that we will lose about a $1 in the long run. Maybe more.

I'd choose option A until I had a better read on my opponents, which might push option B into the black.

"What is villain's squeezing range here? If we havent seen him do this before we have to give him credit for a decent hand - say AJ+/88+."

really optimistic here imo.

I haven't read the whole thread. I disagree when you say that this kind of play is profitable, here's why:

When I squeeze I am worried about the opener. I simply cannot give credit to a caller unless I've seen him do whacky stuff with aces before. His thought process is very clear: "I've had enough of this bully and for god's sake, I've got a PAIR / an ACE. TV told me it's a strong hand -> shove". So I'm always calling with AJ+, 99+, and that's a big part of my squeezing range. You either make me fold when I have air or make me call when I crush you / flip.

In this particular hand the squeezer was probably more worried about UTG's call than you.

Equity wise - not at all.
77 vs AJ+/88+ = 37.6
77 vs AK/AA/KK = 39.4
77 vs AQ+/88+ = 34.1
77 vs AQ+/JJ+ = 39.2

The more pairs we add the worse our equity gets, as his range gets weighted towards a worst case scenario. Pretty safe to throw AK in there, which is certainly a more likely squeezing hand than 88-TT. AQ is a decent candidate as well. I think 37% is a good estimate of our equity in this hand.

I think your math shows that this is a +EV play, because you point out that it's almost neutral EV against a very strong range. Their ranges are wider than this which means one of two possibilities:

1) we have more EV when called
2) we scoop the money in the pot now

And it it's 0EV after rake, I take the high variance approach for metagame purposes.

For the record, I love 37% equity when I get it all in, and here's why

Mojed is right. If you take a very conservative approach to estimating our ev and assume we have 0% fold equity, it's a neutral play. However, the reality is that the situation is pretty drastically +$EV because 0% fold equity is reaaalllllly underestimating our fold equity, and even though I told myself I wasn't going to do the math on this one...

Taking their ranges apart, with the given action I'm going to put the UTG raiser on a range of:

(88-JJ, AJs+, AQo+, KQ)

Now that's still a fairly tight range (No, I'm not going to be quite as alarmist as some, and yes I am going to discount QQ+ completely after the call of the 3bet).

And I'll be cooperative and put the squeezer on a tighter range than I would give him irl:

(AQ+, TT+, KQs)

Fold Equity

Here's the important part no one wanted to talk about. Yes, I think you still have fold equity. No, I don't think your average opponent is going to think your FOS because your average opponent at 25nl is an idiot. All of you said I needed a read to show me that this guy is an idiot and won't see that I'm FOS there. What I would really need is a read to show me this guy isn't an idiot, and until then I'll continue to play as if he was an idiot because that's how we make money in uNL. We exploit idiots (In the sense that they don't understand poker. I'm sure a lot of them are actually fairly intelligent in other important aspects of life).

Anyways, let's get back to our two ranges, and assign a folding range I'll say he folds less than I actually think they do because otherwise people will throw a fit, but I'm telling you, a villain isn't thinking, "Hmmm... this is a good place to get my marginal hand all in because this guy's line doesn't make sense." It's more like, "Wow. My hand isn't KK+. It's not worth $XX.xx."

UTG: (88-JJ, AJs+, AQo+, KQ) Folds: (88-TT, AJs, AQ, KQ)

Squeezer: (AQ+, TT+, KQs) Folds: (AQ, KQs, TT, JJ)

When we input these ranges into holdem ranger to give us showdown and folding equities we get (2nd number is fold equity):

Note: I ended up using pokerstove to calculate showdown equities because it's much faster than holdem ranger, unfortunately it doesn't include fold equity, so I used holdem ranger for that.

Hero: 30.05% 44.7% 35.8%
UTG: 26.30% 73.37% 55.3%
BTN: 43.65% 52.38% 64.2%

Now, to make this situation more generic, we'll assume 100bb stacks, and that action went exactly as it did.

Now, we have several situations that we need to calculate the EV of:

1.) Both villains fold.
2.) BTN calls, UTG folds.
3.) BTN folds, UTG calls.
4.) Both villains call.

And here's the calculations:

Variables:

remaining stacks:
Hero: 96bbs
BTN: 80bbs
UTG: 80bbs

dead money: 50bbs

Scenarios:

1.)
probability of it happening: .7737 * .5238 = 40.53%

EV when it happens: +50bbs

Total EV of situation: 20.26bbs

2.)
probability of it happening: .7737 * (1 - .5238) = 36.84%

EV when it happens: .358 * (130) - .642 * (96) = -15.092bbs

Total EV of situation : -5.56bbs

3.)
probability of it happening: (1 - .7737) * .5238 = 11.85%

EV when it happens: .447 * (130) - .553 * (96) = 5.02

Total EV of situation: .60bbs

4.)
probability of it happening: (1 - .7737) * (1 - .5238) = 10.78%

EV when it happens: .3005 * (210) - .6995 * (96) = -4.05bbs

Total EV of situation: -.44bbs

Final $EV of situation

Now we add all of the total EVs of the situations, and we get:

20.26 - 5.56 +.6 -.44 = +14.86bbs/hand

Now, whoever said it before that we're neutral EV when called was about right, but it doesn't matter because we take down the pot preflop enough that we're happy to be flipping when called.

I'm also sure I'm going to hear about how, even with my conservative estimates of opening ranges, I gave the button and UTG too wide of ranges to begin with, but it doesn't matter. Tightening up those ranges doesn't make the situation unprofitable; just less profitable than the one I laid out here or the even more profitable one I imagine is actually the case.

There. I did the math even though I told myself I wasn't going to be roped into it once everyone started saying it was a bad move but didn't provide any good math to go along with it. Happy?

I think it is safe to assume that if button is competent enough to 3-bet light, he should notice MP is very short stacked and a light squeeze here will probably not be profitable. So button's range is going to be very tight in general and has you pretty crushed.

Hand 0: 64.450% 64.25% 00.20% 448845384 1412454.00 { 99+, AQs+, AQo+ }
Hand 1: 35.550% 35.35% 00.20% 246949740 1412454.00 { 77 }

I don't think he's ever 3-betting a hand that you dominate and his calling range is probably almost identical to his squeezing range.

Also you mentioned that UTG is a loose-passive player and generally LP's don't 4-bet hands. Also if has truth then it's even more likely for him to call with kk/qq/jj. So I think you're still pretty dominated by UTG's range, and he's probably not folding very many hands especially with all the dead money in the pot.

I would say you're behind both player's ranges and are definitely getting called in at least 1 place almost always as a slight fav/big underdog. So I think this is pretty spewey.

Yes you are a spewtard @ these limits.