I’m going to try doing a “hand history” a little bit differently. Here’s a situation I was in last night, but I’m not going to state my hole cards at the start. I’d like feedback on:
1. Is my general approach sound?
2. What range should I be looking to make this play with?
Situation
Horseshoe Tunica $2-5 No-limit hold ‘em
In general this game is pretty loose aggressive. A couple of people are raising fairly often, but there are still a decent number of limped pots.
Like many $2-5 games, these players are more perceptive and reactive than $1-3 folks. Many of them want to gamble, but if they see me playing as tight as in GSIHE they’ll know to fold and get out of the way.
I’ve been playing pretty tight, but I’ve picked up several good pocket pairs and shown them down. I’ve blown through a couple of $200 min. buyins on “cooler” type unlucky hands that I certainly wasn’t going to get away from.
I’ve decided to target the player to my right. He’s sitting on a stack of at least a couple thousand and is the most aggressive preflop, raising at least two times per orbit. He seems to especially relish raising a bunch of limpers to something like $40 or $50 to go, when in late position or a blind.
I’ve decided that I can exploit this by reraising him with a certain range of hands. My question here is, what should that range be.
Effective stack: I’m the shortest at the table with $225.
I’m UTG with ?? in the hole.
I limp, 4 other players limp, RHO in the BB raises to $50. I reraise pretty big.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose I make a pot-sized reraise to $175. (I realize that most people would find leaving $50 behind to be stupid, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.) If you want to suggest that I vary the size of my reraise according to my hand, that’s fine too.
For what range, if any, is this a good play?
Discussion
Key to my thinking is to not just wait for a premium hand, because he’ll probably fold to my reraise. But I think it is good to play my premium hands this way, and also play a range of non-premium hands, so that he risks either incorrectly folding or incorrectly calling.
Semibluffing theory suggests that, since my fold equity on my semibluffs doesn’t depend on my hole cards, I should semibluff with hands that stand to have some equity against his calling range. For example, KJ offsuit would be bad to make this play with, because if called I may more likely be up against AK or even KQ. So 87s is a better hand to make this play, even though it loses to KJ in an unimproved showdown, because 87s has more equity if called. (Of course it doesn’t matter much if he calls with aces anyway, but I want to semibluff with a range that has some equity against the range of hands that might call me.)
I arrived at a range of something like this:
- Pairs down to about 88.
- AK, AQ
- SCs down to 65s
- A few suited Broadway hands — In addition to the connectors, KJs and maybe QTs
How well did it work?
Well, first I should mention that I had tried more or less this same play once before with QQ, got three way action including a calls by another loose-agressive player with 44 and a call from my target who didn’t show cards. That worked great as I tripled up after turning queens full!
The hand in question, though, it turned out awful. I reraised to $150 (yeah, pointless to leave $75 but I figure it makes my play look more authentic) with 99. He 4-bet all-in with aces, I had to call, and that was that.
I made the same play a third time, this time limping AA from the small blind in a Mississippi straddle hand. Because my target acted last on the button straddle, he made it $40 or so to go and I reraised to $100. I was hoping that seeing the 99 would induce him to call me with KK-99, AK, AQ, and maybe a few other hands. Instead he muttered about how every hand I’d played all night was a pocket pair, showed 44, and folded. (I didn’t show my aces.)
So my limp/reraise worked great once, not so good twice, but both times he was at the part of his range where I didn’t want him. Obviously AA was at the absolute tippy-top of his range, and I figure 44 had to be pretty near the bottom. With his PFR somewhere around 20%, this might be a typical range for him:
22+,A2s+,KTs+,QTs+,J9s+,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,A9o+,KJo+,QJo (20.1%)
Against that range, I’m a 58-42 favorite with 99. However, he’s not going to call with all that range. Let’s suppose he calls a reraise with about a quarter of his raising range:
99+,AJs+,KQs,AQo+ (5.7%)
99 isn’t too bad there, actually: only a 61-39 dog. Given his later remark about me always playing pocket pairs, and including the 9s among good pairs he thinks I’d play, I would imagine he’d probably talk himself into playing KQs or AJs.
Now, how does my general semibluff reraising range compare against that calling range?
88+,AQs+,KJs+,QTs+,JTs,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,AQo+ (8.6% of my starting hands): 43.5%
99+,AJs+,KQs,AQo+: 56.5%
So to recap: Roughly 3/4 of the time I try this play, I take down the limps and his raise. The other 1/4 of the time, we take a flop — but I still hold my own with 43.5% of those pots.
Nasty EV estimates
Figuring based on a $200 stack that I will commit to call any further action:
EV when I take the pot down: $65, say his $45 raise plus 4 limps
EV when I get called: 0.56 * -200 + 0.43 * 200 = -113 + 87 = -26
Weighted EV: $-26 * (5.7/20.1) = -$7.37 representing the times he calls me
$65 * (1 - 5.7/20.1) = $46.57 representing the times he doesn’t call
So my net EV of making the play, at least in this theoretical vaccuum, is $39.20.
But there are also some other complications. For one thing, some other player might be lurking with aces or kings. Acutally I figured I’d tighten my reraising range considerably if we both were in early position for just that reason, but he wasn’t making as many raises UTG. However, the AA or KK could still limp followed by a four-bet to my three-bet. Then I’d be toast.
If that happens, I’m a 78-23 dog, losing $110 in equity. So if this horrible eventuality happens 10% of the time I try this play, I’m now losing 11 bbucks flat and we’re down to $28.20.
The other bad thing that could happen is a raise from somebody else while I’m waiting for a limp/reraise. There were a couple of raisers I had also pegged as pretty loose, and I would reraise them with a good part of my stated range here too, so the above analysis holds. But if a tight or unknown player raised, I’d need to abandon ship with most of the above hands. That would mean losing my $5 limp. It didn’t happen on any of the occasions above, but let’s say it might happen 25% of the time. That’s another $1.25 down the drain, so now my tricky play only nets me a little under $27 each time I try it.
One other benefit is breaking up the table image of me as a nut-grinder, only ever playing big hands preflop and betting my overpairs or sets postflop. But that’s hard to quantify.
In any event, the real question here isn’t whether $27 in expectation is good; it’s whether $27 is better than some other strategy, say, smooth calling with AA-JJ and folding everything else when my neighbor raised. That math is much harder because now I have to play well postflop, at least on the flop. I’d imagine AA and KK have much better than $27, but I need them for cover. QQ and JJ are probably about break even, and then I’m just mucking the rest of my range there. So I think playing all these hands aggressively is much better than playing “normally”, which induces my opponent to play more-or-less perfectly after his original raise. But I’m open to be convinced that another strategy would be more effective.
Food for thought
After I wrote up this post, it dawned on me that I might have been approaching it all wrong. Instead of staying to the left of this guy, in order to get first crack at isolating him, perhaps it would have been better to be to his right, catching a lot of cold-callers in the middle. Of course everyone else at the table knew he was raising light, and (being deep-stacked) their usual approach was just to call him and hope to outplay him postflop. Me being able to push for $200 over a couple of $50s puts them to a pretty distasteful decision, since they can’t outplay me postflop but would still like to outplay him.
Thoughts?
