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Nov. 25 — Having a 12-out plus draw doesn’t give you the right to go crazy. Certain actions dictate that there will be no fold equity

Those of you who have played pot-limit Omaha (PLO) know that sometimes in a multiway pot a non-nutty, two-way draw can be complete garbage. That is one of the costly mistakes that hold’em players learn when transitioning to the new game. If you have A K 8 7 and the board runs out 10 9 2 and you are facing a bet and several aggressive actions in front of you, a lot of times your hand is an easy fold as your draws are dominated.
 
We do not think about this concept too much in hold’em because most draws usually have decent equity, especially heads-up. However, there are certainly situations that warrant not playing draws aggressively. Remember, the number one goal in semibluffing is fold equity — we want to win the pot right now. If there is not a reasonable chance that our opponent will lay their hand down, then it is a pure spew to shovel chips in as an underdog. If you want to flip coins and pay sixty cents on the dollar every time you lose, I’ll fly you on a private jet out to Los Angeles so long as you bring all of your money. 

In hold’em, there are certain actions that will dictate that we have no fold equity. Let us take a look at hand that I recently commentated on from Live at the Bike and that I used for my live training videos over at CrushLivePoker.com. It was a $5-$5,
$300-$1,000 game on a Friday night. The game was typical loose-passive where people were rarely raising postflop unless they had the goods. A player with a $600 stack opened under the gun (UTG) to $25 with A K and four players called in the field. The flop came J 10 9 giving the preflop raiser a royal flush draw. He decided to continuation bet $85 and the UTG plus two player, who had him covered, raised to $250. It got folded back to the UTG who immediately moved in. UTG plus two snap called with 8 7, the board bricked out and he won a huge pot. Some of players at the table bemoaned the UTG’s luck, saying that there was nothing that he could do because he had a royal flush draw.  But, are they correct?

First of all, we have to evaluate what it means to be raised on this flop. Let us put ourselves in the UTG’s shoes. We were the preflop raiser and continuation bet into four people on an extremely wet flop. Even a bad player should know that we must have something, usually at least top pair. Players are rarely ever going to overplay a hand like A-J on a board like this because we look so strong. Also, because we have the ace and the king of clubs, it is unlikely that our opponent has a draw as they would not raise a naked, under-flush draw on this flop. Usually, then, we can deduce that our opponent has some sort of made hand, probably at worst two pair. And, more importantly, with these stacks sizes and our perceived range, once our opponent raises us he will almost never fold. So, by definition, we have no fold equity. 

This hand starts to become a conditional philosophy problem, kind of like logic class back in college. We know A therefore B, or if X then Y. In this case if our opponent raises then we know he will not fold. If his range consists of two pair, sets, and straights, our equity is about 41 percent with A K. To raise all-in to see two cards would be nothing but a spew. Now, depending on the stack sizes, we can certainly call the raise and many times call a bet on the turn, especially knowing that our opponent has flopped something big and will most likely pay us off to some extent on the river. But to just close our eyes and shove is a big mistake because we forget the main point of semibluffing — fold equity.

Now sometimes we can have draws as big as 15 outs (open-ended and flush draw). In these situations our draw has so much equity that it is almost never bad to play them aggressively. In the real world there is usually at least a hint of fold equity and when dealing with a hand where at worst our equity would be in the high forty-percentile range it is probably not bad to semibluff. However, there are certainly situations where you can be overly aggressive with them, especially when it is apparent that your opponent has a set. A fifteen-out draw only has forty percent equity versus a set, so we get back in the territory of spewness just like the twelve-out draw above.

Nov. 22 — You only have so much of an advantage versus bad short stacks. Playing sub-optimally preflop cuts way down on your edge

The shorter stacked you are the less skill that it takes to be successful in no-limit. That is why it is recommended that new players play with a short stack when they are first getting accustomed to the game. Your decisions become a lot easier postflop mainly because you can not really flat call preflop with any implied odds types of hands and your opponents, if they are playing correctly against you, cannot call you with any preflop implied odds types of hands. So you get into a scenario where with overpairs you really should not be up against flopped sets and two pair, and if you are it is really not all that bad to stack off against them because your opponents have made a huge math error preflop.

These math errors are what I want to examine here — but from the deeper-stacked player’s perspective. Most players in live games that play short stacked are usually weaker types of opponents as playing a deeper stack yields more of a winrate. In fact, I can count the number of times on one hand that I have seen a decent live short-stacked player. It is different online when you can play thirty tables at a time. So knowing this, often players try to get involved with these players because we think that they are such easy money. Now, they may be easy money but we are making a huge mistake by opening up our range against them when it is mathematically incorrect to do so. We cannot overcome the mistakes we make preflop versus stacks of less than fifty big blinds, even if we are the best in the world postflop.

If you have read my articles here before you should be familiar with the rules of 15 times, 25 times, and 35 times for flat calling preflop with pocket pairs, suited connectors, and gapped-suited connectors, respectively. Let us say a player with a $200 stack opens over a limper to $30 in a $2-$5 no limit game. We have position and think that the opener is a horrible player. Should we call with a hand like 9 7 on the button? Even with our superior skill, if we call with a hand like this we are actually handing the bad player money. No matter how good we think we are this is a mathematical mistake that we cannot overcome.

Now some players think that they can call and “take it away” on some flops but you really have to ask yourself if the bad player is deep enough to float versus a continuation bet of say $40-$50. At that point he has already put in half of his stack in the hand. I am amazed that competent players do not pay more attention to these situations and it may partly have to do with ego. But this is also why tournament poker can be so frustrating and has so much variance. The simple fact of the matter is we do not have a huge advantage against short stacks when preflop opening sizes are three times or larger, but we can easily control the optimal way to play against them by paying close attention to our preflop hand selection. ♠

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “The Seat Open Podcast” on seatopenpoker.net and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players ­—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LiveattheBike.com.