Today Iโm going to answer a question from Lukasz. This is a hand played at 10 No Limit, 6 Max, and in this situation we have ace/king suited in the small blind. Thereโs a raise, Hero decides to three bet, totally standard. Hero ends up getting called on both spots and classifies both players as fishy, which isnโt too, too shocking, stack sizes are pretty indicative of that.
Cold calling on a three bet by GCE is a little indicative of that, not something that a good player will do a tremendous amount of, particularly off that stack size. So yeah, Iโm totally in agreement here. Size looks fine, three bet looks fine, good to go.We end up going here and now we have to make some sort of decision. Before we even look at what should we do in this exact spot, letโs just back up one quick moment and look at the SPR.
Against Jimmi, we have roughly a 2 SPR, against GCE we have just slightly more than a 2 SPR, and what that means is if I had caught something like top pair, Iโm not going anywhere. When I catch a monster draw like this, Iโm also not going anywhere. Itโs really just simply, how am I going to get my stack inside, not so much how can I try not to or anything like that, simply how and what line is best to get my stack in the middle?
In this exact situation, we essentially have three different options. We can check, looking to go for a check shove, we could bet a normal, maybe 2/3 pot for like $2 or something like that, or we could consider going for something a bit more creative and over-bet jam it.
Now, Iโm probably not going to check jam here, only because thereโs really like no semblance of fold equity. If we decide to check, someone bets $2, we check shove over the top for just a few bucks more. I donโt think anyone is going anywhere, I donโt think any fold equity is gained. I just donโt think that itโs going to work out as favorably in that scenario, so Iโm going to scratch that off the list. Betting $2 again is kind of the standard, or you could consider going for the over-bet jam.
A lot of players wonโt even consider the over-bet jam, but what I want to just point out real quick, if you pull out something like Flopzilla, you plug in some sort of range to the left, board here, dead cards over here, think real quick about say a typical kind of range that one of these players may have. Now, obviously because theyโre both fishy, they could have very different ranges that maybe you or I would ever have in this situation, but keep that in mind when youโre building the exact range. My Premium Videos For Only $22
Letโs say we assign something thatโs pretty pocket pair heavy, we assume that hands like this wouldโve been four bet, maybe queens as well, so maybe we think that this is the kind of range that they wouldโve called that three bet with.
Notice that thereโs a lot of hands over here that have nothing, a king high thatโs probably going to go away, ace high that probably just goes away. I mean, if either of them want to stick it in with ace/queen/nothing, thatโs okay with us, too, because we annihilate that.
This is just the kind of situation where yeah, theyโre going to have things like weak pairs, but maybe they consider finding the fold button if they all of a sudden see a $7 or 6 jam in their face, maybe all of a sudden they go away.
At least consider that. Iโm not saying that itโs a spot where Iโm always going to over-bet jam, but if you donโt at least consider it, I think youโre doing yourself a disservice.
Now, Hero did go for a more traditional 2/3 pot-size bet, again, Iโm not too shocked about this, but at least consider the over-bet jam. Itโs really simple to do, you just pull out something like Flopzilla, you see how often theyโre missing, whether or not you really think theyโre going to fold when they miss and if not, how does that affect your equity, plug that into a fold equity calculator, and youโre good to go.
But like I said, in this situation, Hero decides to bet for $2.25, gets called on both spots, goes to the turn and now we have a decision.
In Lukaszโs write up, he mentioned that he thought that there was pretty much no fold equity in this situation. I might disagree with that slightly, simply because I think if someone has maybe like sixes or sevens or pocket nines, they might go away if you drill it here, and obviously thatโs a good thing for us.
But I agree, I think overall youโre probably not going to get folds if someone has like ace/jack or jack/ten, if someone ever improved on the queen in any way, definitely agree thereโs going to be super minimal fold equity, if any, against that sort of hand.
In this situation, I always like to proof it mathematically. Yes, when youโre in real time, youโre not going to have the actual time you need to run this through a spreadsheet or run this through a fold equity calculator. This is all stuff you do off the table. This is stuff that when you do it enough, you just start to get an inherent feel for it. When youโre playing in real time, it actually becomes easier to estimate whether or not this is going to be a good jam or a really terrible jam.
Letโs proof it real quick and weโre going to do this using a tool, Iโm not sure if Iโve used this in one of these videos before, but I want to introduce you to it. This is a spreadsheet that I created, which is a little bit more powerful than just a basic fold equity calculator, so I want to introduce it real quick. This is also available for free, if youโre interested here is the link to it over at Red Chip Poker . I would definitely pick it up and mess around with it a little bit.
When I created it, it was originally meant for all in pre-flop scenarios, but really, you can use this on any street, itโs not pre-flop specific, by any stretch.
Letโs just start filling in some of the numbers and then weโll talk about kind of what weโre seeing here.
Pot size before we shove is going to be $9.75. How much do we have to call? Nothing, weโre not facing any bets.How much are we drilling it for? Letโs just do the $5 effective, and again, you always use effective stack. The absolute smallest one is $3.82, but Iโm just going to use 5, because I always like to do kind of a worst-case risk when Iโm doing this kind of stuff. My equity when called, we can use Equilab for that. Iโve plugged in the board, plugged in our hand, letโs plug in the hands that we think theyโre never going to fold when we decide to drill it here. Again, assuming that they probably donโt have aces and kings or queens, those probably got all in pre-flop or something, so letโs just say all of those, letโs say that, letโs say eights, letโs say fours, letโs maybe say ace/queen suited and if you want to say tens and nines, letโs do that, too.
Letโs just rock and roll with that. Notice that we have 31% equity, thatโs pretty awesome. There we go. Youโll notice that at this point, even assuming that no one ever folds, weโre actually profitable by about a dollar.
For A Video On How To Use Equilab Click Above!
Letโs assume that we have slightly worse equity. Letโs nuke out that, letโs throw in all the jack X, good, good, good. This is a pretty worse-case scenario, Iโd say.
Eval at, notice we have 29% equity, go back and reproof it, and you notice again that itโs roughly break even.
The other option here is you could check and put yourself in hell and Iโm not really loving that option, especially if I think thereโs any semblance of this being plus EV and it looks like it is.
Just for the record, you could also do a fold equity calculation and here you just click on this box. Use Solver, which is baked into Excel and then you rock and roll from there. You just see itโs roughly about break even.
Now, the graph down below, just in case this is your first time seeing this, is something I created simply so I could say, โOkay, what if the scenario were slightly different, so I donโt have to go in here and manually plug in all these different numbers of bunch of different times?โ What I did is I said, โOkay, well, hereโs our actual, this is what we just proofed for, and then what if we had 5% extra equity or 5% extra folds or 5% of both. Thatโs what the E, the F, and the B stand for. This is 10% equity boost, 10% fold equity boost and then both on 10, and then the negatives of both of those.
This gives you a nice way of saying, โOkay, well, I think this is roughly break even or slightly positive and then if it were like slightly better case scenario, maybe there was a little bit more fold equity than I originally envisioned, then all of a sudden you notice this goes higher and higher, or maybe I think itโs slightly worse, and blah, blah, blah, maybe itโs down here somewhere.
Again, even if itโs just slightly it works. Notice that weโre still hovering around slightly profitable.
This looks like a decent scenario to jam it and this is one that I think a lot of players wouldnโt always think about it, theyโd say, โOh, crap, itโs a really bad card, thereโs no fold equity, so Iโm going to say forget it and get out of here,โ whereas I think this is a much better situation to say, โOkay, Iโm happy getting my stack inside it, slightly profitable, itโs not the most profitable jam weโve ever made in our lives, but itโs profitable nonetheless.โ Even with very minimal, actual no fold equity, this is okay. If thereโs even a semblance of fold equity, this is even better.
Unfortunately after doing all that awesome exploration and analysis, this hand ends in a very boring way. A turn goes check, check, check. The river, we brick, and it goes check, check, check, and we end up losing to both players and queen/seven of diamonds ships it.
Now one quick thing is you notice that in none of the ranges that I assigned are in this video, did I assume the queen/seven of diamonds or queen/seven suited in general was going to be in here. Sometimes people are going to show up with hands you just did not assume were included. Thatโs okay, what you do is you just go back, you reanalyze the hand with that new information, understand that if they call three bets with queen/seven suited, theyโre going to call three bets with queen/nine suited as well, and then go back and explore.
Now, the major takeaways here are on the flop, again, at least exploring the over-bet jam, thinking about which hands you would do that with when itโs going to be good versus bad, if thereโs any fold equity, using Flopzilla is going to be huge and/or a fold equity calculator. The other one, of course, is going to be on the turn. Again, exploring whether or not there is fold equity or whether or not the jam is profitable, even if there is no fold equity in a spot that you may have otherwise just snap judged and said, โWell, I canโt jam here,โ when the case shows that maybe you could. Thatโs a really, really important thing to understand and a very important thing to explore.
