The Riceman said
Hey TPE peeps!

I am back. I hadn’t gone far, and in fact I have tried a couple times to post hands in the strat. section, only to find the HH insert(er) inop. I tried again tonight, but I still can’t get it working. Maybe it is me…perhaps I have not posted a hand in so long here that I have forgotten how to use the insert.

I have two points I would like to make. 1) The titles of the threads here are so boring zzzzz. This is no insult to any poster. I guess it is just the nature of the game. A game comprised of math and probability calculations is already set up to look boring by default I guess. In the old days the poker boss was grizzled…probably in his 40’s, with a freakin’ beard and grey-flecked long hair. Think Chris Ferguson on steroids. He would look you in your eye and size you up…did you flinch or blink? Or are you man enough to be bluffing and return a steady glare? He would read your very soul! And if he caught youse a’cheatin’? He’d shoot you dead on the spot! 

Move forward to today. What does your average poker boss look like in 2017? A freakin’ geek that’s what! A wet-behind-the-ears mammy’s boy who has become anaemic because he has never left his room. He has never left his room cos he’s never had a girlfriend. He’s never had a freakin’ girlfriend cos he is a geek! A math genius! Unfortunately for myself, because I look like Arnie and I have had thousands of women and can’t even look in the mirror because it breaks my heart how handsome I am…I took up poker in the wrong era.

2) I was walking around my local supermarket the other day and I realised that the majority of people are morons. “No!” you cry (because you are a math geek). “They must be, on average, averagely intelligent”. Wrong! In the same way a very small percentage of people skew the earnings graphs, there are a minority of super-IQ’d folk skewing the intelligence spread graphs. The reason this is relevant is because I thought to myself how fantastic it would be if we could get all these droolers playing poker! The guys to whom it seems a good idea to set up an online poker account are probably pretty savvy: computer literate, forward thinking, entrepreneurial types. Intelligent. Who the hell wants to play poker against intelligent people? Forget about breaking open the Chinese or Indian markets…we need the droolers! Whatever, it’s a thought.

Due to the inop. HH insert, I shall have to do this the old fashioned way:

Pokerstars $22 turbo MTT, late stage. ITM 450/650 left or something. 

I don’t want to make this too complicated: the central idea is straightforward. I was in the Big Blind with 15bb stack with 5s 2d.

MP2 raises 2x pre. I call. 

Flop: 7h 8d 6h, giving me an open ended straight draw. I check, MP2 overbet shoves. I was getting 4-1 on the call. 

My thinking at the time ran as follows: simply, I am getting almost twice the odds I need to call here. Pot odds wise, it is a call. But how should I range him? I guess this is my central question. At least, do I need to even be thinking about ranging him when I am getting such a good price? If I fold, I’d be left with 14 bb’s. This seemed like such an obvious call, but the second I hit “call” I had the feeling I was not thinking about enough of the variables.

As it turns out, when the cards were turned over, he had Ah 9h for an open ended straight and flush draw, but I still had 21% equity on the meter, so technically it was a +ev call in any case.

How do you play this spot, and why? Many thanks as always!  

I’m confused about a few things. I’ll be blunt for the sake of clarity. How can you be getting 4 to 1 odds if villain overbet shoves? That defies math. If villain shoves for pot, you’re getting 2 to 1, and your odds get worse from there as the bet gets bigger. Others have already pointed this out, but I only noticed that after writing this part, so I’ll leave it in for emphasis.

Secondly, how can you possibly know what equity you have before you’ve put villain on a range? Your equity is dependent upon their range. If they’re only overbet shoving a set, your equity is lower than if they’re shoving any pair, obviously. WRT your final question, you can’t know if it’s a call or not until you know villain’s range. There’s no situation whatsoever in which you shouldn’t be considering villain’s range when they make a play.

Thirdly, the hand villain actually had is irrelevant. Saying your call is +EV because villain had Ah9h ignores the possibility that that hand could have only been a tiny part of a much stronger range. In reality, your call was probably not +EV – it was likely significantly -EV, since you weren’t getting 4 to 1 odds to call.

Finally, how much you’d be left with if you fold doesn’t matter unless you’re dealing with deep stacks. 14bb is not enough for you to have a big edge, so take every profitable spot you can find. “Wait for a better spot” should not be in your poker vocabulary.

One other point – for the time and effort you put into writing the first 60% of this post, you could probably have submitted two other strategy hands. I appreciate the character you add to your posts, but if your goal is to discuss a specific hand in terms of strategy, please try to keep your posts focused on strategy. You’re not likely to get too many productive responses if the person has to wade through 500 words in order to find the hand.