Blinds [Archive] - Two Plus Two Older Archives

TStoneMBD

02-27-2005, 02:34 PM

if you raise-in from MP with AJ as a part of your basic bread and butter game plan, you will lose. there must be very compelling extenuating circumstances involved before making a lot of the plays that i've been reading about lately around here. to make matters worse, we are encountered with lexiconic stumbling blocks in this game, that do not foster the development of a true understanding into important aspects of the game. this game is relatively very new as compared to most other games involving stategy, and comes directly to your doorstep from the backwater bogs of the mississippi delta. some poor fool at some point in time vainly attempted to reclassify the turn as 4th street thinking that would bring civility to bear in this game. but it's still the 'turn' boy.

the first round is still the 'pre-flop'; poor.

you see, the first round of betting in a hand should not be linked up to the flop like that. it can too easily create the idea that you are buying a piece of the flop, and prevents you from playing the first round as a separate non-flop oriented entity, as though no more cards would be dealt. then perhaps once and for all the phantom crutch that your two starters are customarily given would be replaced with a muck.

the "nothing else coming", or "nutin' elz cumin'", if you prefer, first round of betting. the nutin elz.

the pre-flop should be approached from the point of view that it is distinctly different from the future rounds not because the flop is coming, but rather because the flop is not there. it is absent. you need to really understand this important pre-flop concept as you fight to get the very idea of the flop out of your mind and thought process.

now that you are treating the pre-flop as an entirely separate game or as the total game, beginning to end, with no more cards or action coming, you can begin to develop a pre-flop strategy void of the phantom crutch of the flop. without the specter of KQT lending assistance, you will suddenly begin to see the stark similarities of AJ and AT. without the crutch, 22 and AQ seem like powerhouses juxtaposed to the measely AJ and AT, and you would be very correct in that assumption. we can't compare QJ to AJ since QJ will often give us a very powerful draw to the nuts. our image, as well as our opponent's image, may be such that we can get the fold by betting our outs, and we will often enough be able to confidently call any resulting raise coming from our foldout attempt. QJ has it's forte; QJ has its specialized area in which to excel. QJo also has its deficiencies. but these deficiencies are easy to see. we never even remotely expect QJ unimproved to take down the pot on the showdown, and we therefore do not make this error in expectation. if the pot is very small and we are heads-up, if our opponent is a calling station, we know that we should not call our opponent's bet on the expensive round if the board is heavily coordinated against us, even if we have a solid draw. if, however, the pot is of reasonable size, we can usually easily make that call. this is because QJ is a drawing hand, and is not dominated.

a dominated hand is any hand that will not likely produce a solid draw with 8 or more outs, and of which its role as leader is never clear-cut, even when the subsequent action by the average opposition suggests that it may in fact have the lead.

average opposition.

the viability of any dominated hand depends upon opponent knowledge since its value is considerably diminshed when we don't know where we stand. this is true even when the dominated hand is the leader. to understand why this is so, it is important to understand that this is not a game of winning pots. those of you who say that this is a game of winning chips are more nearly correct, but that is also a bit of a misnomer. the game is neither. in fact, the whole theory of this game involves not chip stack height, but instead, is entirely based on your ability to extract and save bets above that ability of your opponent. chip stack height, although related to your ability, is not something over which you have direct control, over a short term cycle which can and does range into the several of months on rare occasions. bad runs frequently last a week or two, and chip stack height will vary excessively randomly when measured side by side against a standard weekly paycheck, much less attempting to rate your ability based on the vagaries of your chip stack height in a single session, or even more preposterously, in a single hand. yet that is what we are told. we are told that this is a game of playing hands of cards. and i believe that. therefore, the object of the game as played hand by hand cannot be the increase of chips. so the game's objective must be to make better decisions than our opponent, and to garner more bets those times that we are invulnerable and in the lead, and lose fewer bets those times that we are vulnerable and trailing in the hand. this is something that we can do each and every time we raise, bet, call, or fold, in each and every hand, and that can be tallied and measured a high percentage of the time. at the conclusion of every session, you will have seen the showdown often enough to form a solid tally of extra bets earned and saved, and whether you are above or below par. you can also tally your opponent's ability in the same manner. will you have a larger percentage of hands in which to tally those extra earned and saved bets on some nights, and a smaller percentage on other nights, and therefore a more accurate assessment, or less accurate assessment as the case may be, on some sessions vs. the other? yes. but even when there is no showdown and you are estimating your extra earned or saved bets, or, as in the case of the non-2+2 er, sometimes the bets left on the table and the extra bets spent, along with the extra earned and saved bets as opposed to the average par level, which in the case of the 2+2 er, you will be above, you can quickly and accurately score real points that give you an indication of your ability to play this game vs. that ability of your opponent, in every hand that you play.

back to AJ.

AJ is a dominated hand. you can win the entire pot with AJ. you can increase the size of your chip stack with AJ. what you very frequently cannot do with AJ is maximize the number of bets earned and saved. you usually cannot score a lot of points in the hand with AJ because you will not likely know with the necessary level of certainty needed to raise or call, whether you are leading or trailing in the hand, an extraordinarily high percentage of the time. what this means is that when you are leading, you will not likely earn the extra bet; when losing, you will not likely score a point by saving an extra bet. even achieving par will be difficult, unless par, which is, i reiterrate, the average number of bets earned and saved by your opponents, unless par is lower than what is normal and average. so the sole criteria for entering in with a dominated hand is your opponent's ability.

understanding the pre-flop this way, and also as a separate game within the game, and with no further action taking place in the hand, and so therefore no phantom cards to bolster the two that were dealt you, we can see that when we do not have a hand that is dominated, whether 76s or QJo, as well as many other such hands, including the minor and major made hands ranging from 22 to AA, whenever we do not have a dominated hand, whether or not we proceed is based not on opponent knowledge, but rather on our knowledge of the odds we are getting. the better, the more we bet, the lesser, the least we bet, an extraordinarily high, high percentage of the time with our most powerful non-dominated hands, although absent good odds, we do increase the weight of the importance of opponent knowledge as we descend the power scale of our non-dominated hands, as they begin to show some of the traits of being dominated. 43s may not be dominated in the classic sense, but it sure rides and handles like one. also importantly as pertains the non-dominated made and drawing type hands, in all but the most extreme example, given the correct pot odds, even weak non-dominated hands that allow us to proceed knowing where we stand in the hand, and thereby gives us such high scoring potential whether we win or lose chips in the current hand; given correct pot odds even the weak non-dominated hands can be bolstered, sometimes powerfully so with very good odds, regardless of opponent tendancy. dominated hands can never be bolstered by increasing the size of the pot, in fact, it often weakens them further. interestingly, if the bet that is put into the pot by your opponent is called by you, you do not earn an extra bet earned, even though you might win the entire pot. this is true even if you didn't intend to bet, but instead, made an excellent call. why? because if you called but were leading, you should have raised, albeit far less frequently, you would not have been leading but trailing in the round, and then drawn out on the subsequent round. the thing is that even in this spot, you probably were not getting correct odds to drawout with your dominated, non-drawing type hand, and more likely should have folded. these type calls by you do not represent scored points by anyone other than your opponent. we could also find numerous examples of folding our dominated hand incorrectly, and betting incorrectly. do we ever get it exactly right with a hand that is dominated? yes, yes we do; when the ability of our opponent or opponents is so dismal, that in spite of not being able to play at even our average level of competence, we can still play the dominated hand better than our opponent can play his dominated or non-dominated weak and strong hands.

viewing our pre-flop decision making under this structured guideline for the evaluation of our pre-flop holding, we can see that with non-dominated hands, we evaluate the cohesion of our two starters with the actual and implied odds by supplanting the phantom of the flop with those odds, and searching for coordination, just like we do on the actual flop. in the case of our dominated hands, we evaluate the cohesion of our two starters with the knowledge of our opponents by supplanting the phantom of the flop with our base of opponent knowledge. if we find coordination, indicating success, between our starters, in this case AJ, and our knowledge of our opponents, then our opponents become the effective flop on the pre-flop to supplant the actual flop that we aren't even factoring.

with the non-dominated hands, cards and odds; with dominated hands, cards and opponent knowledge.

is position more relevant in the former case, or the later? correct. position is more relevant in the case of the non-dominated hand.

without touching on our hand reading skills, it should be self-evident that often, our opponent will communicate at great length, and at great length we will totally dismiss as relevant what he is attempting to lead us to believe. but then, less often, our opponent will let slip what to him is an inconsequential irrelevant utterance that what is to him just a meaningless nuance. however, because of that, you know that he can't be deceiving you when you know the even he himself sees no importance in the utterance or gut sound as the case may be. your ability to pick-up on and decipher the little nuance is critical to your success because while often it means nothing at all digestive disgruntlement, occasionally it means a lot, especially when he doesn't think you picked up on it. it is the same with up-threading a post.

sometimes, the poster will indicate through nuance what his thinking about the hand is at the time that he took his action. whether he was right or wrong doesn't matter. what matters is whether the action taken was carefully mapped out, and whether the correct approach was given by him to his subsequent action. there is a lot that we haven't addressed, including how raising in with a dominated hand disallows the opportunity for your opponent to iniate a raise that can convey additional information over to you, but when this poster stated that he raised in from MP, i knew that he was assessing the situation from an odds perspective, even if he was estimating his odds of stealing the blind. you can do this with a non-dominated hand, and tweek with opponent knowledge after you know which opponents are going to call behind you. you cannot do that with AJ. if there is a good opponent left to act, who you think will fold to your raise-in with AJ, or AT, KQ, KJ dominateds, or will not raise your dominated unsustainables like AQo or KQs, and to a greater extent KJs, etc. big gapped suited connectors, even if non-dominated when only called, then that must be highlighted first. the fact that it wasn't told me that this poster may have understood that his AJ was dominated, but that he knew little more than that. how do i know this? by the level of importance he attached to his MP position status. the rest of the hand could be a fairy tale. the only thing that i know for certain is that this player didn't understand what to look for when considering whether or not to enter-in with a dominated hand, and neither did the up-threaders who didn't question his omission of the crucial prerequisites necessary to carefully weigh and evaluate prior to raising in with a hand that very frequently can be difficult to get away from and very expensive when trailing, but will frequently garner the least amount of bets when winning. as long as your worst play is better than your opponent's average play, and you compensate needing worse and worse opponents with their possible increase of number in the hand, you are o.k. to raise-in, albeit limping in is still preferable, unless you are sure that you will get heads-up against a weak blind. if, on the other hand, there is a single average opponent who might likely call or raise your limp or raise, then all but the most talented of players should muck, and rather easily at that. as you move farther along in position with dominated trash, if you play dominated trash hands expertly, and have good reason to believe that no average or better opponent will call or raise you, raising in gains merit. but even here, position takes a backseat to opponent knowledge since dominated hands prevent you from maximizing your ev.; in the case of non-dominated hands, in late position it is usually correct to raise-in since winning the blinds, and not getting heads-up with the BB, assumes a more important role in your betting strategy. counter-intuitively, with the dominated hand you are not so eager to get the BB to fold unless he will release a stronger hand, which is usually not the case. so raising in with dominated hands is often counter-productive. was this poster trying to win the blinds with his raise. yes, that is not the issue, however. what is important is that he didn't assess his prospects of limping in rather than raising in, and make his raise-in a choice between the two options.

'he didn't tell you that much.', you surely say. not only did he tell me as much, but so too did you.

you must learn to determine what the poster is really saying, as much as you must determine what you opponent's are holding. not to be forgotten by the wayside, you must have a correct strategical approach when entering in with a dominated hand, and when you do enter-in with it, whether you raise-in or limp-in, you must give clear-cut reasons why you chose one option over the other. this thread is an attempt to tackle all of those issues since they are all interwoven into the main body of your hold em stategical analysis and proceedure. rather than posting a specific holding such as AJ, you do better to cut to the quick and just simply say that you raised in with a dominated hand with nothing but good intentions. we can then just scroll up to the top and play it again until you can explain your actions against the correct backdrop, and under the right analytic evaluation method for a fast and effortless tally. this way, you don't seem too overly concerned about your prospects while struggling for a solution, something that is absolutely unsustainable for all but the luckiest of dominated hands, from trashy all the way to modestly respectable.

you playin' trash hands boy?