Folding 99 pre-flop for a raise

But when a player wins a pot after having raised preflop from early position with a hand like nine-eight suited because he makes a flush at the river, you have to ask yourself: "How times has he been doing this and we never saw his hand because he folded when the flop missed him and he was bet out of the hand?" Is this the tip of the iceberg?"


I cannot help but believe that a player who happens to win once in awhile playing this way must be doing it a lot and we simply never get to see his hand when he misses. He will miss a lot more often than he will hit. Putting it another way, he has to be doing this a lot in order to have be able to show down a hand like this once in awhile.


I am much more prone to fold AQ offsuit for a raise against a player who only raises early with AA, KK, QQ, JJ,TT,AK,AQ,AJ suited, or KQ suited than one who occasionally raises on other hands as well.


Keep in mind, that when calling with AQ offsuit your big fear is being dominated when an ace or a queen arrives. This is less likely to happen given that you have an ace and a queen and one shows up on the board. For example, you have AQ and the flop comes Ace-high. You are dominated by AA and AK. But given that two of the four aces are now accounted for, there is only one way for him to have AA and only eight ways for him to have AK. This means that he is much more likely to have KK,QQ,JJ,TT, AJ suited, or KQ suited than otherwise.

"The reason is that a solid player in these situations will almost always have AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, AK, AQ, AJ suited, or maybe KQ suited"


IMO, if a guy can be counted on to have nothing other than these hands when he raises in early position, he is not as solid as someone who will show these hands 85% of the time but will show some other funky but reasonable hands the other 15% of the time.


But the fact that he puts in a funky raise 15% of the time is not enough to turn my AQ into a call. A reraise (perhaps 15% of the time?) maybe but not a call.


My question to you is this: If you think that the raiser's requirements are such that it is profitable for you to always play AQ, do you not think that 3 betting will often be the better play? After all, you have position and preflop strength coupled with position is better than position alone.

I think you have a borderline decision with 99 when you can't expect to get the "standard" set-flopping value, i.e. when you expect less than 5 opponents. The way I see it, the smaller the pair, the more you must rely on set value to justify playing it pre-flop, and the bigger, the less. There are (admittedly rare) situations where I might even fold QQ, JJ, or TT, but realistically, I almost always take the flop with these hands. I fold nines or lower in many of the situations similar to the ones you described, where you only expect four or less total players, and the raiser has standards that are fairly "by the book." As for the EV of folding them (I assume you are concerned about folding when folding presents you with a negative EV situation), I think you probably aren't making much of a mistake here. Those times you ARE giving up EV by folding, it is probably only by a small margin. Those times you correctly folded, it's probably a good thing, because to make folding correct, the raiser needs to be fairly likely to have a bigger pair, otherwise you would probably want to take the flop. (This assumes that you KNEW the raiser had two overcards, and that you were about a 6:5 dog). However, the difficulty of knowing where you are at with a hand like 99 also makes it easier to fold it. What do you do with flops that are T, J or Q high? A, K high flops are pretty easy, you just fold. The others are troublesome. I think the extra difficulty of playing them, especially with exactly two or three opponents, makes folding them to a legit raise with few players perfectly OK.


Dave in Cali

when you DO find Feeney's AQ thread, you will probably find that it is SO long that it has its own separate archives... The debate was FIERCE, and sometimes a tad eeeny weeeeny bit on the BITTER side.. So go get you a bottle o' pepto bismol first!


I am in the "Feeney group" against perhaps 20% of the regulars at my local fairly small cardroom. The rest, I generally reraise if no one else is in, or just call in other circumstances, like when there's limpers, or I'm in the SB or BB.

"He states that AQ is only superior to 27% of these hands. As an aside, given that you have AQ, it is superior to 38% of these hands."


Jim, to be precise I state that AQ is "clearly superior" to 27%. Your post prompted me to go back and try to reconstruct how I came up with the 27%. After a few misses, I think I got it. (There is some subjectivity due to questions like, "Which is better, AQ or 99?") I suspect you're ranking some hands a little differently than I did. I stipulated that AQ was not "clearly superior" to TT or 99 (heads up). I also included the other AQo combos as hands to which AQ is not clearly superior. Anyway, when I go over it now I find it stays, coincidentally, almost exactly at 27% whether you account for holding AQ or not. (You end up with 24/89 in one case, 20/73 in the other.) But I could have an error in there, or could be missing something.

I decided to find it myself.


Texas Hold'em (General)- May 2000 (almost at the bottom)


Ken Poklitar

Btw, I think there were actually two or three threads (though I could be mistaken). I think a couple of threads came not long after the main thread, including David's primary posts on the subject.

The initial post on 5/30/00 has many messages deleted at the author's request (I forget the one specific author). Unfortunately, this ruins the flow of the discussion since it seems that one author was the primary advocate of calling with AQo in a raised pot. The "back and forth" discussion ends up being all "back" and no "forth".


I haven't read the posts which were started in early 6/00 yet.

Ah yes, that would be Badger.

Hi John!


Here is how I derived my 38%. You are "dominated(???)" by AA (3ways), KK(6 ways), QQ(3 ways), JJ(6 ways), AK suited (3 ways), TT(6 ways), AQ suited (2 ways), AK offsuit (9 ways), 99( 6 ways). These total 44 possible hands. You are "superior(???)" to AJ suited (3 ways), KQ suited (3 ways), JT suited (4 ways), QJ suited (3 ways), KJ suited (4 ways), AT suited (3 ways), and AQ offsuit due to your superior position (7 ways). These total 27 hands. Therefore, of the 71 possible hands, you are "superior" to 27 of them which is 38%. Note these are all Group I, II, and III hands.