Two Plus Two Older Archives

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I think I changed my vote. I don't think we have enough of a hand to raise with on the flop. Calling looks better.

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- Let me give you some scenarios in this hand.

Let's say that the bettor has 99 and that some guy behind us has KQ. Do we really want to knock out the KQ? (Assume that flush draws aren't important).

Our equity with the KQ in there is 22.0%. If we knock the KQ out, our equity jumps to 25.7%. Meh.

- Now let's say that the flop bettor has AT and someone behind us has KQ. Do we want to knock the KQ out?

With the KQ, our equity is 65.6% If we can knock him out, it jumps up to 78.2%. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

So the idea of "cleaning up" outs is only useful in a couple of circumstances:

1) You have the best hand.
2) You don't think that you have the best hand, but you think that you can get dominated hands to fold (or hands that could potentially give someone a straight). So if you have AQ on a AKJ board and your two opponents had AJ and T9, you should raise to knock out the T9 (you can now win if you hit a queen).

So in this hand, we should only raise the flop IFF we think that our AQ is good. If we don't feel like our AQ is good, we should call or fold. Now, if we had A5 in this hand (instead of AQ) we should be MORE inclined to raise eventhough our hand is weaker. If we can get a hand like AT to fold, we might have just bought two more outs for our A5.

Brad