[W. Deranged]

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Yep.

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What happened to the real W. Deranged?

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I had been up for 36 straight hours when I wrote this having decided to pre-game the Harvard-Yale tailgate with 12 mid-night hours at Foxwoods...

As for the hand in question:

1. I see no reason to raise pre-flop given your reads. Raising often has the effect of getting this hand 4-handed, which is probably the worst position to be in, particularly because you use leverage on the flop being the last aggressor.

2. With no one left to act behind you except the SB, raising the flop is not good either. Waiting until the turn to put in a raise, particularly because you're in position and have a chance to shut out SB on the next street, seems much better to me. Three-betting opens you up to a cap which not only may be costing you money but also confuses the hand, as a taggish type like UTG+2 may be competent enough to cap a big flush draw or something here for value.

3. Turn raise is, as Brett notes, way up there on my list of favorite plays... We are in perfect position to take a free showdown, charge the maximum against flush and straight draws, possibly fold out hands like A6 that we probably don't want around, and maybe even encourage SB or UTG+2 to fold a better hand.

The salient question is why should we be raising when we probably can't fold to a three-bet. Here's my reasoning:

1. It is very important to realize that MP2 called two cold on the flop and called the turn. He is very loose here, but his action seems to suggest that it's pretty likely that he has either a flush draw, and open-ended draw, or at least something like a pair and a gutshot.

2. If there is any flush draw on the table, two of our outs are killed. If anyone has a 5 (quite likely), two of our outs are killed (though one is repeated). If anyone else has a 7, we lose one 7 out and halve our gutshot outs.

3. Because of the above, a bunch of our outs have pretty heavy reverse-implied odds, and require even further discounting. Let's say that we hit a 7 on the river and it goes two checks to MP2 who bets. Our call there is really extremely thin even if we decide to make it. What if the river is a [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]? And so on...

My point is that what look like 6 outs here are probably only 3.5 on average. With discounting because of the reverse implieds, counting our draw as really a 3 out draw I think is safest. If, say, SB folds, UTG+2 three-bets, MP2 calls, we'd be getting something like 13-1 on our money, and so a call there is negative EV. But, some of the time we'd be getting three-bet, another player will drop or something and we can fold.