[Monty Cantsin]

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Should i click even if it's sometimes? with tight blinds I;ll open 78s - but not if blinds are loose. Is this a "folded to you, you ALWAYS open raise" poll?

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You only check your defaults.



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This is a huge grey area.

Very few of these are 100% defaults for me. But I would raise many of them more often then not.

Card strength is a big factor of the decision function for raising, but for a lot of these hands the difference in card strength isn't big enough to justify making one a default and one not.

Of course you should always be slightly more likely to raise J9 than J7 because it has that bit of extra card strength and that gets plugged into the decision function.

But if you were to say that you always raise J9 and not J7 in a certain situation (eg. opening from the CO against unknowns), then I would say that you were not giving enough weight to the other factors that get plugged into that function.

If you were to do that you would essentially be using that little bit of card strength difference as a randomizing function to properly mix up your stealing. But there are so many more important and useful factors for this purpose.

I'm thinking specifically of rhythm - the pattern and frequency of your raises and the general momentum of the table's short term history. This factor will often overwhelm the card strength difference between a lot of these hands for me.

/mc