[elindauer]

Hi Lestat,

This is a very complicated post so I'm just going to start to analyze the turn bet. You've given no reads, so I'm going to assume you are looking for the game theory neutral, base case answer.

Question 1: ok, you reach the turn after calling preflop and checking the flop. In your mind, what is your hand range here?

Now, the pot has 5 BB in it. How does the multiway nature of the pot effect how often we should bet? well, I'll speculate that we can start by asking ourselves how often one opponent, playing well, will continue against us to prevent us from constantly bluffing. Then, since we have to get past 4 other players, we're going to succeed much less than this, at least, if they all play well.

Now, the first caller can't call as much as he could heads up, because he still has those 3 guys behind him. I'm not sure how these concepts all interact, so I'm going to start by showing how you would play against just 1 guy. That will be an upper bound on the number of hands we should bluff and value bet, right?

ok, heads up, he'll continue with at least 5/6th of his hands. Given this, we should value bet, I guess, the hands that are favorites against 5/6th of his range, plus we should bluff about 1 time in 6 that we bet. On this board, it may be hard for us to get very far in front of the top 5/6th of his range though (side note: if we don't know his range, I suppose we should use our own game-theory-perfect range after all of his actions). Any pocket pair has us crushed, any K or 6 has us crushed. unpaired hands below kings will almost always have 6 outs to win and 4 outs to tie. That's tough for us to beat. With ace high chopping so often and the raiser having a much stronger hand range than us (he raised preflop, we just called getting 10:1) our value-bettable hand range is going to be much less than 1/2 of his calling range. Maybe we can only bet the top 1/6th of our range or so. If that's the case, we'll be bluffing very rarely, only the top 1/36th of our range. Tiny.

Ok, so we can't do much value betting against just one opponent who plays well. How about against 4? I'm not exactly sure how to model it with any precision yet, but it's obvious that we can value bet MUCH less against 4 good opponents then against 1. Given this, betting ace high for value doesn't make much sense. If you are choosing it as one of your bluffing hands, then fine, but you should be betting it very rarely, VERY rarely, into 4 good opponents.


So, short answer, no, the bet isn't good, unless it's kind of a "value-bluff" that you make very rarely.


Now, you may say that the opponents will not call nearly this often. You are essentially saying that they play too tight in this situation, and that you should bluff more. Fine. But if you always bet ace high here, you'd be "value bluffing" WAY more than game theory would suggest is correct. You'd essentially be saying that you read these guys as WAY too tight.

But you don't have any read on the main villain, much less the other guys. Without a clear and strong read that they are way too tight, you shouldn't bet. If you check and it's heads up back to you though, calling could be right, as could raising every once in a while. For example, your river play is probably wrong unless you only do it very rarely as a kind of bluff.


I'm new to this subject, but trying desperately to jump start the conversation(s). Please let me know if you see any logic errors.

thanks,
Eric