[ML4L]

Hey Tommy,

While I respect your play/posts/opinions as much as anyone, your thoughts in this thread make it seem as though you're not examining the situation properly. You frame the situation in three ways:

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It cost me $20 to call, so if I called, that would make it a time pot. In other words, it cost me $83 to call.

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Or put another way, it cost me $20 to call, but the pot was really $117, not $180.

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Or, the way I think of it is, it was going to cost me $20 for the opportunity to lose $63.

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The first "framing" is flat-out incorrect. The third framing is not incorrect necessarily but strikes me as potentially misleading. I think that the second framing is the way to get to good decisions in these spots.

That is, if you were trying to decide whether to raise preflop here, you would set up the decision-making process as follows. Under the conservative assumption that you will never win a hand at showdown after being called preflop, you should raise preflop (we'll say, your standard raise of $200, so make it $220 to go) if that raise will win immediately 64% of the time. You said that you had yet to be called on a raise; do you not think that you would have dragged the pot there at least 64% of the time, especially since I would imagine people to be more reluctant to call, given that it was a time pot?

Further, with regard to completing preflop, your strategy should probably not be too drastically different from a normal blind situation where you are getting 6-1. Having to pay the $63 is contingent on your dragging the pot, so there is no way that you can win the pot and still lose money. Also consider that, with regard to being out of position, I think that, all else being equal, people are more likely to play straightforwardly in a time pot. This fact mitigates your positional disadvantage to a degree.

So, while you should certainly adjust your preflop strategy in some time pots, I can't tell if you are examining the situation in such a way that you are making the proper adjustments... As one poster noted, AA can never be a fold, so how far would you take the concept here, and how does it compare to your normal blind strategy?

If you are looking at it the same way that I am but did not think that any +EV criteria were met here (e.g. you didn't think a raise preflop would win the pot very often), then I certainly can't argue with that. I am also not privy to any metagame considerations, etc.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Mike