Thread: AJs
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Old 11-18-2005, 01:57 AM
soah soah is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 112
Default Re: AJs

Your EV of raising may be better than calling... but I must argue that this alone does not make it the correct play.

Much of your equity is derived from the fact that your opponents will give you respect, they will put you on a big hand, and they will not play back at you much unless they flop something very big. Thus, you must make this move sparingly, or else your image will become tarnished and your reraise will not get respect, they will not put you on a big hand, and they will start looking you up or playing back at you.

Suppose that you are to play two hands... AJs, and 76s. Your opponent will have a random hand in the range of JJ-55, AKo-ATo, AKs-A6s, all suited broadway, KQo, and T9s-43s. Your opponent doesn't know what you are being dealt, but he believes you to be a tight, rational player. The poker gods inform you that you must reraise preflop with one of these hands, and call with one of these hands.

As a good player in position we will assume you can show a profit calling with each of these hands, and a bigger profit reraising them. I believe that the difference in EV between reraising/calling with 76s is greater than the difference in EV between reraising/calling with AJs. Therefore, I choose to play AJs for "best hand/steal unwanted pots" value and 76s for "force him to flop huge, and then make a hidden straight to bust him" value.

(And of course, this is all based upon the assumption that the reraise will indeed force him to play very tight on the flop. If he will still check/call the flop with unimproved 99, etc, then much of this analysis is useless.)
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