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Old 11-08-2005, 01:16 PM
einbert einbert is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: in sklansky i trust
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Default Re: Back To Basics. Annoyingly simple preflop question.

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Another interesting thing to consider is his capping range. If he's adapts to our 3bets and caps more lightly, this is gonna give him back the initiative. Also his average capping hand is gonna be significantly stronger than our hand (even if he sometimes caps JTs he's always capping AA, etc. So if it's someone who caps lightly I can see an argument for a reduction of your 3betting range.

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This is very interesting.

My initial reaction is that if he does increase his capping range, although he makes it slightly harder for us to play against him because we have to account for a wider range of hands, it also certainly makes it a lot harder for him to play the weaker hands he caps. He's going to be building an even bigger pot OOP. And a good portion of the time we will have a big pocket pair or acebig and when he caps and is actually behind to us, it will very often just blow up in his face because it will make it even harder for him to play his weaker hand out of position.

So if he does start doing this, is it worthwhile for us to slightly decrease our threebetting range against him? I think the factors are probably such that it about balances out. What I would do is decrease my threebetting range if he starts raising less preflop than 30% in response to our more frequent threebetting. Of course that's hard to tell while sitting at the table but if you are 1- or 2-tabling you can pull up his session stats in PT (I think this works).

This capping problem is very interesting, it seems like the kind of problem that calls for an optimized solution. But since we get to play the hand postflop in position and we are already aware that he is very aggressive postflop, I can't really see enough reason to let him off the hook by folding hands like A9s and ATo before the flop here. I don't think he'll be able to outplay us so much after the flop "just because he has initiative." In my opinion, something like initiative matters more and more the smaller the pots get and the weaker the hands get. But here our hand range is not very weak esp compared to his opening range, and our hand range hits the vast majority of flops pretty well. With the pot being >9SB going into the flop, the flop is hardly ever going to go bet, fold. But maybe I'm underestimating the effect this adjustment would have for the 35/30 player.
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