[destro]

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Well, I had a hand today where I raised 77 from the BB. My rational was that although I was taking a slight EV hit preflop, I would make it up postflop when I hit my set.

If we were to assume that our opponents each had the top 40% of hands, which is probably giving them too much credit, as the top 10% or so they probably don't have, as they would have raised preflop, then our 77 has 20% equity! (I ran the numbers again with a more reasonable range, and I pulled out 21% equity). Even 22 has 18%, which is more than the required 16.6%. Now, this equity is hot cold, so given that we will give up on many flops, we don't always realize our full equity. So, in reality, considering we are folding many flops, we don't truly have as much equity as listed above, but we do have a decent amount.

So, lets assume that we never win with out hitting our set on the flop. This isn't quite true, but I am trying to give a worst case here. Let us also assume that all of our equity outlined by PokerStove is from when we hit a 7. We have to fold on the flop 88% of the time, but, since we have 2 outs twice, we only would improve after the flop 8% of the time. This means that out of PokerStoves hot/cold equity, .12 comes from when our 7 comes on the flop, and .7 of it comes from when, or in other words about we miss out on about 1/3 of our preflop hot/cold equity by folding on the flop without our set. This means that our new equity of preflop bets is about 13%. So, when we raise preflop, we are putting in 16.6% of the money, but only retrieving about 13%. That means we have a 3.6% loss on our bet we put in. So, raising preflop has a immediate -EV of .02 BB.

So, we have established using a few assumptions (which I feel are pretty reasonable, if they are a bit off, my numbers still wouldn't be drastically different), that our we lose .02 BB by raising preflop with 77. The question now becomes, can we make that up postflop?

I think the difference between playing in an unraised pot with your set, and a raised flop with your set is quite different. People will be peeling with far more, and you will have a significant edge with your set. Granted, you will get sucked out on a bit more, but I think you will be collecting bets from people drawing dead, people with a few outs, and even people with strong draws. Since the pot is big, people have more incentive to stay in with what they think is the correct number of outs, but in fact they will be completely wrong, and be losing money. I think we easily make up any preflop loss of bets postflop.

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For this reason ( raising for implied odds with set ) I would raise 77 down to 22 with the same frequency. They are pretty much the same hand in this spot.

I once got grilled when I raised 22 from the SB with 8 limpers at a full ring game. They told me I was crazy for thinking that it would hold up against so many opponents! [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]