[Aisthesis]

Well, Bozeman's idea that B should raise pre-emptively to limit the option for A got me to thinking about this a bit more, and I realized that there's also a case for why B should raise LESS: His raising hands are all great trap hands if A raises him!

Moreover, in #4, I hate to have B give up on hands less than 1/2 because he probably has the better hand. Maybe as last to act, A does have some kind of edge here, but I'm not ready to admit it yet.

Anyhow, the following suggestion is far from "airtight" but it does improve on Jarred's EV, and I'm at least convinced that it's the optimal way for A to counter B's strategy:

B just limps on [1/2,1] and calls a raise at [2/3,1]

A will then bluff-raise on [0,1/9] and value-raise on [2/3,1]

My reasoning is this: B actually again has to call with the top 1/3 of his hands to prevent frivolous bluffing.

A, on the other hand, as I brought up in a previous post, is getting 4 times the "bang for his buck" on the raise. Hence, he will value-raise 4 times as often, but also now knows the range of B's hands as [1/2,1]. So, where B raised the top 1/6, A will raise the top 2/3 of B's range, hence [2/3,1].

For the same reason, it would seem that A would want to bluff-raise on 2/9 of his hands rather than just 1/18. But that assumed that B would call only 1/3 of the time. B is in fact going to call twice that often. So, A can only bluff 1/9 of his hands. Note that the function of this bluff is simply to drive B's call criteria on the raise down as far as possible. If A didn't bluff at all, B could make more profit by limp-calling only on [3/4,1], where he has pot odds given A's value-raise criteria.

Anyhow, I find it difficult to believe that B's truly optimal strategy here should be to refrain from making the raise altogether. But this strategy for him has a value of 1/4 (A's raises are all just break-even, and otherwise everything is the same as in scenario #3a, where B couldn't raise), which is better than in Jarred's and Bozeman's strategy.

Can anyone beat this strategy by letting B use his raise option?