[Shillx]

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I would call down and check behind on any street should he check to me.

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Check behind Brad? I agree check call but checking behind makes me feel funny inside [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img] Could you enlighten me as to why?

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Okay we know a few things about this hand.

1) We may or may not have the best hand on the flop. So let's say that there is a 25% chance of him having aces or kings. If we raise the flop and then he 3-bets, there is now a 75% chance of him having AA/KK. So the only hands that he will be willing to get into a pissing match with have us destroyed. Therefore it is -EV to goto war here. However since we will have the best hand here often, it puts money into our pocket when we call down.

2) After he checks to us, one of 3 things will happen. If he check/raises we just lose more money if we decide to pay off. If we fold to the check/raise we don't get to see what he has. If he check/folds, we don't get to see what he has either. He knows that we have a good hand but we know very little about his. If we see that he has something like T9 in this spot, we can make much better decisions against him in the future. The best thing that we can hope for is a check/call but it is pretty strange for someone to limp-reraise preflop and then get passive after the flop. So by either checking or calling we:

a) encourage him to bluff if that he what he is doing
b) lose less if he has us beat
c) get to a showdown where we gain lots of information about his hand

You also have to understand that when we check behind, we are not giving him a free card. Since we don't know if we have the best hand or not, we have less corncerns about giving free cards (he could be checking intending to trap us with a monster hand). Also consider that he might be drawing stone cold dead after the turn and we want him to toss in those desperation bluff attempts.

Brad