The evolution of the mid-high stakes forum

[elindauer]

hi w_alloy,

you make a good and true point. You can sometimes, perhaps even often, balance your strategy by using your cards to do the randomization for you.

Very insightful. Others have said this as well though, and I've explained why this is part of the answer, but isn't enough. In high limit games, we simply are forced to face off with experts who are capable of adjusting to our play, so we must go further in many situations. To sum up, these are:

- when your hand ranges don't happen to line up well with percentages you want to fold / call / raise in the situation
- when many hands have similar odds of winning against what your opponent is representing, so that they can be essentially chunked together as 1 hand

Sadly, these cases are very common in heads up pots, and heads up pots dominate the action in high limit games. Therefore, we need to look at this stuff to better handle these critical and common decisions.

Case in point: there's a thread right now with this action... you steal raise. Big blind calls. Flop J55. He bets. What do you do? Without a priori knowledge of what range he will donkbet, and recognizing that this range may well depend on how we react to his bets, the only starting point for this discussion is, in my opinion, a game theory discussion about how often we should call, fold, and raise. Then we can look at hand ranges, see which ones are similar in value, and start chopping it up among the hands. What you do depends greatly on your steal percentage, after all. Some of the hands right on the border are going to be so similar in value that we may decide to split calls and folds between them, to give ourselves some room to take into account our current table image, what the opponent has been doing the last few hands, etc. AK / AQ comes to mind here, as a good spot for treating to hands similarly to leave room for our expert judgment.

-Eric