$25 NL PF steal, is this really dumb?

[JobyWan]

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The main reason this is a huge mistake, in my book, is that you only can ride a tight image so long. You've got one or two shots a having any bet respected before they start getting suspicious. Why not wait and use one of your free passes in a $20+ pot when you can represent the nuts as opposed to wasting it on a few limps when you don't really know where you stand.

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Or why not ride a loose image (which weak players notice more than a tight image) into a huge pot when no one believes you have the goods and you get two callers with all your money in the pot and triple up.

I think the point that a lot of people are missing is that when you make moves like this, you are controlling the action, and you are making people react to you. This is where you want to be when you are playing NL.

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He can ride a tight or loose image, but he's already established a tight image - so why play marginal hands with an UTG and MP caller in order to make a big swing over to loose.

I certainly agree that making players react to you, and controlling the table is important. In general, that's excellent, but here, he's a guy who's played very few hands who's pushing a hand into the darkness. Raising for the sake of raising, with one of the worst starting hands in poker, into an UTG limper and 2 blinds yet to act just doesn't seem to have much upside. Unless he's doing this regularly to seem like a maniac, and he would actually be playing like a maniac and need to feel comfortable doing so...he seemed interested in stealing here..not a grand alteration of his table image.

I appreciate your correcting me with regards to the EV, but we'd also want to add re-raises from the blinds or UTG limping with someting big. With 2 limpers in, if one of the blinds calls, you more often than not get a cascade of 'pot odds' calls from the limpers and you're forced to throw away a hand to a bet on the flop, or bet after 3 checks into an obvious slow play scenario. Plus your continuation bet gets proportionally larger with 3 callers, thus you're bet is larger while your chances are success are that much smaller and this chips away at your above mentioned call ratio of 1/3 to achieve break even EV. Plus, any two non-raising cards that you choose to try and steal with offer you the same EV on paper with regards to needed call ratio, but you've also got to compare the EV of the possible cards used to steal with against each other. As mentioned by others, why not make the same move with suited connectors, small pocket pairs, etc, hands that have much greater chance of actually turning into something. I understand that crap hands are easier to get away from, but you have to hope that a player astute enough to post and read here would have the discipline to handle himself after the flop.

JobyWan