Rock Bottom

[Stork]

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Re-raising preflop tells the table you have aa/kk.

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No, reraising tells the table that you probably have two face cards or better.

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It also puts more money into the pot giving your opponents correct odds to draw to nearly anything on the flop.

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You should read SSH. This logic neglects the mistake these players make preflop by calling the raise in the first place.

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calling gives you the best chance to win the pot imo.

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How can calling give you the best chance to win the pot? You give yourself a chance to win the pot by giving your opponents a chance to fold. Raising accomplishes this. Calling doesn't.

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KK isn't good 6 way, you need to try and give yourself the best chance to win the pot and not worry about building a big pot multiway.

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KK is good any way. It's the second best hand in the whole game, why wouldn't you want more people to put money into this pot which you expect to win way more than your fair share of the time?

[Dreamcatcher]

I don't mean to be a jerk here, but I don't understand some of the logic. I fully accept that hand 2 was me "on-tilt" hoping to win, fine. However, on hand one I hear a lot of not 3-betting is horrible. Could anyone expand on this? I might not have been perfectly clear, but this table was playing fairly normal (which to me means not a lot of pre-flop raising and calling), the situation I described seems to be players who are a bit loose (and aggressive), which was not typical of what I saw at the table to that point. I called because I assumed my opponents (who had not played terribly loose at that point) either had a decent pp, good A, or good drawing hand. Two out of those three are bad for me and making a large pot pre-flop seems to help them more than it helps me. I understand that my hand is almost surely best pre-flop, but I fear what happens on the flop. I'm looking to win the pot as soon as possible (with my Kings that don't draw well) and call and go for a c/r on the flop. This also helps me avoid wasting money if an Ace flops, which I can hardly bet/raise against with 5 opponents calling 3-bets. I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong (which I'm sure you will do), that if I 3-bet, this hand is going to the river. I'm not sure KK does well enough going to the river to call this 3-bet +EV, but if your books say it's true, than it must be.
If my opponents were as loose as some of you (for some reason) think they are, I would, no doubt, 3-bet pre-flop.

[etizzle]

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I understand that my hand is almost surely best pre-flop

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I'm not sure KK does well enough going to the river

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If you have the best hand preflop, than ON AVERAGE you will have the best hand at the river more often than any other hand.

Tell yourself that a few hundred times.

[Dreamcatcher]

I guess my point is lost. You talk about "on average". That's great for typical hands. For example, you should call a $5 bet with a $60 pot when you have a gut shot because you are 11-1 and the pot odds justify it. On average, you will win more money than you lose (provided the pot odds are usually better than 11-1). Great. What if the situation you are facing is very rare? I don't know about anyone else, but this is the first time I've been in a situation where the first person in raised, 4 people called and I was the last to act with KK. On average is bullshit. Sorry, but this doesn't happen enough, like gut-shots, to consider it a play to make "on average", where the long term results are positive.
Again, no offense to the book-smart guys, but give me something better than "on-average".

[StraitRazor]

Okay, dude. I'm going to step in here because this is really obvious.

The only hand that is better than yours is AA. There are six possibilities that that hand is out there. You're telling everybody here that you don't think raising here is a good idea because you won't cause anybody to fold. That logic is fine for AQ in some games, but for KK... you're giving up a lot. Let me dumb it down and then give an example.

Your KK is probably the best hand in play right now. Since this is the case, you should make other players put in as much money as possible right now. When you no longer feel that you're hand is the best, or you know it isn't... throw it away. For the sake of this argument, if nine players call all your bets and you win you'll win that much. If they call all your bets and you lose, you'll lose very few bets by comparison. It's deeper than that, but I'm simplifying.

Last night, same situation. I have KK in the BB. Full ring, 6 players call. SB raises. I re-raise. 8 of us see the flop for 3 bets each. Ace on the flop. I check and fold. Pair of Aces (3 kicker. Offsuit... yup) wins the pot. I will get as many raises in the pot against that guy as I can when in that situation.

Not to beat up on you, but you raise to get more money in the pot when you win. There are times when you want to raise the thin the field, this is not your objective here though. YOu're raising because you have the best hand and you want other players to pay you off.

Good luck.

[kidpoker22]

I hear ya' dude. I've been slumping pretty hard myself lately...But, in response to your post, I have a couple of comments about how you played those two hands.

The first hand I agree that you don't three-bet pre-flop. You're out of position to play the hand and nobody's going anywhere if you do. On the flop, a check/raise probably isn't going to work. Since you're going to be last act (raise) when the action gets back around to you everyone that is going to call is going to stick around for one more bet. You bet in hopes that the UTG raiser will 3-bet and isolate you and him. The raiser on the flop probably flopped a set and was trapping you on the turn. After he three-bet preflop, I would shut it down. You may end up missing a value bet or two if he holds 88 or something like that, but if he did flop a set you minimize your losses.

On the second hand, I don't really understand your play. If you read the raiser for weakness then I would either semi-steal on the flop and take control or check/raise if you can get it heads up...also taking control. If he has nothing and you put pressure on him on the turn and river you win the pot.

Hope this helps,
This is my first post...I'm excited. I was posting with the micro-limit players at FTR and they sooooo didn't get what I was saying.

KP22

[Kevin J]

A simpler way to understand this is to realize that even though KK is a dog to win any particular pot against a field of 5, it is still a HUGE money favorite. A re-raise pre-flop on your part adds a minimum of $90 (possibly $180 if UTG caps) to the pot. A good portion of this money belongs to KK in the way of pre-flop equity. In short, you are passing up too much pre-flop equity by failing to get as much $$ in the pot as possible, even though you will lose the hand more times than not. Does that make sense?

Now there might be some reasons NOT to re-raise. For instance, if you felt that NOT re-raising would enable you to win (a smaller pot), but a much higher percentage of the time, Or... If by not re-raising you could make MORE money after the flop through deception, then a case can be made for just calling. This might sometimes be the case with hands like AK,AQ, 77, or oddly enough, if you were heads-up. But against 5 players, KK has just too much equity not to build the biggest pot possible before the flop, even though you can expect to lose any individual hand.

One other thing: It's interesting to note that even if you felt there was some chance UTG might have AA, re-raising still doesn't cost you much, since you are getting 5 to 1 to flop a set.