justification for pfr?

[AngelicPenguin]

The money you make in poker is from other players making mistakes. If you limp w/AA they are calling properly with many hands. If you raise and they cold call, most of the time they are making a mistake. The goal is to make your opponents make mistakes - by limping you are not giving them the chance to.

[Greg J]

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The money you make in poker is from other players making mistakes. If you limp w/AA they are calling properly with many hands. If you raise and they cold call, most of the time they are making a mistake. The goal is to make your opponents make mistakes - by limping you are not giving them the chance to.

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Post of the day.

[Ringo_Mojo]

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Aces is strong in any pot. Very few flops are very scary for Aces, I love them when 4-5 people cold call my raise with em.

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Yes!

There is a common misconcpetion about aces made by many newer players: "they don't play as well multiway." They win more often against one or two opponents. They win more money the more people are in the pot. Ideal situation for AA: 10 players see the flop, capped preflop.

You want to win money, not pots.

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I never said Aces weren't strong multiway, just that they're strongest heads-up/3-way. The great beauty of pocket aces is that their strength is less diluted when the pot goes multiway, but it's still diluted.

[Aaron W.]

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Aces is strong in any pot. Very few flops are very scary for Aces, I love them when 4-5 people cold call my raise with em.

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Yes!

There is a common misconcpetion about aces made by many newer players: "they don't play as well multiway." They win more often against one or two opponents. They win more money the more people are in the pot. Ideal situation for AA: 10 players see the flop, capped preflop.

You want to win money, not pots.

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I never said Aces weren't strong multiway, just that they're strongest heads-up/3-way. The great beauty of pocket aces is that their strength is less diluted when the pot goes multiway, but it's still diluted.

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Their "strength" is diluted in that you win less often, but their "strength" is magnified because the many pots you win are substantially larger. I would much rather play AA in a 10-handed pot than AA heads up.

[TripleH68]

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B) Open up your game a lot more and give them a large dose of PFR's and flop bets no matter if you hit or miss the flop. This is tougher to do and you have to know when people finally figure out what you are doing. At that point you start going back to your normal strategy and hopefully you will get 5 coldcallers when you raise AA UTG. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Brad

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For many players it is tough to be on "offense" so much. Upping your preflop raising % takes some work, but once you get there it is really fun to see what players will start calling you with...especially when you finally do get dealt AA.

[mhardy]

Ok - I read every post. Thanks for the replies.

The one poster is correct - I don't just follow what a book says because it says it. I want to understand conflicts to decide for myself. I understand the concept of zero-sum and that for me to win, someone has to lose. But I can't square that with the rote answer of "making opponents make mistakes" because (IMO) it doesn't address the principle of OP: Leverage. It's self-evident that the most effective use of one's money is to leverage it to the maximum extent possible. IOW, very little of my money vs. very much (cumulatively) of theirs.

Open raising (AA for instance) short circuits this principle by forcing some players to muck hands that for a single bet they otherwise would have played (and with AA's strength probably still would have lost). The upshot is that the raiser MINIMIZES his leverage since the net effect is that he now contributes a greater percentage of the money in the pot. (And I'm not trying to design a scenario that suits my question (OP). I'm sure everyone would agree that tight players would probably play group 3-4 hands if they weren't faced with coldcalling.)

So again, can anyone square the principle of leverage with "the gospel", without just typing what some book says? This is a sincere question - I want to understand what I'm missing. "Making opponents make mistakes" isn't the answer (AFAIC). Rather, why does "making opponents make mistakes" trump maximizing one's leverage?

[bottomset]

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The simple answer is... Aces are strongest in a heads-up or three-way pot.
The more people in the pot with marginal hands the more chances that your aces will not hold up if they don't improve.

If I recall correctly against a field of 9 opponents AA wins about 30% of the time, heads up it wins about 80%.

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couple things obviously wrong with this line of thinking

A. the pot will be at least 5x as big with 9opponents maybe more

B. you only put it 10% of the bets, with a return of 30% which is vastly better than putting in 50% of the bets with 80% return for all #'s(1-12BB) of bets putin

the game is about winning money not pots

[TripleH68]

The complexity really comes after the flop. Playing AA unraised with eight to the flop is great, but in most games these players are not all sticking around to the river. If you have a coordinated flop and four of the players put no more $ in the pot, you are often left in a raising war with little knowledge of where you stand especially when the blinds are in play.

Now it seems better EV to let a couple players cold call or even 3-bet. Sure you are putting in more $ preflop, but with the best hand. You are also looking to tie players to the pot when they hit a marginal hand. This is not the time to pass on an advantage to wait until a later street.

[Aaron W.]

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The one poster is correct - I don't just follow what a book says because it says it. I want to understand conflicts to decide for myself. I understand the concept of zero-sum and that for me to win, someone has to lose. But I can't square that with the rote answer of "making opponents make mistakes" because (IMO) it doesn't address the principle of OP: Leverage. It's self-evident that the most effective use of one's money is to leverage it to the maximum extent possible. IOW, very little of my money vs. very much (cumulatively) of theirs.

...

So again, can anyone square the principle of leverage with "the gospel", without just typing what some book says? This is a sincere question - I want to understand what I'm missing. "Making opponents make mistakes" isn't the answer (AFAIC). Rather, why does "making opponents make mistakes" trump maximizing one's leverage?

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In your original post, I think you did not come across as clearly as you did in this one. I'll take on the issue at hand.

Your claim is false. In the standards of measuring poker play, maximizing leverage is not the goal. The goal is to win money. I'll contrive a simple example to demonstrate this:

Suppose there are two games to play.

Game A - It costs $100 to play. You win $500 25% of the time and you win $0 ever other time. Your EV is $25 per play (25%*500 - 100). Your leverage is 25% (ratio of EV to initial investment)

Game B - It costs $10 to play. You win $100 30% of the time and you win $0 every other time. Your EV is $20 per play (30%*100 - 10). Your leverage is 200%.

Which game would you rather play? If you don't say A, then maybe you're missing some information about EV.

The point is that leveraging your money is not the goal because the bets are non-scalable. If you could play these two games, except that the initial investment and payout scale linearly, then the second game is better because you can earn more money with an investment of the same size.

But poker does not work this way. Your investment is controlled by the betting structure, so you need to need to play the EV game, and not the leverage game.

A similar idea is risk aversion. Some players choose to play a style of lower variance. They may still be winning player (and in fact, often are), but they are not winning as much as possible. While I'm not suggesting you are risk averse, your style of play seems to mimic that line of thinking. "I want to invest little to win lots." But solid poker is "I will invest lots to win even more."

[jaxUp]

This is a conceptually daunting reply that I urge everybody to try and comprehend (especially the OP). EV vs. leverage is a concept that I have never seen discussed before in the micro forum, but we all would do well to understand it. I think this is the kind of reply that OP was looking for...nicely done Aaron.

To the OP: It's great that you don't just do something because you read it in a book, because as we all know, you could run into problems here with certain authors (*cough* hellmuth *cough*). Now that you have seen this analysis I hope you understand the reason we raise these big hands preflop. Also, reread Shillx's reply in which he gives some good advice. If you still can't see a reason to raise these hands, then I hope you can just take the word of the hundreds of thousands of hands worth of experience that replied to you.