QTo in BB(1/2 6 Max)

[Aaron W.]

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I don't think it's so easy to get away. Assuming that the flop is checked to villain and he bets, you're looking at a 10-11 SB pot. Giving yourself between 3 and 4 outs if you've got some weak backdoor draw and an overcard (or two overcards), you've got just enough to peel, and then you've got to decide if you want to peel or call and risk facing a check-raise.

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But I don't think we should base our preflop decision here on whether this might get us into tough situation post flop. You could check and fold everytime you were in that situation postflop and the preflop call would still show a profit.

In fact, you could fold anything but a pair and you'd still hit 33% of the flops. If you consider oesd's as well, you could only play the strong hands postflop and show a profit, you would just potentially be missing some additional profit by not making those loose calls (when no one check/raises).

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I don't buy the logic. The first claim is true of any two cards, but you're not calling any two here. OESDs are nice and they do increase the value of the hand above the "any two" case. You also have less "draw out" potential than "any two" as your cards are higher.

But you still haven't argued that the reverse implied odds of not being able to get away from a losing hand can be overcome. You're probably investing 3 BB postflop with a pair when you get it. You aren't guaranteed a river value bet because you are out of position. We have no information about how villain plays postflop (which is really the key component missing from this conversation).

As I said before, I don't hate the call. But I'm wary of it because of all the factors working against you.

Would you play Q9o in this spot?

[deception5]

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I don't buy the logic. The first claim is true of any two cards, but you're not calling any two here. OESDs are nice and they do increase the value of the hand above the "any two" case. You also have less "draw out" potential than "any two" as your cards are higher.

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I disagree slightly. I agree there is a chance that we may lose the hand due to domination. But I'm advocating that domination is not that likely. The advantage of having 2 high cards versus 98o is that despite the increased risk of domination, hitting a pair is much more likely to be top pair. If we're against A9/A8s/A7s/KJ/99 and we hit a pair, the preflop raiser is going to be drawing thin. If we hit a queen, we're about a 60% favorite against 99+, ATs+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, ATo+, KJo+. With a T we're about a 55% favorite. Even if there's an ace on the board we likely have a 40% chance to win - which is pretty significant when the pot is already 10SB. The trickier thing is when one of the other players bets out or cold calls, and that's where the situation can get dangerous.

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But you still haven't argued that the reverse implied odds of not being able to get away from a losing hand can be overcome. You're probably investing 3 BB postflop with a pair when you get it. You aren't guaranteed a river value bet because you are out of position. We have no information about how villain plays postflop (which is really the key component missing from this conversation).


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We can lose this pot well over 50% of the time when we hit a Q/T, miss the river bet and still show a profit.

When we're ahead
4SB(assuming we c/r lead the turn and miss the river bet)+10SB=14SB profit

Assuming we're behind and get the worst of it postflop:
8SB(assuming we c/r bet/call and check/call)+1SB(preflop)=9SB loss

With good reads postflop we may be able to get away from the hand for less (or villian may just call down) allowing us to save more when behind and we may be able to win more when ahead.

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Would you play Q9o in this spot?

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Yes, I'd play down to around T9o and 98o.

[milesdyson]

i'm calling 65o, 86o, J8o here.

[deception5]

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i'm calling 65o, 86o, J8o here.

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I don't mind calling with those either, but I cut them out when I realized I was losing money on them postflop. Perhaps I'll add them back in at some point [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Aaron W.]

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We can lose this pot well over 50% of the time when we hit a Q/T, miss the river bet and still show a profit.

When we're ahead
4SB(assuming we c/r lead the turn and miss the river bet)+10SB=14SB profit

Assuming we're behind and get the worst of it postflop:
8SB(assuming we c/r bet/call and check/call)+1SB(preflop)=9SB loss

With good reads postflop we may be able to get away from the hand for less (or villian may just call down) allowing us to save more when behind and we may be able to win more when ahead.

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Ahhh... this reminds me so much of the numerous calculations I needed to sit through to really begin to understand how these hands work. It's like a "back to basics" thread for me. Anyway, here we go:

There are 19600 different flops. We are first interested in flops where we flop top pair. We'll not worry about two pairs, paired flops, and those other higher order approximations.

Flopping top pair with a queen: (3 queens)*(40*39/2 undercards) = 2340 flops
Flopping top pair with a ten: (3 tens)*(32*31/2 undercards) = 1488

We flop top pair 3828/19600 = 19.5% of the time. So we're a 4:1 dog to getting a good top pair. That's pretty far from the 33% number you were giving for estimate. The reason for the difference is that we're not concerned with catching "a pair", but we're interested in "top pair" (because if we have second pair, the board is very likely going to have an ace or king, and we're likely in trouble if we get any action from anyone in the hand).

So playing by the very conservative standard of play top pairs only (we'll continue to ignore OESDs for now), 80% of the time, we muck and lose 1 SB. For the remaining 20% of the time, given the worst case estimates you have, how much should we worry about domination? Let's say the chances of being dominated is x. What's the EV?

EV = (.8)*(-1) + (.2*x)*(-9) + (.2*(1-x))*(14)
= -.8 - 1.8*x + 2.8 - 2.8*x
= 2 - 3.8*x

This is zero when x = 52.6%. So in the absence of everything else, if we're dominated less than 52.6% of the time, we win. I have to admit that this is quite a bit higher than I was guessing. I would have guessed this to be around 25% or so.

Let's give villain a decent range of starting hands: 77+ (42 hands), Axs (46 hands), A7+ (120 hands), K7s+ (22 hands), KT+ (40 hands), QTs+ (4 hands), QJo (12 hands) for a total of 286 hands. We're dominated (or worse) by AA-TT (24 hands), AQ-KQ (24 hands), QJ (12 hands), AT-KT (24 hands), which is a total of 84 hands. So we're in trouble 84/286 = 30% of the time.

The rest of the time, we are something like 75-25 to win by the showdown (as an average guess). This brings down our winrate a little bit more (because we don't always win the full 14 SB).

What are the other factors involved?

1 - The other players. It's very hard to make estimates on what they will flop and what they will do with the flops that they get. This tends to hurt us rather than help us.

2 - Flopping second pair and chasing two pair/trips. The pot size is large enough that this helps us.

3 - OESD and gutshots. We will often be able to chase these profitably. I don't want to include backdoor draws because they will be very weak draws because villain will often have a pair when we're chasing the weak draw.

4 - Position. I really believe in the power of being in position with marginal hands. Being OOP hurts our ability to make fewer mistakes postflop. This is a negative.

5 - Our assumptions. We gave ourselves the worst case scenario above, which obviously hurts our estimate.

It looks like things are coming out on the marginally profitable side instead of the marginally unprofitable side. However, unless there's some important factor that I'm missing it doesn't seem that this is a no-brainer call at all.

[Yerma]

I like to check-raise the flop a lot and then claim that I am a "disgusting human being" for being so devious. But probably you're actually supposed to bet and get in a 3-bet.

[deception5]

Very well thought out response as always. A few small things.

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We flop top pair 3828/19600 = 19.5% of the time. So we're a 4:1 dog to getting a good top pair. That's pretty far from the 33% number you were giving for estimate. The reason for the difference is that we're not concerned with catching "a pair", but we're interested in "top pair" (because if we have second pair, the board is very likely going to have an ace or king, and we're likely in trouble if we get any action from anyone in the hand).


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I did make some reference to this but I was just saying we'd flop a pair 33% of the time and that very often it would be top pair since are cards are both on the high end. When an overcard flops we aren't necessarily sunk but we will certainly win much less often.

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The other players. It's very hard to make estimates on what they will flop and what they will do with the flops that they get. This tends to hurt us rather than help us.


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As far as the other players go - this can be a positive and a negative. With more players we will win less often but on the other hand we will win larger pots as they call down with flush/straight draws and hands that we dominate (which can be reasonably often since they did not raise preflop).