$25 NL PF steal, is this really dumb?

[async]

It's not that you can't steal in that position... but with J6o? I think I might wait for a monster like 86s.

[fimbulwinter]

I'll give my two cents in general about stealing and let people derive what they will from it.

At the very beginning of a poker player's career, they can't even read the board. someone with top pair who is playing for the first time won't realize that the guy who's now betting big after that third club hit probably has a flush.

in this kind of game, the most rudimentary strategy wins. play better cards. make a hand that beats your opponent's range and bet big. push allin preflop with aces. almost no deviation from just knowing hand values and how to read a board is needed.

as our opponents become more and more consicous, we must move away from this easy play and do some sub-optimal things to get paid. stealing is one of them.

Just like all other deviations from a simple strategy, it should only be done when simple strategy not longer earns optimally. Metagame is just one facet that can be used when assessing if an FPS'y play is best, but in general such considerations are overemphasized.

Remember that your steal is just another form of a semibluff. you are raising with a hand that doesn't figure to be best but has outs (bluffing and real). That's why you will almost never catch me stealing with complete trash. i'll steal with offsuit connectors, i'll steal with sooted crap, but i won't steal with trash because i need those few flops where i can really push back hard as a subsidy.

remember that making plays should only be done when the standard play becomes a loser. In this case, mucking this hand is the winning play.

fim

[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