Flat Calling Raises with Kings Preflop

[Chris Daddy Cool]

do you reraise AK or QQ... because if you only reraise with AA doesn't that make you... readable?

[lapoker17]

Here's the thing. Most online guys are obsessed with this type of stuff - as they should be. They play 9,000,000 hands with the same people and have all of this data at their fingertips. It's incredibly important to vary their play. I play in LA - at 2 or 3 different clubs in 2-3 different levels of game with tons of tables and must moves etc... My history with most players is either brief or nonexistent, and most of them don't notice anything anyway. I'm comfortable playing after the flop. I rarely reraise PF at all - It could totally be a leak, but I don't know, it's just how I roll. And I don't feel like I'm giving up much in the games I play.

From a data-focused perspective this, I know, seems flawed, but live play (in LA) has little to do with data - at least for someone like me who does not play the same game everyday, all the time.

Dissenters can bring it.

[Percula]

I do it a lot too.

As a general rule I find that it hides power of my hand well from thinking players that would not normally play me off if I had RR PR.

[Garland]

I don't like losing the opportunity to give opponents to call a re-raises preflop with vastly inferior hands. Whenever I re-raise with AA or KK, I seem to get a caller(s). Then flop goes I bet they fold 90% of the time. If my opponents are gambling type players, I love to make them pay for raising hands such as AJs, ATs, their eyes seem to light up and can't call fast enough for the chance to bust a big stack, even if they know the odds are heavily against them.

In addition, if you're only reraising with AA, then you become extremely readable. Perhaps you're reraising other hands to compensate.

Garland

[soah]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't like losing the opportunity to give opponents to call a re-raises preflop with vastly inferior hands. Whenever I re-raise with AA or KK, I seem to get a caller(s). Then flop goes I bet they fold 90% of the time.

[/ QUOTE ]

In this case, might it be more profitable to get less money in preflop while allowing your opponents to overplay their weaker hands postflop? If they are always folding then the fact that you have AA/KK is irrelevent.

A while back Sklansky wrote an article for the 2+2 magazine where he said that if it's limped to you in the big blind you should occassionally raise huge with utter trash like Q6o because once you make a huge raise like that, the hand will almost never go to showdown. So under the right circumstances you can make more money running a pure bluff than by playing out the hand normally. But with cards that have a chance of flopping something (I'm not necessarily referring to big pairs here), you'd do better to just take a flop and get paid if you make a hand. Essentially the EV of raising huge and representing AA is x, almost regardless of what cards you have, and the EV of checking changes a lot based upon your cards.

This is not quite the same situation as reraising preflop, but the principles are similar: why waste only premium hands to make people fold? As I recall, this concept is also discussed in TPFAP... basically saying you should reraise preflop with premium hands you want to get all-in with, and with complete trash that has no other value besides bluffing equity. But some hands you should just call with because they aren't strong enough to be all-in preflop, yet can still be played profitably.

I realize I've sorta contradicted myself amongst the various points I've been making, but this post is just a collection of various thoughts that came into my head which seem to go together.

[whitelime]

I like it too. I feel like with AA, because so many people are unable to fold KK preflop, you have a chance at an all-in as an 80-20 favorite.

[coltrane]

[ QUOTE ]
I do this a lot.



[/ QUOTE ]

I do it a lot too - it's almost always a function of stack size.....and having said that, I flat call preflop raises with aces more than most too....I don't reraise preflop very often either - especially when I'm out of position and really deep......I like to play poker....

[Kirkrrr]

"I don't reraise preflop very often either - especially when I'm out of position..."

Hmm... I take the opposite approach and tend to re-raise harder when I'm OOP since I know that my options will be limited post flop.

In position I'll usually just call a LP open raiser and reraise EP raisers.

Kirk

[fsuplayer]

[ QUOTE ]
"I don't reraise preflop very often either - especially when I'm out of position..."

Hmm... I take the opposite approach and tend to re-raise harder when I'm OOP since I know that my options will be limited post flop.


[/ QUOTE ]

i think coltrane means when the money is real deep, like maybe 250+BB, where if you raise pf, yoiu prob arent getting much more than 10-12bb's in , and your hand is sometimes very transparent to other players, and they have the odds to bust you.

with 50-150bb's, im almost always reraisin g OOP.

[Kirkrrr]

[ QUOTE ]
Quote:
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"I don't reraise preflop very often either - especially when I'm out of position..."

Hmm... I take the opposite approach and tend to re-raise harder when I'm OOP since I know that my options will be limited post flop.



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i think coltrane means when the money is real deep, like maybe 250+BB, where if you raise pf, yoiu prob arent getting much more than 10-12bb's in , and your hand is sometimes very transparent to other players, and they have the odds to bust you.

with 50-150bb's, im almost always reraisin g OOP.

[/ QUOTE ]

Fair enough, but with stacks that deep my raising hand range pre-flop is FAR greater than AA/KK... basically it's down to 2,5s. My opponents know this, and know that I know they know this, so nothing is transparent. But that's a little outside the scope of OP's question.

Kirk