Blind Battles: Hand #8

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Looking at the bigger picture, against such opponents, it is unrealistic to turn the SB vs BB situation into a profitable one right? Break even would be fine, I think. So why are we raising A7 if the BB will call everytime? Certainly not for value, because we aren't even a big favorite against random hands and we are in a tough postflop position, considering we will miss the board 2/3 of the time and we are oop.


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Break-even out of the SB would be fantastic...but we have to make up the .25 BB we are forced to put in, which is difficult.

You seem to be a bit muddled about this. We don't raise A7o in these situations to try and steal the blinds, we raise A7o because it's a monster hand compared to BBs random hand. If he will call us with every hand then A7o is a raise that is for value, because he will be calling with hands like 93o, J6o, K2o, which cannot proceed profitably on many flops. Missing the board isn't a big deal with A7o if we are aware of the fact that a significant %age of our opponent's hand range has to improve to beat us.

To Cartman:

The worry about c/cing any time you have A-hi is that you will end up having A-hi more often than you have a medium-small pair, so your opponents will inadvertently be making amazing value-bets by overaggressively betting any pair. Our hand range becomes noticably skewed towards very weak hands when we c-c, since we attack with draws and made hands alike.

As a result, we must be sure to balance our play, occasionally c-folding A-hi on unfavorable boards, and occasionally c-c, c-c, c-ring TP so he knows he can't pound away at us with any pair, etc.

Surf