Choose your seat (complex)

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You have the button in what seems to be a perfect situation a loose blind defending, passive, predictable player. Never 3-bets, you have position, easy to get away from, you'll outplay him all day long.

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Joe,

Think about all the hands you raise on the button. Now, when both blinds fold, think of the hands you would be pissed off about because you only won the blinds.

Any hands worse than those, you want the blinds folding. When they happen not to fold, you want at least a little something to back it up.

Coincidentally, the hands you would be pissed over taking the blinds with are also the hands in PT that show an overall profit of 0.75bb/hand or more.

[Victor]

blind stealing post

[sy_or_bust]

hope I'm not intruding, but I think that analysis is too simple. there are tons of calling station players who defend super-liberally but play so predictably that it's OK to take the worst of it sometimes when you have position because you'll earn more postflop when you shouldn't.

if your opponent plays a basic strategy like fit (call) or fold on the flop, or always peels the flop with semi-trash and folds the turn UI, you end up playing many hands heads-up vs. a super-predictable opponent. you won't always have the best of it, but you will always know where you are, and your initiative will automatically win most pots postflop.

[Victor]

are you saying you want your opponent to call when you open with, say, j10s bc you will make more than .75bb post flop?

what is the worst hand that you would open with that you want him to call?

[w_alloy]

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Which is it?

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you dont want a passive player who defends liberally in the BB because defending liberally is correct against my steal range which is probably 43% ATTSB

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or

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even the bottom range of those hands is profitable with position imo.


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????

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It is not only possible but very likely that both of these statements are true (not an either or as you suggest). The bottom of our stealing range is much more profitable against someone who plays tight from the blind.

[kiddo]

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are you saying you want your opponent to call when you open with, say, j10s bc you will make more than .75bb post flop?

what is the worst hand that you would open with that you want him to call?

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This is not the correct way to look at it.

Lets say we got 2 different players in BB.

We got a loose, passive, predictable player in BB. He defends 90% and play passive and bad postflop.

We got a tighter player that folds to much preflop, lets say he defends with 45% against a stealraise from us. This guy is a little better then the other player postflop. Specially he wins more from us when he is ahead.


We can now say that:

1) Both the loose and the tight BB will defend with 45% best hands. We will then lose more against the tight one.

2) The other 45% the tight player will just fold and loose 0.5BB. The loose player will still call (with his worst 45% of hands) and will have a worse handrange the we have. He will be passive and not bet enough when he is ahead. And he will be loose, calling 2 much when behind. And he is out of position.

3) Since the loose one is defending with 90% of his hands it will profitable for us to come in with all those 90% plus a little more since we are better postflop and got position (we dont have to raise each time). But normally it will not be profitable to stealraise with any2 against tight one (of course it depends on how tight he is, but if we start to raise more beacuse he folds 2 much we also have to understand that we will have a worse handrange those times he calls us).
There will normally be a number of hands that win us money against a really loose player, hands that we cant play against the tight player.

So, when we want to know how we want to play in the blind we got three questions:

A) How big is the difference postflop between the tight and the loose when they got same hand from start?

B) How big is the difference between the tight one losing 0.5BB when he folds and the loose player calling our raise with the worst half of his hands?

C) How much will we win on those hands that we couldnt come in with against tight player?

So, its not like we have to win more then Big Blinds post (0.5BB) each time we are called by the loose player. We just have to win more then 0.5BB minus what we gained in (A) and minus what we gained in (C).

Joe Tall says that we would prefer the loose one. I think he normally is right. We want loose-passive players in every position, also in the blinds.

[Spicymoose]

I still think we want tight players in the blinds. Whenever we are playing poker, we want our villain to maximize his mistakes, and folding the BB against a raise is usually a mistakes (that is, if the player is tight, and not defending enough). Lets take a typical hand...

We raise 99 on the button and SB folds. Our mystery villain has K5s.

Now, if BB is a tighty, he will fold, and we pick up .75 BB.

If BB is a loose guy, he will call. Although we have him crushed, we now have a roughly 2.2 BB pot (depending on the blind structure, and rake structure of course), but only have 67% equity! That means that if he is seeing the showdown, he has just taken .73 BB of the total pot, and since an initial 1 BB of the pot is our own money, we only have gained .47 BB of the pot so far . Now, obvciously we will be winning the pot more often than him, so he will be giving up some of his preflop equity, but since he is loose, he is way more likely to see a showdown, and realize his equity.

So if he goes to showdown 50% of the time here, we take .36 BB of his preflop equity. But we have to remember that we don't always go to showdown. If we fold somewhere along the away 20% of the time, he is taking away .3 BB of our 1.47 "owned" BBs. Although I used the number .47 early, that number was showing our profit so far, but 1.47 is our equity. So these two effects mean that instead our instant .47 BB equity from preflop, we now have .47-.3+36 or .53 BB.

We still need to make up .22 BB from his postflop mistakes, remembering that any mistake we make has to be made up again. I don't think we can make up this difference, and therefore we were happy to have him fold outright.


This was a single hand, and so obviously the picture is different overall. I just think that with many hands our villains hold, we make far more by them folding, than by them talking away our instant profit, and having to make it up later in the hand. I used this hand because this is one where it seems we have huge equity, and want him to call, but in fact I think we don't. Perhaps my numbers were too far off though, so in fact we do want him to call. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Anyway, I think in summary, we either want a tight blind, or if the blind isn't tight, at least have him be a ridiculously bad player who will make as many mistakes as possible postflop.

I think you are right. The only times we want him to call are when we have him dominated. 99 vs 76, 77 vs 55 or 77 vs 76. AK vs KQ is profitable for him to call since he has 25% equity and needs 22%. Ofc this slight difference we could probably make up post flop but I am very happy taking the blinds if his equity is above 30%.

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We raise 99 on the button

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Why use such a strong hand as an example? Use an average stealing hand for a 35% ASB player. I think KJo is pretty close to average.

If we raise on the button and SB folds, the ONLY hands that are incorrect for the BB to call with are lower (dominated) king and jack hands. Every other hand has the proper odds to call.

Now, let's look at postflop mistakes.....

If our "reasonable" villain is just bad postflop, he will make mistakes, but those mistakes will be marginal . It's not like he'll go 4 bets on every street with an UI 72o or fold top set on the river after putting in lots of bets. He's reasonable. His mistakes will be pennies.

As far as my statement in the last post, or victor's link showing a similar statement, we are both generalizing for all blind situations. If Joe wants to bring up a specific example based on Tstone's table layout, that's fine, but I wouldn't be so fast to sacrifice the dollars we make in front of us for the pennies we make behind us.

[kiddo]

Did you - or others answering to this post - read my post? Or why do u post it as an answer to my post?

You wrote:

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Whenever we are playing poker, we want our villain to maximize his mistakes, and folding the BB against a raise is usually a mistakes (that is, if the player is tight, and not defending enough). Lets take a typical hand...

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And I wrote:

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So, its not like we have to win more then Big Blinds post (0.5BB) each time we are called by the loose player. We just have to win more then 0.5BB minus what we gained in (A) and minus what we gained in (C).

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In what way was I wrong?

I dont know how to say this simple enough but: Even if we most of them time would prefer that BB folded instead of called when we are stealraising from button we could still prefer a player that called to much instead of a player calling 2 little, even if the misstake of calling to much was smaller then the misstake of calling to little. Its not like we are playing showdownpoker with a specific hand. We are talking about headsup against different players. This is what I discussed in my post.