My Aces are running baaaaad! Is it my fault?

[Catt]

Same proviso about asking / challenging . . .

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Limit hold'em is an interesting game because you can always "call down" if you really want to know what someone has. It will cost us 2 BB to "call down" and it will cost us 2 BB to make it 3-bets on the turn (just to make it 3-bets).

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I didn't mean that "calling down" was crawling into a shell rather than making the right play. But I did mean that "calling down" needed a justification. I felt that a 3-bet was more than just making it 3 bets -- I felt that a 3-bet was pushing an equity edge (more on this below), challenging a possible (though unlikely) semi-bluff, and punishing bad play from an unknown.

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Do we have the best hand here 33% of the time??? If we don't, calling down strictly dominates 3-betting. We actually need to have more then 33% equity to 3-bet because we open ourselves up to a cap when we 3-bet. In this hand, we probably have 10-20% equity so making it 3-bets gets dominated by calling down.

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I think I must have a really poor sense of accurate equity. My knee-jerk reaction would've been that we do have greater than 33% equity here most of the time (and enough of the time so that the weighted-average equity is greater than 33%). Is it really less than 20%? I need a much better sense of this if I am to continue with this game.