River bet - AK unimproved

[StellarWind]

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So do you not 3-bet your high PPs also?

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I'm still experimenting here.

My goal is to have several overall strategies to handle the HU blind defense. Then I pick the strategy that best fits my opponent. Or I can alternate several strategies against a thinking/adjusting opponent to keep him off balance.

One strategy that I like a lot against many opponents is never 3-bet and that is what I was doing here.

Comments on your specific points:

1. It is true that they will lose money when they cap preflop and you have AA. But in the long run you cannot 3-bet just AA and you are not going to be capped only when you have AA. Your 3-bets are going to have a range and most opponents are going to adjust and cap you when they have the best of it versus your range. So against most opponents you will be losing money when you get capped. If you identify an opponent who always caps your 3-bets out of spite or something then you should play a different strategy against them.

2. Maybe it's just me, but I never seem to know what it means when a LAG caps heads up, especially with position.

3. Some of the same people who go nuts with the reraises preflop do the same thing postflop if you don't warn them. It's not like preflop has a monopoly on chest thumping.

[istewart]

Hey Stellar,

Just like Wynton remarked, I'm curious about which flops you would actually check/fold here after just calling PF (I'm guessing T98-type flops, but wondering if I'm missing others)?

[StellarWind]

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Hey Stellar,

Just like Wynton remarked, I'm curious about which flops you would actually check/fold here after just calling PF (I'm guessing T98-type flops, but wondering if I'm missing others)?

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Well T98 monotone I-don't-have-any sounds awesome [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img].

But for a practical example a JJ versus AQx flop would be an example where I would probably change plans and never raise.

[waffle]

Hi Stellar, I've been using

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Scenario II: I call preflop and checkraise his autobet.


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in my game for a while now. I like it. Have you noticed that a lot of people will 3 bet the flop pretty lightly? I have.. any thoughts?

<font color="#666666">(I've also noticed that whenever I post a hand where I use S. II, I get many replies telling me to use S. I =P)</font>

[Jake (The Snake)]

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Then I pick the strategy that best fits my opponent.

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Hey Stellar,

I would be very interested in knowing what types of opponents you DO 3-bet against.

My current play is to never 3-bet against an opponent who is a competent hand reader or who I have played with quite a bit previously. Against unknown idiots or LAGs who can't hand read, I prefer to 3-bet. Does this sound reasonable?

[thesharpie]

How important is 3 betting PF to "discourage stealing", or calling PF and sometimes donking the flop? Obviously you'd 3 bet against someone PF with good hands if they're capping light, and you might donk into someone who auto raises flop donks with a made hand, but do you think these moves are that important without exploitable reads? It seems like your strategy doesn't use these moves. In fact most people on here seem to just check/raise flops against auto bettors, is donking any good against them?

[Spicymoose]

Kinda off topic, but could you explain why you are playing Party 5/10 tables?

The only reasons I could come up with are that you don't have enough time to build a real bankroll, or that you are just highly risk adverse.

[oreogod]

I was talking with Schneids last night about what has become the "dreamclown" HU strategy. Which entails just calling HU OOP with any hand and c/ring a lot of flops, the goal of which relies on playing small pots oop and getting opponents to give up cuz they're small but a decent player should be able to counter this.

I mean, I didnt think it was an optimal strategy and he didnt think it was optimal. It works against some players but we thought it was supoptimal against good players and ppl willing to play back at u preflop. Im tired but here are some points I can remmeber:

A good player should be able to take away your edge by making you feel uncomfortable about trying to c/r on the flop in a tiny pot with both, [censored] and decent hands.

All a good player has to do is raise more hand preflop (no fear of a 3bet or flop donk), 3bet more lightly on the flop (at an optimum frequency between big hands, draws and rags), check flop more liberally, wait-to-raise or bluff-raise turn more if you bluff bet the turn often if the flop is checked behind.

Not to mention against someone fighting your strategy well it makes his hands even more deceptive for u to read...obviously at the same time u have a guy bet/3betting u lighter, but at an optimum frequency it cannot always be a longterm winner to call him down. Not to mention with no fear of a preflop 3bet and flop donk he can check the flop pretty liberally and see four cards just about any time for minimal investemtn w/ no fear of it ever costing him more than what he WANTS to put in. I also belive if u are not careful he can force u into some big mistakes.

I think there are better ways for deception instead of just always getting the minimum value preflop (especially against players that will pump pots with you before the flop), allowing them greater postflop flexibility, and allowing them to make their own mistakes at their judgement, not yours.

At least there are not many good players out there, but they are around and I think entail a different strategy, although this one may work for a session or so, but they should be able to adapt eventually. I dont know, it seems to work for Dreamclown, the guy just does not change gears OOP, I think alot of its success has to be due to failure for players to adapt. Dunno. Anyway sums up what was mentioned.

[StellarWind]

This is an interesting post and I intend to read it several more times. Here come a few initial thoughts.

There seems to be two basic postflop countermeasures proposed:

1. Light 3-bets against the flop checkraise.

Most flop checkraises are not big starting hands. They are modest starting hands that took a cheap flop and happened to hit. The "never 3-bet" strategy has the effect of adding some big hands to the standard mix like overpairs, large top pairs with big kickers, and jumbo overcards. My average hand strength for a flop checkraise is going up not down because of these hands. For Villain to loosen up his normal flop 3-bet standards in the face of this cannot be a good idea.

Note that I don't know what dreanclown does but for me the flop is a new beginning. I'm not going to checkraise the flop with garbage just because it used to be a good starting hand. I'm going to apply my best poker skill and checkraise the most appropriate set of flopped hands that I can find without regard to whether the starting hand was QQ or 98o.

One of the advantages of this strategy is technical rather than deceptive. You save money when you delay the preflop raise and then discover that the flop sucks and in your best poker judgment you don't want to raise after all.

There is another fundamental issue with thinking that light flop 3-bets could be a "cure". The plays you describe may well be a better way to play poker. But if you can 3-bet my flop checkraise you also could have raised my flop autobet after I 3-bet preflop. If one play is good the other play should also be good because it's the same pot size, the same flop aggression, and the same hand representation. Why would one expect light flop 3-bets to do something that the equivalent flop raise wouldn't do against a preflop 3-bettor who autobets the flop?

Except of course that it's much harder to put me on a narrow range of hands when I never 3-bet preflop. Surely that has to work in Villain's disfavor.

2. Checking behind on the flop and the various follow up measures to this action.

This is very interesting and I need to think very carefully about it. But one apparent difference from your Schneids discussion junps out. This is not heads up poker. Villain is openraising from outside the blinds and has at least one other preflop opponent besides me. He figures to have a half-reasonable hand and not the virtual any-two stuff you see many players raise the SB with. Plus the SB itself is extra money in the pot. The upshot is that his openraise hand range is going to be a lot better than my BB defense hand range.

He can't just go around checking lots of flops with such a big difference in hand range and expect there to be no consequences. Yes I'll lose a bet when I have QQ but for every time that happens I'll get several free cards with raggy connectors. There's a reason people autobet the flop after a steal attempt goes headsup with a calling blind. You can't ignore this just because there is an occasional AQ or KK mixed in with the great mass of ordinary hands.

All this assumes that I won't allow my good-player opponent to simply outplay me on the big streets after he checks the flop. That would be a problem but the cure is better table selection and picking my battles more carefully.

Preflop Villain can choose to steal more often if he thinks that my blind defense countermeasures are inferior. I know I do that when I think the BB plays poorly. But I hope I've made my point that the never 3-bet strategy is not inferior, just different. In that case Villain can still increase his range but he's just making a mistake if he goes beyond his proper steal range because he is attacking a weakness that doesn't exist.

The SB and possible other players sitting behind him represent another independent obstacle to excessively increasing his steal range.

Finally there is an important practical issue. I'm quite willing to change strategies or even mix them. In a real 6-max ring game I can diagnose that he is stealing excessively a lot faster than he can figure out that I don't 3-bet headsup from the SB. Very strong hands don't come up that often and for me to go without one for a while is not remarkable at all. Me showing a premium would of course be a tipoff but it might be a one-off play.

So I expect that I can adjust to the countermeasures a lot faster than he can put new countermeasures in place. But this illustrates why I said in a previous post that I want to learn several good BB defense strategies that I can selectively apply and mix. Predictable is usually bad.

why not reraise/cap preflop?

if you do this you can probably bet out the flop and he may call down or just fold later on. either way i'm betting the whole way.