A3s in the BB, what's my flop play

[LesWormMurphy]

Yes, calling too often is a costly mistake-- but you've got top pair! Folding too often is an even worse mistake. I think you could easily raise this flop.

Here's how I figure:

The times to call and hope for improvement on the turn is when the pot is huge, or when the flop bets come from the left because a raise will only be an additional bet to your opponent's-- not two.

Here's a 4BB pot, the bet is from your immediate right and you THINK you might be easily dominated. You should raise to protect your hand. Faced with calling two bets cold, a bunch of your opponents will fold with their draws in a pot this small.

If you had a pair of Queens or something on this board I could see a fold, but honestly-- you have top pair. Granted, you have no kicker, but you need to protect your hand and find out where your at. You could fold if its reraised, but you still have 5 outs to 2-pair, and a backdoor nut flush draw so let's kick it up to 6 outs.

Your raise would bump the pot up to 6BB-- and with even 2 calls, your getting your proper odds...

However-- if everybody folds and the SB calls, your only getting 6.5-to-1, and the pot needs to lay at 6.7-to-1 for a 6-outer to be a little more than break even.

I'd raise.

[wildwood]

"Winning Low-Limit Hold'em" by Lee Jones has a section (pg 74-77) on this type of hand. When you flop top pair with a medium/bad kicker Quote from the first paragragh "The most common way this can happen is when you have AXs, hoping to get a flush draw, and just an ace flops"

edit: I've learned through experience that a flop with 3 broadway cards can be very dangerous.

[KDawgCometh]

[ QUOTE ]
"Winning Low-Limit Hold'em" by Lee Jones has a section (pg 74-77) on this type of hand. When you flop top pair with a medium/bad kicker Quote from the first paragragh "The most common way this can happen is when you have AXs, hoping to get a flush draw, and just an ace flops"

edit: I've learned through experience that a flop with 3 broadway cards can be very dangerous.

[/ QUOTE ]


and I've learned to basically ignore lee jones in general as his advice is on the weak tight side of things

[sy_or_bust]

And sometimes you should ignore LJ. But this situation is much worse - broadway straight + flush draws with TPNK against a field.

If you can always narrow the field to SB vs. Hero, you should show a profit if SB will bet flush draws and occassional hands like KQ in this spot. Sometimes you will even bet SB off of a hand like A6 on the turn.

Calling looks terrible because of all the hands that might be around - better hands notwithstanding, any king or queen
has a draw to 2-pair and straight/flush draws will usually stick around. There is some merit to waiting for the turn in a small pot, but certainly not when thinning the field immediately is so critical to winning %.

Problem is, I think a raise leaves you stuck with coldcallers behind a significant portion of the time, and in a small pot to boot. You will have no idea where you stand, and often will have the worst of it. If all of your opponents are unknown, can you really be confident your raise is +EV? Perhaps they are weak and play any ace - this is a bad situation. Perhaps they are stronger and tend to limp with better suited aces and high connectors....

I'm always folding this on the flop, but I'm really interested in the logic behind raising - e.g. how do you play the turn 4-handed and 2nd to act?

[Kirg]

This is a fold for the exact same reasons this digest hand is a fold.

[Nick C]

All right, enough people are calling for a raise or a fold (and I still don't know what's best, though I don't like folding), that I'm going to try to make the case for a call.

It goes like this: Maybe (not so likely, but you never know) we have the best hand right now. However, the bet comes from an awkward place if we can't get rid of hands like gutshots that might fold at a tighter table where the pot wasn't already 9 SB's big. (It doesn't help either that the players we're hoping to fold out are apparently very loose.)

If we call, there will possibly be a big series of calls behind us. And so be it. We've got top pair (and thus decent two-pair outs), along with a backdoor flush draw. No one has to have anything all that good, and if they do, there's a decent chance they won't raise with it anyway until the turn, by when we will either have improved or we won't have. (It's possible we'll be in an awkward spot again on the turn if SB bets again, but he might not, and if he does, by that time we may want to raise.)

I don't know. I don't like it that SB bet, but I think I like calling and seeing what the action is behind me.

[Nick C]

[ QUOTE ]
This is a fold for the exact same reasons this digest hand is a fold.

[/ QUOTE ]

The situation isn't quite as unfavorable, and the pot is bigger.

[W. Deranged]

I think this is a pretty tough situation.

One thing that people have to realize, which I don't think has been made clear enough, is this:

All of the hands which are MOST dangerous to our hand here (hands that include combinations of pairs, gutshots, and backdoor/full flush draws) are most likely NOT folding to our raise here.

We are often going to be helpless to fold out all of the K's and T's. Flush draws aren't going anywhere. We might fold some odd pairs, but we many of the hands that make pairs here will also make gutshots or have other reasons to stick around.

We are very often up against a better hand here, but we probably are going to be good often enough to continue playing, and action behind us should give us a pretty good idea of where we are. Given that our equity here is a high variance random variable (namely it could be really high or really low), I like to get more information before proceeding further.

The presence of the backdoor flush draw does indeed make this hand much, much more playable. Without that this may well be a fold here.

But, to my own personal great surprise, I advocate a:

CALL

So, look's like Nick C. and I are in the same boat.

Another way to think about this hand is how you would play it if you were in the SB, with no action in front of you, rather than BB with a bet. The standard line that is often discussed on these boards it to execute a "wait and see" or "two way" check, whereby you check with the intent of deciding on further action (maybe a fold, maybe a raise, sometimes a call) based on what happens behind you. Here, you are basically making a "wait and see" call. It's a little more expensive, but your hand is good enough to merit it.

[W. Deranged]

Kirg,

It is extremely important that you recognize the differences between this hand and the digest hand.

The primary difference is that our pair of A's is not vulnerable to nearly as many, or the SAME KIND, of cards. In this hand, we don't have to worry about overcards. We do have to worry about flush draws and gutshots (as we also did in the previous one), but those types of hands likely aren't going anywhere.

In the T6 digest hand, we are laying bigger reverse implied odds, because the pot is smaller, we are dodging more cards, and it will be less obvious to us when a card comes that beats us.

We don't have a backdoor flush draw in the digest hand. (Backdoor draws are awesome, because they are a kind of "guarenteed equity"; regardless of our opponent's holdings, if we hit our backdoor nut draw we are going to win with a very, very high frequency. This provides a sort of 6% equity safety cushion to play around with).


So the hands are different in very material ways that will dictate different plays.

[sean c]

I'm folding here. A case could be made for calling but I think a raise here is spewage. We are basically drawing to a BDFD or some running miracle cards we are OOP and have six people to act behind us. If we were on the button or in the CO i could see peeling one here but from the BB I'm folding and waiting for a better spot. Nice table selection BTW.