|
|
（接上）
On to the hand...
Six-handed $100/200
Everyone has $20k to start the hand.
You raise 9♥8♥ to $700 on the button, and a smart optimistic player calls in the BB (I use the term optimistic to describe a poker player who is quick to put you on a hand he can beat if it’s reasonable).
Flop is Q♥10♥5♦ ($1,500 in pot). He checks and you bet $1,500. He calls.
Turn 4♣ ($4,500). He checks and you bet $4,500. He calls.
River 5♠ ($13,500). He checks and you go all in for your last $13,300. He insta-calls with A♣J♣.
You look down at your 9♥8♥, think how bad of a call he just made, and that you would play Q-Q the exact same way, and muck. He gets the $40k pot.
But what the smart player knows about you is that you don’t bet hard enough with top-pair type hands, and you always bet hard with your draws. He knows that with K-Q or A-A, you would check behind on the turn to control the pot. So the only hands you bet for value on the turn are two pair and sets. You also bet with any open-ended straight draw on the turn and with any flush draw. Let’s look at your range on the river and see how bad a call it was.
Your range for raising pre-flop and betting all three streets:
Q-Q, 10-10, Q-10, 5-5, 4-4, A♥5♥, 7-6, K-J, J- 9, A♥2♥ to A♥K♥, K♥9♥, J♥8♥, 9♥8♥, 8♥7♥, 9♥7♥.
I’m trying to get you to recognize how many hand combos make up a certain hand. For instance, when you think someone has a set, there are only three possible combos of each set, whereas there are twelve hand combos of top pair-top kicker. So, if someone takes a line where he has to have a set or a bluff, realize how unlikely it is that he has a set. Similarly, suited hands are much less likely than unsuited hands.
Anyways, let’s see how bad his river call was in G-Bucks. Since all the cards are out, GBucks analysis is simply what % of your hands he can beat now. If it were earlier in the hand, we would also factor in % to improve to the best hand by the river.
I won’t go through the whole hand counting analysis again because it’s as boring for me as it is for you. There are programs available online where you can input a range of hands and see how your hand does against that range, and it accounts for hand combinations. If you are so inclined, try this one by hand to see how often your opponent made a good call versus the range I gave above. Remember to account for his A♣J♣ in your range, as he knows you cannot have the A♣ or the J♣.
I’m going to put the range into the program and see how often he has the best hand. If he’s right, he wins $26,800, and if he’s wrong he loses $13,300; so he has to be right only about 33% of the time to make a call break even. Looking at the math, he has the best hand 70.5% of the time! That’s way more than enough to call on the river. His call made him almost $15,000 Galfond dollars ($26,800 real dollars), and is clearly the right play against you.
Let’s talk about a couple other aspects of the hand. First, his call on the turn. Second, how you can manipulate your range to make this a more difficult decision for him.
While your opponent’s river call was very standard versus your range, his turn call was much shakier. River decisions are very simple in that they can be solved completely with numbers. Pre-river decisions are much more complicated. Let’s look at his call on the turn from a Galfond Dollars perspective. When you bet the turn with that same range, and he calls with A♣J♣, he is 54% against your range of hands. Since he has to call $4,500 to try and win the other $9,000 in the pot, it might seem like he’s making a good play. If your $4,500 bet put you all in, and your range was the same, his call would be making him $2,790 G-Bucks (see if you can get that number on your own). However, with a draw-heavy board, and being out of position with money still to go in, his call isn’t as good. I don’t have a clear-cut figure for you, but you should be folding spots that are marginally +G-Bucks when certain situations arise.
Here are some examples of times that you should fold when G-Bucks calculations are telling you otherwise:
• You’re out of position and there is some money left behind.
• The board is draw-heavy, and you don’t know which cards help your opponents.
•Your opponent is a strong aggressive player.
•Your hand has little chance to improve.
On the other side of things, there are some spots where you can call when G-Bucks calculations make a call seem slightly wrong:
•You are in position and there is some money left.
•The board is draw-heavy and you have a disguised draw (especially in position).
•Your opponent is very predictable ? too loose or too tight ? and you are a strong aggressive player.
•Your hand has outs to become very strong. (These factors all increase in effect the deeper the stacks are.)
The reason your opponent should fold the AcJc if you are a competent player, in my opinion, is that you will make his life very difficult on the river. If you don’t have hearts and a heart falls, you can bluff him off the best hand. Or you might hit a straight and he’ll pay you off thinking you missed a flush draw. The main thing is that you have another street to act on where you have everything going for you. You should earn money on the river on average, if you are as good as your opponent or better, because of all of the factors above. So, he should give up a little bit of $ in value on the turn to make up for the value that you should gain on the river.
A good example that I like to give: same game, 100/200, $20k stacks. The button, a good aggressive player, raises to 600 and you call in the BB with 5-5. Flop is J♦10♦2♥. You check and the button bets $1,000, which he does with almost every hand he raised with. You usually have the best hand. But a fold is still correct. Think about that and make sure you understand. You likely have the best hand, definitely over 65% of the time, and you have over 2:1 pot odds, but a fold is still clearly correct. First of all, you are an underdog to finish the hand ahead. You’re about 44% against a reasonable button-raising range on that flop. Even with the pot odds, which would make the call appear to net you some Galfond Dollars, you have to factor in your opponent’s advantage on later streets because of the examples I gave above.
Let’s go back now to the A♣J♣ hand and talk about how you can make your turn and river play better. Remember the action looked like this:
Flop is Q♥10♥5♦ ($1,500 in pot). He checks and you bet $1500. He calls.
Turn 4♣ ($4,500). He checks and you bet $4,500. He calls.
River 5♠ ($13,500). He checks and you go all in for your last $13,300. He insta-calls with A♣J♣.
And we said that you would take this action with the following hands: Q-Q, 10-10, Q- 10, 5-5, 4-4, A♥5♥, 7-6, K-J, J-9, A♥2♥ to A♥K♥, K♥9♥, J♥8♥, 9♥8♥, 8♥7♥, 9♥7♥.
Now, his turn call is very close, as it would be with weak one-pair hands, so your turn play doesn’t need too much work, except for the fact that we need to tweak it a little to help your river range. So, let’s try checking behind on the turn with your ace-high flush draws besides A♥K♥ and A♥J♥. I like checking these a little bit better because we know where we stand when a heart hits, while we don’t if we check behind 9♥8♥ and a flush comes, and also because our ace outs might be good, and I would hate to get check-raised off of a hand with that many outs on the turn.
We also need to add some more one-pair hands to our range. Remember our opponent is smart and optimistic, so on a board this draw heavy, he is going to call down quite often. In addition, it's unlikely that he would only call your flop bet with a hand like a set of fives or Q-10 when so many scary cards could come on the turn. There's no reason for you to think that a hand like A-Q is beat here. So, let's also pot the turn with K-Q, A-Q, J-Q, K-K, and A-A. We'll stop there and not bet Q-9 because he can have K-Q or Q-J often, and he could check-shove the turn with a draw and you might have to fold the best hand.
Let's look at your new range: Q-Q, 10-10, Q-10, 5-5, 4-4, A-A, K-K, A-Q, K-Q, Q-J, 7-6, K-J, J-9, Ah-Kh, Ah-Jh, Kh-9h, Jh-8h, 9h-8h, 8h-7h, 9h-7h.
I'm certain now that his turn call is bad against this range.
Let's see how good his Ac-Jc river call is against your new range, assuming you bet all of these on the river. Running the numbers … he still has the best hand 43.3 percent of the time, making his call correct and netting him some G-Bucks. Since he's kind of a calling station, we want to make his call incorrect. At the very least, we want to make it a tougher decision. So let's try to get his hand down to 30 percent against you. This means we have to check behind with some of our bluffs on this river. Well, for starters we should check behind A-K and A-J of hearts, even though they actually aren't bluffs versus his hand. We should check them behind if we're going to check any more hands behind because they can sometimes win the pot without betting. How about we check behind with open-ended straight draws? So K-J and J-9. We give up with those hands, so now we are betting: Q-Q, 10-10, Q-10, 5-5, 4-4, A-A, K-K, A-Q, K-Q, Q-J, 7-6, Kh-9h, Jh-8h, 9h-8h, 8h-7h, 9h-7h.
Running the numbers once again, it looks like his A-J is good only 26.6 percent of the time now, so we made his call a bad one. So, now, when we bet this river and he calls with A-J (or Q-J or A-10 or 8-8), whether we have a full house or nine-high, he loses G-Bucks and we make G-Bucks. That means that in the long run we will earn money if he keeps making that call. To be exact, that river call cost him $2,633 Galfond Dollars and earned you the same amount.
Why, you ask, should we just not bluff this river? Then he'd be extremely wrong to call, right? Definitely a good question. If you are up against a very loose, very unintelligent player, you should probably bluff this river close to zero percent of the time. The problem with doing it against good players, even if they are loose, is that they're smart enough to catch on. They'll notice that you aren't bluffing enough and they'll not give you any action. Remember the Ah-Kh example up top where we weren't bluffing enough? Your goal is to make the most money on average, not necessarily on the present hand. You have to bluff sometimes against smart players in order to get paid off other times when you have a big hand. So, if you are only going to play five minutes against this player, and you think he will almost always call the river -- sure, don't bluff. But if you play against him often, you have to occasionally bluff so that he doesn't figure you out and start to play correctly against you.
Against a loose player, you want to mix up your play in a way that makes his calls as incorrect as possible (from a G-Bucks perspective) without making him realize and start folding. Against a tight player, you want to mix up your play so that he's as incorrect as possible when he folds, without making him loosen up enough to play correctly. So against a loose but observant player, you might want to bluff this river around 18 percent of the time, and against a tight but observant player, maybe around 45 percent. Against a very loose but unobservant player or a very tight but unobservant player, you would want to almost never bluff or almost always bluff, respectively.
Another tip I have for you is to see how cards that fall affect ranges. You raise preflop and the big blind calls, and the flop is 7-8-2 with two spades. He checks, you bet, and he calls. You think he raises most draws so you don't put him on spades or a straight draw. The turn is 10s. You should usually bet almost everything when he checks because his range can't like that turn card and probably can't stand the heat.
Or let's say you raise preflop under the gun six-handed with Q-J off-suit and only the small blind calls. Flop is 10-8-4 rainbow. He check-calls a bet from you. Turn is a 2 off-suit. Check, check. River is an ace. He checks. This card, while not improving your actual hand, improved your range a lot. Plenty of the hands that you play like this contain an ace. That makes this card a good card to bluff on. You shouldn't necessarily always bluff in this spot, but you should more than if the river were a 10 or a five. Just like before, you should balance your play so that it's a tough decision for your opponent based on your range.
One trap I've seen people fall into is the following:
You raise with 6-5 off-suit on the button and the BB calls. The board comes out Qd-Jd-4h-4s-7d.
Your opponent check-calls a pot-sized bet on every street and wins with Qs-10s. You think to yourself, "What a terrible call. My range is like, flush draws, sets, two pair and straight draws, and then, every once in a long while, just pure air. Every draw hit except for the straight draws. He's way behind my range."
So you almost never have complete air, but you just decided to bluff this time with it? That could be true, but it's probably likely that you would've fired all three streets with a lot of air hands here. Be honest with yourself about your range.
Don't use G-Bucks analysis as an excuse to make bad plays. Don't use it to console yourself after losing a hand by proving how bad your opponent's play was. Use Galfond Dollars to balance your play, to exploit your opponents' weaknesses and to keep level-headed when you make a play that happened to be incorrect this time but is still the right play. The worst form of running bad is when you make good calls or bluffs or value bets that happen to be wrong over and over again. It makes you feel like you're playing badly when you aren't.
I hope you got something out of this. If you don't understand it yet, or don't know yet how to apply it, save this article and reread it when you are ready. Reread it if you find yourself making what appear to be bad call-downs or bad bluffs. Go over your ranges and your opponents' ranges and see if they really were bad plays. Reread this if you find yourself unsure how to play against an opponent who plays too aggressively or too loose or too anything. Think about what his ranges are on every street, and the best way to play against him.
Good luck at the tables. I hope you all become Galfond Billionaires.
|
|
QQ好友和群
QQ空间
腾讯微博
腾讯朋友
微信
收藏
楼主
