Some No Limit thoughts

A play I have seen a few times in NL tournaments when the stacks are still relatively deep is to defend the Big Blind to a single raise from a steadyish player in, say, MP2, when the big blind has something like A4o.

The thinking is that, if opponent has something like AK and the flop comes AJ4 rainbow, or AJ4 with two of a suit, then the defender has a good opportunity to take the steadyish player for all of his money, or at least a good proportion of it.

So, my question is, what would you, as an MP2 player, do against this kind of cunning Big Blind defender?

One option is to make your raise big enough not to price in the Big blind defence. This has the added bonus of causing moans all round about "Internet players".

So, to bring it back to the Big Blind. How big does that raise have to be before you do not feel that this defence is worthwhile?

Let's suppose the blinds are $50-$100 and you both have $5,000 in front of you. Now, if I am in the Big Blind in this situation, and MP2 makes a mini-raise, I will call. If he goes all-in, I will fold. That gives me my parameters. But at what point do I become indifferent to calling or folding? And what reasoning should I apply to come to that conclusion?

(I know that there are many many other play-possibilities to consider here. I'm just trying to isolate this particular play.)

First we need to know steadyish player's standard-raising range in MP2. Let's say AJs, AQ, AK, any pair 8s or better. We could add in a 5% chance of complete randomness, but that only confuses things. If included, it would increase the level of the raise we would call with by a fraction.

That gives us 36 hands which are Ace-high, and 42 that are a pair.

Now, this is where the problems arise. How do these big blind defenders play the various flop possibilities? And how likely is the steadyish player to lose all his money if the dream of A-x-4 hits the board?

Our maximum gain if defending is $5000 minus the amount of the raise. Assuming that we break even on flops of Axx and a certain proportion of paint flops, and that we lose our calling money (on average) on all other flops, how big a raise pre-flop are we prepared to tolerate?

Well, not as much as 10% of the stack, surely. You just won't hit the dream flop often enough to compensate for the hands you have to give up. So, 5xBB is too much. And we've established that a mini-raise (2xBB, giving odds of 25-1) is too little.


So, where do players thinking of calling such a raise become indifferent? Curiously, my own instinct in this particular situation is at about 3.5 x the BB: i.e., the "standard raise". That gives me odds of just under 20-1.

So, if I am the raiser in this situation and I think that the Big Blind can outplay me post-flop, I really want to raise more than he will tolerate. If he calls, then, never mind, I've not given him the satisfactory odds (Of course, there are many other pssibilities at the point that I make the raise, so this scenario has to be considered a subset of all other scenarios when deciding how much I am going to raise).

Contrarily, if I think that I can outplay the Big Blind post-flop (in this particular scenario), then I want to price him in.

This brings me to the point where a well-known tournament player went through a no limit tournament only making mini-raises. On being asked why he did this, he said "what makes you think I wanted my opponents to fold pre-flop?". Felicia Lee once made a similar point, but in reverse. She said something like "if you are up against better players, make your pre-flop raises big. If they can outplay you post-flop, at least make it expensive for them to do so".

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I worked from home today after selflessly putting in five office days last week. This gave me the opportunity to play some lunchtime limit. Or it would have, if there had been any games available.

I had to resort to $1-$2 on Party, only to see a known $5-$10 player there. A bot? It appears that some of these Russian Federation players will happily sit in the highest stakes ring games they can find (up to about $5-$10) until they reach their 12-table limit.

I was getting ready to say that $1-$2 games are the equivalent of $2-$4 games a year or so, but this distorted things even more. In fact the games were not like any games that I played a year or so ago. Lots of three-betting from the blinds in heads-up situations both pre-flop and on the flop. Hands being bet (and call down) on very thin values. I'm sorry, is this $1-$2 ring, or $10-$20 6-handed?

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There was a question on 2+2 recently (let's ignore the latest Brandi hilarity -- I really hope she is at my table when I am in LV in a couple of weeks) about what percentage of any players playing cash online at any time were likely to be 2+2ers.

The replies were illuminating. One assumption was that 2+2ers probably played 20 times as many hands a week on average than did non 2+2ers. Another respondent, I was pleased to say, took up my line of "faux-bots", referring top them as HUD bots. Nice to see that this concept wasn't just the product of my own warped mind.

The guess was that about half your opponents are likely to be 2+2ers (lower at small stakes, much higher at high stakes, obviously). If you add in bots, real or perceived, that probably means, even in the broadest definition, that the percentage of fish to sharks is now down to 10% to 20%. Tough times.

And Ultimate have, damnit, made it even easier for the HUD bots, by allowing infinite "callback" of hand histories. Fuck it. Do I want to play under conditions where most of my opponents will have my complete playing record? Should I buy my larger hard drive now and just go with the flow?

Clearly the software upgrade that only allowed 4 hand histories a time was the product of a coder who had no idea what most serious players want. Now they've put the software under the control of a guy who looks like he has Win Holdem installed at home :-)




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