What’s Your Play? Suited Gapper In Position, Deep Results

Thanks for all the comments on What’s Your Play? Suited Gapper In Position, Deep. The very first comment, from Zach, pretty much nailed it:

[E]ven though position is important, and the stacks are deep enough to make 74s less ghastly than if we were 100BBs or shallower, there just aren’t enough reasons to play it. Furthermore, our image is bluffy, and that’s going to make it hard to barrel through this hand if we flop a draw/some equity and miss on the river and have to make a large bet because we either flatted a 4x pre (or 3-bet to even more) and raised or floated the flop and fired the turn. With a stubborn/bluffy image, I’d rather have a hand that wants the call it’s going to get (because our opponents are keen to look us up) instead of one that wants a fold. Sure, the flip side is with deep stacks if we make a well-concealed monster we’ll get paid off huge, but how often will that happen compared to the regrettable number of times we are forced to play into our own image and bluff?

This wouldn’t be much of a thread if Hero did fold, so I imagine there’s going to be a flat here and a float to take advantage of villain’s c-betting tendencies and predictable play from out of position.

This is me keeping my WYP range balanced. Sometimes – often, actually – you’re just supposed to fold, and I don’t want this feature to send the message that some fancy play is called for every time you pick up a remotely decent looking hand. There’s no further action here, Hero folds pre-flop. Still, there were several comments worth discussing, so let’s get to it.

The Players in the Blinds

Tracy Marrow says, “The description leads me to believe that the blinds will come along if I call, which makes indicates much better odds for our call,” and a few others echoed this argument as well.

I gave HJ a range of all broadways, all pairs, and a few suited connectors and other hands. I gave the blinds pretty loose ranges and subtracted QQ+,AK as likely 3-betting hands (which of course hurts our equity even more than if they call with those hands, though it won’t be reflected in the number shown here). Assuming they call, there will be perhaps $155 in the pot after rake, of which Hero will have contributed a little over 25%. Yet Hero will have just 16.5% equity.

If the blinds fold, Hero will be heads up with $90 in the pot, 44% of which was his. He’ll have 32% equity.

In the former case, Hero is 8.5% shy of the equity he needs to avoid losing equity on the pre-flop call, and in the latter case he is 12% shy. So he does slightly better when the blinds call, but not much. Many players overestimate this effect, but the truth is that although you get better odds in multiway pots, you also need better odds, because it’s harder to win multiway pots.

Implied Odds

Of course there is some post-flop advantage to having position on each of these players, but to some extent their favorite mistakes risk cancelling each other out. Matt Glassman says, “The description of villain immediately had me thinking “Call, float flop, take it on the turn” will happen often enough to make getting involved more profitable than folding.” He’s right that this would be the preferred strategy against the pre-flop raiser, and if we could guarantee we’d be heads up with him, this just might be profitable enough to outperform folding – I’ll come back to this argument.

However, throwing a loose player or two into the mix complicates matters. Villain will probably continuation bet less, which immediately makes floating less profitable, never mind that floating now requires hitting a parlay where neither Villain nor one of the blinds flopped much of a hand. Admittedly, less continuation betting will mean more opportunities to check behind and realize some equity on the turn, but in most cases Hero’s hand will be so weak that even a free turn card won’t be of much value. Basically we’d be calling hoping to flop a weak pair or draw with which we’d still either end up playing passively or making some pretty thin bluffs into multiple players.

The whole “make a big hand and get paid” idea isn’t as easy as it sounds when you have 74s and a 250BB stack. Two small pair is not necessarily going to be a favorite when that much money goes into the pot, nor is trips with a weak kicker. There are a few ways to make two-card straights, and those should be solid money makers, but a flush may not be. If three or four people see the flop, and then a flush card comes on the turn, even loose players know to be wary. I’m not saying you won’t win the pot often, just that you can’t count on winning huge pots terribly often.

Floating In a Heads Up Pot

Even if the two loose players in the blinds fold, Hero still isn’t in a great spot to float with no equity. If Villain c-bets $60 close to 100% on the flop and then checks close to 100% on the turn, Hero will have the opportunity to bet perhaps $100. Let’s break it down:

10% chance Villain bets turn. He always has big hands, and Hero always folds, netting -$100.

30% chance Villain checks turn and calls a bet. Hero’s net is -$200 (perhaps he recoups a bit of this with slightly +EV river barreling).

60% chance Villain checks and folds. Hero nets $110.

.10 * -$100 + .3 * -$200 + .6 * $110 = -$4.

This is an important lesson: even if you know someone will overfold on a later street, you aren’t guaranteed a profit by calling to that point with any two cards just hoping you’ll get the opportunity to exploit it. Sometimes the price you have to pay to find out whether you’ll get a profitable any-two-cards bluff is too high.

Now, if we give Hero some equity in the pot, that can easily swing this to a profitable float. But that will happen only about 1/3 of the time, and even then it won’t be a super-profitable spot, so even the “best case scenario” of seeing the flop heads up with the raiser is not an especially good one.

Three Betting

I like Eddie’s question on this subject: ” If you are 3-betting this hand, what percentage of hands will you then be 3-betting overall?” Many players do respond very badly to three-bets, and if this guy folds way too much pre-flop or on the flop, this might well be a profitable AATC (almost any two cards) spot. I didn’t give you that information, though, and it certainly shouldn’t be profitable to three-bet such weak hands against a player with a relatively strong opening range. In other words, if Villain isn’t making a big mistake in a three-bet pot, then Hero is.

In my opinion, fold > three-bet > call.