You’ve undoubtedly heard it said before that poker is a battle for information. At least among good players, the one who has the most information about the other’s hand will be the one who gets the best of it. It stands to follow, then, that information is worth money at the poker table.
You probably understand this concept and are willing to spend some money to avoid giving away information about your hand. When we talk about “mixing it up” or range balancing”, we often mean playing a hand in a way that is perhaps not ideal in a vacuum but which creates deception about your ranges and makes you harder to play against in future hands.
The converse of this, ensuring that you are charging your opponents for whatever information you do give away, seems not to happen as often. This month, I’m going to discuss why this concept is important and offer some suggestions for how it ought to change the way you play.
A Hypothetical
Suppose that you are the tightest poker player on Earth. You only play no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, and you only play pocket Aces. You always play with the same players, and they all know that you open fold KK from any position. Furthermore, they are all very good players with strong understandings of poker and game theory. For some reason, you keep playing with them anyway; perhaps you are a lonely old man, and they are your only friends.
Needless to say, this is a losing strategy, and there are quite a few things you could do to improve it: play some more hands, find a new game, or quit playing altogether. However, you are not willing to do any of these things. The only thing you are willing to do is change the way that you play Aces. You are willing to call, raise any amount, or even fold if it will improve your results. If you are only going to play Aces, and everyone at the table knows this, what is the optimal way to play them?
You should just move all-in whenever you have Aces (or raise enough that no one can afford to call you with anything speculative, which amounts to the same thing). This is a superior strategy to folding, since you are virtually guaranteed to win at least the blinds, excepting that rare occasion when someone else has the other two Aces.
This is also a superior strategy to raising anything less than all-in, since your savvy opponents will always play perfectly against you. They will call your pre-flop raise with hands that have the potential to crack you, and they will mix value bets and bluffs against you with optimal frequency post-flop. Since they have perfect information about your hand, raising an amount that could be called can only give them an opportunity to outplay you.
The only exception to this rule would be if you have AA in the big blind in an unraised pot. Here it could arguably be correct to check instead of raising all-in. This is the only situation in which you could end up seeing a flop with any hand but AA, so it is the one time that you can play your hand without telling your opponents exactly what you have.
In every other situation, however, the only way to mitigate the harm done by revealing perfect information about your hand is to set the price for taking advantage of that information so high that none of your opponents is able to do anything about it. Let us know extend this concept to less hypothetical situations.
Pre-Flop Raise Sizing
It is standard practice to raise the same amount pre-flop whether you have AA or 65s. Though it would be nice to make big raises with your big hands and small raises with your speculative or bluff hands, this benefit is not generally worth the information that it reveals to all but the least observant opponents. But what if there were a way that you could raise more with your strong hands than with your weak ones without revealing any additional information?
You can, if you vary your raise size by position. Think about it: your raising range in first position is undoubtedly stronger than your button raising range, and everyone at the table probably knows that. If you raise to four times the big blind whenever you raise from first position and to two times the big blind whenever you raise on the button, you will be disproportionately making big raises with strong hands and small raises with weak hands.
However, this does not provide your opponents with any new information. All they know is that when you raise in first position, you probably have a strong hand, and when you raise the button, you probably don’t. Then again, they probably knew that already.
The important thing is that you raise the same amount with any hand that you happen to be raising from a given position. Thus, if you do find yourself raising 65s in first position, you should still go to four times the big blind, and if you do get Aces on the button, you should still min-raise. It’s not a perfect system for optimizing your pre-flop raise sizing, but it gets a lot closer than raising the same amount with any hand from any position, without revealing any additional information.
In fact, such a strategy is arguably superior because it charges opponents for information that a uniform raise sizing strategy gives away for free. If you are going to announce that you have a strong hand, which you pretty much are when you raise in first position, then you might as well charge a higher price to opponents who want to take advantage of their position to use that information against you. A player set mining with a small pair might still show a profit against you, but his profit will at least be smaller since it costs him more to see the flop.
Cold-Calling 3-Bets
If the pot has already been raised and re-raised before the action gets to me, it’s rare for me to call the 3-bet cold, at least when stacks are shorter than 200 BB’s. If I have a hand I want to play, I will almost always 4-bet it.
Doesn’t a cold 4-bet scream strength? Isn’t it giving away a lot of information about my hand? Of course, but then again, so does cold calling a 3-bet. If there are two raises in front of you, and you haven’t yet put a penny into the pot, anything other than folding is going to reveal a lot of strength, as there is a quite limited range of hands that can be played profitably in this situation. The 4-bet at least builds the pot and charges players to use the information you are revealing against you.
This is exacerbated when you are out of position. Not only must your cold calling range be tighter without the benefit of position, but you also make it that much easier for your opponent to exploit the information you are giving him. Pretty much the only time I would cold call a 3-bet from out of position would be if I felt that I had such a large edge against my opponents that despite the edges they ought to have (superior position and information), they would be too weak to take advantage of me. Such players don’t often come along in high stakes online games these days, but here’s a hand I played against one recently:
It was a $5/$10 6-handed online game. The player in first position was a relatively tight and weak player with about $500. He opened with a raise to $30. An extremely bad, loose passive player in middle position re-raised to $90 with $3000 behind. The action folded to me in the small blind. I had $1350 and a pair of T’s.
If the 3-better had been a good player, I would have folded. For one thing, TT is not in good shape against his range. The original raiser was tight enough that no one was 3-betting his first position raises as a bluff. That meant that the 3-better had to have a decent hand, probably TT+,AQs+,AKo. My pair has 36% equity against that range, so I can’t expect to play it for value unimproved.
Set mining isn’t going to pay off against a good player, either. I’d have to call $80 just to see the flop, which of course would not give me a set 8 times out of 9. Considering that even with a set I won’t win 100% of the time, I’d have to average $800, 10 times my pre-flop investment, from second-best hands on the flops that do make me a set. In fact, I’d need a better return than that, since there’s also the risk that the original raiser could shove pre-flop and force me off my hand anyway.
The problem is that my cold call would reveal far too much about my hand to a good player. He’d know that I knew his hand had to be strong, he’d know that my hand had to be strong, and he’d know that I knew that he knew that my hand had to be strong. In other words, he wouldn’t be stacking off post-flop with just any overpair, which is what I’d need him to do to make my set mining profitable. So against a good player, this would be a fold.
My opponent in this hand was not a good player, though. I expected him to have a big pair almost always, to put very little thought into what I might have, and to overplay an overpair post-flop. Against him, I could cold call and try for a set. If I hit, I expected to win $1350 most of the time, more than enough to justify an $80 pre-flop investment, even considering the possibility of a 4-bet from the original raiser.
As it played out, I cold called the 3-bet, and the original raiser called. The flop was just about perfect for me: T [spade] 9 [diamond]2 [spade]. I checked, figuring that the 3-better was guaranteed to bet if he had an overpair, and that he wasn’t calling a bet anyway if all he had was AK.
Sure enough, he bet $150. This wasn’t as much as I would have liked, but once again, I didn’t see much point in raising. If he had an overpair, he would bet it again, and if he didn’t, then he was folding to a raise. I called, and the first position player folded.
The turn was a nice, safe 2 [heart]. I checked, and he bet $222 into what was now a $580 pot. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. The small bet size didn’t scream confidence, though it was enough to easily allow for an all-in bet on the river. I figured if he was confident enough to call a turn shove, then he would probably shove the river himself, and if he was still bluffing with AK, then maybe he’d fire a third barrel or river a second best hand. So I called again.
The river was the 4 [diamond]. I checked, he bet the $885 I had left, and naturally I snap-called. He showed QQ, and I won a big pot.
I can guarantee you that once I cold-call, a good player is not stacking off with Q’s in this spot. The only hand he could hope to beat would be JJ, and even that is a hand I’m pretty unlikely to stack off with. He loses to 99, TT, KK, and AA. I could maybe have AKo or AQs, but those aren’t hands that are going to play a big pot with him anyway.
Thus, a good player with QQ would be in pot control mode from the flop. The best I could hope for would be for him to check the flop and then make crying calls on the turn and river. That would probably net me barely $800, and that’s a best case scenario. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he called turn and folded river.
Of course, if the river had been a Q, then a good player would have gotten the money in with me, and there would be nothing I could do to avoid losing a big pot. In other words, cold calling out of position would be kind of like letting him free roll me. I’d know basically what his range was, he’d know basically what my range was, but he’d have position. He’d play small pots when he was in bad shape against my range and big pots when he was in good shape, and it would be a lot harder for me to figure out where I stood or control the size of the pot from out of position.
TT is weak enough just to fold it pre-flop. With KK or AA, I’d 4-bet. They would play almost as badly when cold called out of position as TT, and for the same reasons. The 4-bet would announce at least as much information about my range, but it wouldn’t put me in such an undesirable position with the vast majority of the stacks yet to be bet.
Conclusion
The lesson here is to be conscious of situations where your opponents will correctly put you on a very strong hand range. This is not the time to slowplay. A good hand reader is not going to try to bluff you or overplay a second best hand, but he will take free cards in hopes of hitting a miracle draw. The best you can do is bet your hand hard, bluff any time you happen to show up with an unexpectedly weak hand, and hope that your opponent makes a crying call with something that’s a little too good to fold.
You’ve undoubtedly heard it said before that poker is a battle for information. At least among good players, the one who has the most information about the other’s hand will be the one who gets the best of it. It stands to follow, then, that information is worth money at the poker table.
You probably understand this concept and are willing to spend some money to avoid giving away information about your hand. When we talk about “mixing it up” or range balancing”, we often mean playing a hand in a way that is perhaps not ideal in a vacuum but which creates deception about your ranges and makes you harder to play against in future hands.
The converse of this, ensuring that you are charging your opponents for whatever information you do give away, seems not to happen as often. This month, I’m going to discuss why this concept is important and offer some suggestions for how it ought to change the way you play.
An article well-worth reading multiple times.