ChuckTs
Legend
Silver Level
Using pokerazor (free while in beta) range analysis by way of combinatorics. Again, I urge you guys to do these yourself. It's easy and extremely helpful with situations like below where you're not entirely sure how often you're good. Just enter your hand, your opponent's range, any board cards, and hit 'calculate'.
Scenario 1:
The bars under 'frequency' represent the % of the time you'll see that hand type. The bars under 'cumulative frequency' represent the % of the time you'll see that hand type plus the sum of the %s of all the better hands in his range. So basically that hand type or better.
So in this scenario, we've got the best hand %68 of the time, plenty enough to continue. Not only that, but the hands we're beating have very little chance of improving (3 outs for Ax, 2 outs for underpairs). Clearly the best line at this point is to flat and decide whether or not we can call a second and third barrel, or if we should fold based on our reads.
This example is a little skewed though. A decent tag won't always cbet a hand like QQ-TT or other hands for that matter. His range is probably a little more heavily weighted towards top pair+ hands, but we're still clearly a favourite over his range. Also, the top pair hands also include KQs which we tie with, so that skews that number just a little bit in the other direction too. I think in practice, this is a spot we should call the cbet, and generally try to either get to showdown, or get some minor value if we get checked to on later streets. If he barrels the turn and/or river, we should generally lay it down unless he's got some barreling history.
Scenario number 2:
Same pf action, but the flop changes to Qxx. This actually changes things considerably, mainly because AQo is not in his range, and so top pair is much less likely.
So now we're good somewhere around %75 of the time.
Again, the results are a little skewed, but not enough for us not to know that we're an even bigger favourite on this board. Again this is a similar wa/wb spot where raising won't do much without some very specific reads and/or history with villain. Peeling and continuing with reads in mind is still the play, but this time we can be a little more confident in our hand's strength.
Scenario 3:
Where it gets complicated. Honestly I don't know where to start with a situation like this.
In terms of his made hands, we have the best hand about 2/3 of the time, but often times if we have the best hand, he still has a lot of outs to beat us. There are a ton of gutshots, plenty of 8 out draws, and a few flush draws, all of which add up to the fact that this is really really close. If we plug this range into pokerstove we're almost a dead on coinflip. I hope someone else can shed some light on this scenario and some good lines for it.
Scenario 4:
Low/middle connected, flushy flops. I tried a few of these, expecting ace high to be enough of our range to make some moves on our opponent, but I'm wrong. Some flops mean our opponent is sitting on lots of overpairs plus overs+gutshot draws, other flops mean they're sitting on sets and stronger draws. In general they have hands we can bluff-raise or float (ie AK high etc) something like %30 iirc. Either way they have hands and draws often enough that we just can't contest pots in these spots, and clearly don't hit the flops either.
In summary:
All this doesn't exactly tell us whether or not we should be calling KQo vs a %5 3bettor, but hopefully it sheds some light on some common scenarios. There are a billion more flop textures we could look at, but I'm getting lazy. Feel free to add more to this thread...
Scenario 1:
So we punch in a %5 range for villain, punch in our KQo, a typical board of Kxx, and we hit calculate (sorry for the large size):
The bars under 'frequency' represent the % of the time you'll see that hand type. The bars under 'cumulative frequency' represent the % of the time you'll see that hand type plus the sum of the %s of all the better hands in his range. So basically that hand type or better.
So in this scenario, we've got the best hand %68 of the time, plenty enough to continue. Not only that, but the hands we're beating have very little chance of improving (3 outs for Ax, 2 outs for underpairs). Clearly the best line at this point is to flat and decide whether or not we can call a second and third barrel, or if we should fold based on our reads.
This example is a little skewed though. A decent tag won't always cbet a hand like QQ-TT or other hands for that matter. His range is probably a little more heavily weighted towards top pair+ hands, but we're still clearly a favourite over his range. Also, the top pair hands also include KQs which we tie with, so that skews that number just a little bit in the other direction too. I think in practice, this is a spot we should call the cbet, and generally try to either get to showdown, or get some minor value if we get checked to on later streets. If he barrels the turn and/or river, we should generally lay it down unless he's got some barreling history.
Scenario number 2:
Same pf action, but the flop changes to Qxx. This actually changes things considerably, mainly because AQo is not in his range, and so top pair is much less likely.
So now we're good somewhere around %75 of the time.
Again, the results are a little skewed, but not enough for us not to know that we're an even bigger favourite on this board. Again this is a similar wa/wb spot where raising won't do much without some very specific reads and/or history with villain. Peeling and continuing with reads in mind is still the play, but this time we can be a little more confident in our hand's strength.
Scenario 3:
Where it gets complicated. Honestly I don't know where to start with a situation like this.
In terms of his made hands, we have the best hand about 2/3 of the time, but often times if we have the best hand, he still has a lot of outs to beat us. There are a ton of gutshots, plenty of 8 out draws, and a few flush draws, all of which add up to the fact that this is really really close. If we plug this range into pokerstove we're almost a dead on coinflip. I hope someone else can shed some light on this scenario and some good lines for it.
Scenario 4:
Low/middle connected, flushy flops. I tried a few of these, expecting ace high to be enough of our range to make some moves on our opponent, but I'm wrong. Some flops mean our opponent is sitting on lots of overpairs plus overs+gutshot draws, other flops mean they're sitting on sets and stronger draws. In general they have hands we can bluff-raise or float (ie AK high etc) something like %30 iirc. Either way they have hands and draws often enough that we just can't contest pots in these spots, and clearly don't hit the flops either.
In summary:
All this doesn't exactly tell us whether or not we should be calling KQo vs a %5 3bettor, but hopefully it sheds some light on some common scenarios. There are a billion more flop textures we could look at, but I'm getting lazy. Feel free to add more to this thread...
Last edited:
