If I think I'm ahead, I want to give him a chance to bluff at it on a later street. Again, I have position. The idea of raising here holds a lot more weight when you're out of position, because then you'd like to end the hand early. I'm confident that I can make better decisions than my opponent with a positional advantage.. I get more information to go on than he does.
Yes, if he's unpaired with two overcards he will outdraw me 25% of the time. If he's got one overcard, he'll outdraw me 12% of the time. A small pocket pair will outdraw me 9%. That's poker, and if I can get him to make another bet at it some of those times he misses, it will be +EV in the long run, because he's usually missing.
I have to get back on this again. First of all, if you read all my posts in this thread, I never once said to raise flop for info. I always said to raise to "follow your read", which turned out to be correct, and I did mention that stacks aren't exactly ideal to do it, but his 350 can be raised to 850 w/o you necessarily being pot committed yet, you'll still have ~1450 and a fold is not necessarily crazy, although a bit ugly I admit.
Now, your figure of 25% of getting outdrawn (to the river) puts you in a nice 3 to 1 advantage, and I think its fine to take that risk, however, although this time villain did bluff again at the pot, many times this won't happen if he misses the turn. How many times do you see a player take a stab at a pot and then back off if he gets called and misses the next street? TBH, I see that happening much more often than him betting again if he also misses the turn, unless he's a real aggressive Phil Ivey type of player. All I'm saying is that if you're not raising this although you feel you're ahead, you have to be fairly sure ( just fairly, of course I know you can't be always sure) this player will bet again on the turn even if he misses, if not this play is never +EV and all you did was give him a free card with a 12% chance to outdraw you on the turn.
I'm not discounting the probability you had this type of read on him, and I'm not criticizing your play. Actually I'm glad you posted this hand because it gives an opportunity to think at a different level. I just wanted to know the reason you didn't raise the flop bet, because the whole stack size issue and raise getting called only by hands that beat you, even if they have their merits, are not, IMO, a good enough reason. I mean think about it, we're not raising the flop but we're calling a 1k bet on the turn. Why? You're doing it based on a specific read of the situation, and if that's your read you're calling this 1k whether its a Q or a 3 on the turn. So why are we worrying about being pot committed with a raise on the flop? That just doesn't add up, it would only if you fold to a turn bet that's not a 7 or 8, and its the reason why I don't accept the "raise being awful because of stack size" issue (sorry DM, but somehow I had to take a shot at you
).
But I will accept the idea of you thinking to squeeze more from this hand vs a 3 to 1 risk of getting outdrawn. This makes much more sense and the percentages are most definitely on your side, so now I see what you're getting at and this line of thinking that you followed throughout the hand is a much better explanation, also adding in the mix the positional advantage you have on him and the chance to add more pieces to the puzzle.
