No Limit Hold’em is a complicated game. The breadth and depth of necessary decisions demanded are as varied as in chess, reversi, bridge or backgammon (which is most like poker in its luck element). Attempt to account for every variable in every decision and you’ll make yourself certifiably insane. The best way to handle difficult situations is to minimize their number. By eliminating as many external variables as possible, you can simplify your game, and your life playing it.Game theory experts call this “play optimization.” There are moves you can make in a game which are correct, and cannot be exploited by your opponents. Let’s take a look at a common example in No Limit Hold’em tournaments. It is almost always correct to call with the likely-to-be worst hand if you’re getting 2:1 pot odds, since you are rarely much worse than 33% to win as an underdog.
- 75o is 34% against AKs
- A5s is 30% against AQo
- K4o is 28% against QQ
So let’s say you have one of these hands while playing an MTT. You’re in late position with a big stack, and the blinds are fairly short (less than 20 big blinds). You raise your standard 2.5x to 3x the big blind in a steal attempt, and the SB or BB shoves. Now you’re faced with a difficult decision…what’s his shoving range? Has he been tight or loose? How aggressive does he think I am? What does he think my range is, and what impact does that have on his range?
There’s an easy way around this. Your raise has to be enough to give you 2:1 on your money if you’re forced to call a re-raise. Your play is unexploitable pre-flop. You are getting the right price against the tightest shoving range (except your opponent is Allen Kessler).
How much do you bet? We can devise a fairly simple formula to find out. At the start of a hand, there are approximately 2.5 big blinds in the pot (SB + BB + antes). The short-stack in question has “S” big blinds remaining, which will also be part of the overall pot. We are looking for the “N” number of blinds to bet-and-raise.
When your opponent shoves, he’s calling N, and raising the rest of his stack, S – N. In order to get 2:1 on your money, the amount you’re calling off, (S – N), has to be ½ of the rest of the chips in the pot. Solving our equation with freshman algebra now looks like this:
(S – N) = ½ (S + N + 2.5)
2(S – N) = S + N + 2.5
S = 3N + 2.5
3N = S – 2.5
N = 1/3 S - .833
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it N = 1/3S – 1.
Let’s assign some real numbers to see how accurately this works. The blinds are 150/300 with a 25 ante. Our targeted big blind has 5400 chips after posting the blind. Our equation says we should raise to 1500. If we do so, after our opponent shoves, we will have to call 3900 more. There are 5400 + 1500 + 300 + 150 + 225 = 7575 chips in the pot. Our pot odds are 1.95:1. Pretty close estimation from a simple formula.
Why not just shove? Well, if you’re the small blind and you’re stealing from the big, shoving is fine from a game theory perspective. But, in my experience, most players think you’re stronger if you just put out a raise than shove, so you’re actually losing fold equity by shoving than making the “N” bet.
So, do you make this play every time you have an opponent with the right stack size in the blinds? Personally, I save this play until the antes come in. Otherwise, you’re committing an extra blind with each raise to achieve the same 2:1 ratio. You’re also losing the opportunity to establish a tight image in the first five or six levels of a tournament, if you happen to want that kind of thing.
If your opponent in the big blind has also been known to be a big fan of the stop-and-go flop play, you may also wish to consider either tightening up your range for the “N” bet or just going with a standard raise. If you have a hand which needs a really specific flop to be good (low connectors or one-gappers, for example), you’re committing far too many chips pre-flop, and spewing them off with a flop fold to a stop-and-go.
Poker’s tough enough in the best of times. Developing tips and tricks to optimize what you’re doing can help weather the worst of variance storms. It’s worth the effort to find a way to make the tough decisions easier.
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* Paul "grapsfan" Herzog has been a PocketFives.com Contributing Writer since 2005, and is a successful mid-stakes poker player. He can often be found playing online when he has free time away from his duties as a Software Testing Engineer for a Minnesota firm.
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