Getting crippled with top pair

From a hand history discussed on rgp.

After this hand I was questioned about it. I have put in my thoughts in
from when I was playing the hand. Help me understand where I can improve.
Bet preflop? can you fold to the flop bet?

Grant (Morphy?) and Fell both jumped on me about it

> PokerStars Game #22603082268: Tournament #124719100, $5.00+$0.50 Hold'em No
Limit - Level III > (25/50) - 2008/12/03 22:37:10 ET
> Table '124719100 1' 9-max Seat #6 is the button
> Seat 1: jimpic79 (3390 in chips)
> Seat 2: charrison100 (4145 in chips)
> Seat 3: bgadams (2250 in chips)
> Seat 4: brewcam (1405 in chips)
> Seat 5: Grant1525 (1690 in chips)
> Seat 6: jpawloski (1530 in chips)
> Seat 7: k1d_qu1ck (960 in chips)
> Seat 8: Porsche_Dan (2855 in chips)
> Seat 9: aakringle (2775 in chips)
> k1d_qu1ck: posts small blind 25
> Porsche_Dan: posts big blind 50
> *** HOLE CARDS ***
> Dealt to charrison100 [Kh Qs]
> aakringle: folds
> jimpic79: folds
> charrison100: calls 50

MP limp to see if I hit

> bgadams: folds
> brewcam: folds
> Grant1525: calls 50
> jpawloski: calls 50
> k1d_qu1ck: calls 25
> Porsche_Dan: checks
> *** FLOP *** [Qd 9d 8s]

pot 250
TP 2K

> k1d_qu1ck: bets 910 and is all-in

Against 3 players I saw this as a steal. I called with my hand given it
was 1/3 my stack and a chance to knock him out. I was thinking A9 A8 two
diamonds or gut shot. No bet preflop from him in the blind made me
discount any pair or A face.

> Porsche_Dan: folds
> charrison100: calls 910

Thought the bet and the call was enough to isolate and that Grant and
Jason would fold.

> Grant1525: raises 730 to 1640 and is all-in

Ummm
Flush draw or straight draw or top pair

> jpawloski: calls 1480 and is all-in

Damn it
Flush draw or straight draw or top pair
One of these 2 has me beat.

> charrison100: calls 730

There was too much in the pot to not call and I was still going to have
1/2 my stack if I lost and that was a chance for a triple elimination.

> *** TURN *** [Qd 9d 8s] [Ad]
> *** RIVER *** [Qd 9d 8s Ad] [7d]

Made his flush. Grant and Jason both having the straight was a shock I
figured one had it and the other had AdXd but like I said with the pot
size and the amount of a call I felt it was justified.

> *** SHOW DOWN ***
> charrison100: shows [Kh Qs] (a pair of Queens)
> Grant1525: shows [Jh Th] (a straight, Eight to Queen)
> Grant1525 collected 320 from side pot-2
> jpawloski: shows [Ts Jc] (a straight, Eight to Queen)
> Grant1525 collected 855 from side pot-1
> jpawloski collected 855 from side pot-1
> k1d_qu1ck: shows [8d 6d] (a flush, Ace high)
> k1d_qu1ck collected 3890 from main pot
> *** SUMMARY ***
> Total pot 5920 Main pot 3890. Side pot-1 1710. Side pot-2 320. | Rake 0
> Board [Qd 9d 8s Ad 7d]
> Seat 1: jimpic79 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
> Seat 2: charrison100 showed [Kh Qs] and lost with a pair of Queens
> Seat 3: bgadams folded before Flop (didn't bet)
> Seat 4: brewcam folded before Flop (didn't bet)
> Seat 5: Grant1525 showed [Jh Th] and won (1175) with a straight, Eight to
Queen
> Seat 6: jpawloski (button) showed [Ts Jc] and won (855) with a straight,
Eight to Queen
> Seat 7: k1d_qu1ck (small blind) showed [8d 6d] and won (3890) with a flush,
Ace high
> Seat 8: Porsche_Dan (big blind) folded on the Flop
> Seat 9: aakringle folded before Flop (didn't bet)

>

From above

> Made his flush. Grant and Jason both having the straight was a shock I
> figured one had it and the other had AdXd but like I said with the pot
> size and the amount of a call I felt it was justified.

Do you understand what you just said?

You thought you were drawing dead but called because the pot was big?

Do you know what zero times a big number is?

You need to pay more attention to position and think of third to act in a nine handed game as third to act in a nine handed game rather than as middle position.

Given the situation (position and stack sizes) a KQo should probably have never been played in the first place.

Top pair with that coordinated flop is not what is meant by "hitting the flop"

So I guess that's three pretty big mistakes.

Fun with Poker Stove

I spent some time this morning just playing around with Poker Stove.

No starting hand is a favorite to beat nine other players. Not a single one. Pocket aces has about a 30% chance of prevailing against a field of 9 random opposing hands.

Of course getting 9-1 on a 30% proposition is a money winner, a very good money winner, but most of the time it’s going to be a loser.

As the field narrows the win percentage of AA grows a lot. According to Poker Stove it will win 85% of the time against a player who plays the top 20% of his hands.

But when Poker Stove says top 20% it means in terms of win percentage against a random hand. That includes things like A9o and A4s, which aren’t considered power houses against someone who’s shown strength or might show strength. Players who’ll call in early position limper with 20% of their hands aren’t likely to be playing A9o.

Here’s the top 20% against a random hand
AA KK QQ JJ TT 99 88 77 66
A9o ATo AJo AQo AKo
KTo KJo KQo
QTo QJo
JTo
T9s
J9s JTs
Q9s QTs QJs
K8s K9s KTs KJs KQs
A4s A5s A6s A7s A9s ATs AJs AQs AKs

What’s the top 20% against a strong hand? First you have to define what we mean by strong hand.

How about the top 5%? The top 5% against a random hand are AA KK QQ JJ TT AKs AKo AQo

I think everybody will agree that’s a collection of strong hands. Some might quibble on the margin, arguing for inclusion of 99 and 88 77 instead of AQo. There are more combinations of AQo than 99, so to replace the same number of hands that are removed by taking AQo out of the mix you need to go as deep as 77.

Against the top 5% that includes AQs AA wins 84.4% percent of the time. But against the top 5% that includes the middle pairs AA wins 84% of the time. Not a big difference, but big enough to suggest that when you’re against a known strong hand, or even just a suspected strong hand you might want to steer clear of the offsuit Aces, even hands as strong as AQo might be suspect.

What to play when you put the other guy in the top 5% and he’s playing the distribution that doesn’t include AQo but does include pairs as low as 77?

Playing any pair against that distribution is a loser, winning only about 45% of the time.

Because he’s playing strong pairs, you don’t want to get involved with some of the more hopeless pairs. Playing only the same pairs he does (77+) puts you at about 56% winning.

But since he’s playing other hands than pairs you can include pairs smaller than the pairs he plays, just not all of them.

Against a distribution of hands
77+
AKs AKo

Here’s how you’ll do calling with various pairs

44+ 48.7%
55+ 50.6%
66+ 53%

When against any kind of strength, think about staying away from those little pairs, 22, 33, 44 aren’t likely to be winners.

Top pair revisited

The other day I made a post titled Don't fall in love with top pair. More recently Ed Miller has a post about Going Broke with One Pair. The two ideas are related, although not exactly the same. Falling in love with top pair often leads to going broke needlessly, but the converse is not so often true. There are plenty of circumstances besides inappropriately falling in love with top pair which might lead to going busted with top pair. Ed's post uses one of those other situations as an example to illustrate his thesis.

His thesis appears to be

Going broke with just a pair brings on a bevy of emotions, from guilt (for ignoring such a simple rule), to embarrassment (for losing so much with such a modest hand), to despair (as in, “Why the hell can’t I figure this game out?”).

The thing is, all that angst is often thoroughly misplaced. Sometimes it’s not only ok to go broke with one pair, but it’s the right thing to do.

I'm not sure that I'd say going broke is ever the right thing to do, although it might sometimes be a common result from doing the right thing.

Ed didn't mention my prior post in his, but making a reference to somebody elses blog isn't the sort of thing I expect from Ed anyway. He's just not that kind of guy.

Some of Ed's post is based on some misconceptions he has about poker history and the source of the phrase "Don't go broke with top pair" as an adage that is heavily adopted by many players. He doesn't seem to understand the motivation for the original adage.

I think the main thing that trips people up is a common poker fallacy. It goes like this: “I see bad players do that a lot, so it must be a bad thing to do.”

It’s similar for going broke with one pair. Bad players do it a lot. It’s part of what makes them bad. But that doesn’t mean that’s it’s always a thing to avoid.

That's not really the source of the adage. The source of the adage is that it's a solid truth in the context of the games that gave rise to the adage. Those games tended to be deep money cash games. In deep money games it's important to keep pots small with vulnerable hands. To relate it to some comments I've made on my mathandpoker blog, (I'm having some database errors on that blog, so that link might not work) what becomes important in deep money no limit games isn't EV, it's risk-adjusted EV. Risk-adjusted EV is a concept from mathematical finance that's based on mean/variance efficient frontiers.

The way to control risk in deep money no limit games is to keep the pot small enough so that you can easily get away from vulnerable hands if things go badly for you.

Ed gives an example of a short money game where the hero got all-in on a red flop of 566 with a pair of black queens. Flush draws, straight draws, three sixes, overcards, all kind of draws that put his hand at risk and at best he has a 2-card redraw if he's beat.

As a prelude to the hand history he says,

Sometimes one pair is more than enough to get all-in with, and if you go broke, you go broke. An example of this is today’s Q&A.

That's nuts.

It turns out that the villain had a black AJ and the QQ was far ahead. But with that flop, there's no way to put a typical villian on a black AJ unless you've shown a history of being willing to lay down pairs on drawy looking flops and he's shown an ability to overplay weak draws. Without that information (which I didn't see anywhere) this is not at all an example of when an ovepair is more than enough to get all-in with. Not even close.

While it turns out I actually agree with Ed that in the situation as given it probably is right for the hero to call a check-raise on the flop with all his chips (which is how he got all-in), the reason it's probably the right thing to do isn't because his hand is worth it, it's because he didn't have many chips.

There was $3.30 in the pot preflop, hero bet $2 and the villain goes all-in for $2.50 more. Sure call an extra $2.50 once the pot is over $7. But not because you have a hand to go busted with, becuase the money is short and you're getting a price.

The didn't go busted anyway when the villain rivered an Ace, he had the villain covered.

Ed seems to have completely missed the point. About the only time top pair (or an overpair) is a hand to go busted with is when you're short stacked and the pot has gotten big relative to what chips you have left. Or, as is the actual case in his example, when you're not really going broke.

Bottom two

Two pair on the flop is usually a pretty good hand, one that you should feel comfortable with in most cases.

But when you're getting a lot of action, and the flop doesn't look real drawy, it's sometimes a hand you want to think about backing away from.

When there aren't a lot of draws showing on the flop you can be pretty sure that any action represents a strong holding.

Let's say you have a 5h7h and the flop is 57J, rainbow, you bet and there's a raise and a re-raise. That's pretty heavy action. What do they have. If there was no raise preflop you might want to eliminate JJ or AJ (you might not want to eliminate those possibilities, but let's just do it for this example). That leaves Jx, say J7-JK, 77, 55, 57, or 86 as possibilities for the first raiser. The second raiser probably doesn't have a single pair, he probably has one of the stronger possibilities, or a straight draw. Running pokerstove we get a 36% equity for bottom two pair in the 3 way pot.

That makes it plus EV for you on the flop, but that's if the hand ranges I'm assuming are accurate. It could be that you're a little better than 36%, it could be a little worse. In any event it's close to a wash for you if the action is very heavy and the bets make the dead money already in the pot insignificant. If the money left is deep it could be a negative implied odds situation for you too. What are you going to do if a 9 falls on the turn? A Jack?

In limit poker, if you're estimate is that you're ahead you should stick it out almost every time. But in no limit you sometimes need to think in terms of what the finance people call risk-adjusted return. Sometimes in no limit a plus EV situation isn't really plus EV once you make a risk-adjustment. That's a topic I need to cover in some detail at mathandpoker.com one of these days. But, for the most part the thing to keep in mind is that if the EV edge is small and the risk is large you should often give it up in no limit, wait for a better situation.