Dubai, if this was Super Tuesday on Stars, what would you do?
It was only a matter of time before this question, or something like it, appeared in this thread. Personally I think it isn't relevant, when at a new table and facing a decision you have to profile your unknown opponent as someone who plays like an average opponent in this particular field, something that will obviously be very different between the UKIPT Nottingham and the Super Tuesday. I am more interested in people's answer to this question:
what realistically do you think villain's flop raising range is?
At first I was advocating a flop 3bet because the way I think the hand is going to play out after we call, purely intuitively, is that we will be putting more money in on the turn and folding the river when we miss, or stuck with deciding between bet/fold and check/call on the river with a very well-defined hand. Obviously the scenario where we hit 2nd nuts isn't bad, but I don't think it's an amazing enough spot to justify the downside. Meanwhile, if we 3bet, even if villain's stacking range is only sets as Dubai says, provided villain's flop raising range is wider than this then I think we turn a pretty big profit. Worst case scenario for us is that the villain always just folds to our 3bet whenever he doesn't have a set (I think it's pretty obvious that we make mad dimes on average when villain flats our 3bet), in which case we lose 4k on average vs his sets and win 2.5k the rest of the time, so we only need him to have 'bluffs' in a ratio of 4:2.5 for us to profit. As stated before, there are only 7 combinations of sets so we only need villain to have >11 other combos. Imo, the average UKIPT villain has a range that looks something like AT, JJ, {QJ J9 J8 89 A2-A5 AJ AQ} in clubs, 75 and some random other stuff considering that he probably 'put you on Ace King'. This range is 34 combos without any of the random spazzes, I'm interested to see whether Dubai thinks the average villain isn't raising >11 non-set combos on this flop or whether he thinks that there is some way for villain to play vs our 3bet that owns us in some other way. Also I guess he could also say that it goes 3 way and we have 1.7% some proportion of the time, but I personally think that absolutely never happens. Finally, he could just be saying that raising is not better enough than calling to justify the extra variance, in which case this whole argument is just a difference of opinion and there's no concrete way to resolve it.
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