Very very very good post ^
I agree.
I would however like to perhaps argue the other side to get more of a debate going as this is a very common spot and we could perhaps do something that is a little outside the box to emphasize our understanding of population tendancies to increase our winrate. I perhaps quite like the 4bet pre flop. From my experience of NL10 there seems to be the following population tendancies;
- super wide 3betting cut off vs button (choosing the wrong hands to 3bet, such as KQ etc)
- very very low amounts of people 5bet getting it in (either folding directly to a 4bet with JJ/AK or calling)
- extremely high rake
So because people are using very poor theoretically based 3betting ranges such as KQ/AQ/KJ/AJ and hands that they think because they are immediately ahead of you they can 3bet for "value" (they misinterpret what value actually means) and they will almost always fold to a 4bet with these hands. When reviewing players games I have seen the following.
- btn opens, sb 3bets, bb folds AK
- hero opens jj in co, btn 3bets, hero fold
- hero opens qq utg, mp 3bets, hero folds
Often we are going to be out of position and our opponents will often have a "one and done" approach meaning they will cbet once but probably not follow it up with a tonne of aggresion. That means we can call the 3bet and call alot, but a lot of the time there will be an overcard and it will get a little messy.
As Alex said, Initiative IS important, at higher stakes 4bet folding here would be a bigger crime than Pardew benching Hatem Ben Arfa last weekend but at these stakes I actually think its good because we can get better hands to fold, we can get hands that share equity with us to fold and if we do get called by a potentially ambitious range then we have a hand that plays pretty well and lastly because its pretty unlikely we will get shoved on and thus we wont have many times that we face a very hard decision.
For the record Alexs post is very good for a nl50 player and sums up all the basic theoretical stuff pretty well but at every stake we should be looking to push the boundaries a little and do stuff that the other guys arent doing. The better you are, or should i say the more comfortable you are playing oop without initiative the more i would suggest calling.
I also tell guys who play micro stakes that if there is a very close spot and you dont know what to do that avoiding post flop is going to be ok perhaps because the rake is genuinely huge.
Big Blind rake/100 Rake in BB
$0.05 $0.59 11.9
$0.10 $1.25 12.5
$0.25 $2.58 10.3
$0.50 $4.68 9.4
$1.00 $7.55 7.6
$2.00 $11.27 5.6
$4.00 $14.81 3.7
$6.00 $16.98 2.8
$10.00 $18.47 1.8
$20.00 $21.31 1.1
$50.00 $23.24 0.5
This means that before you can establish the elusive 3bb winrate that makes you a "good reg" you have to win 11.9 first, compared to 400nl where i "just" need to win 3.7bb before I start posting graphs bragging about winning at 1bb/100
Just to reiterate, I think Alexs advice is better than the above but was trying to open a potential debate, i think that thinking outside of the box and thinking how to beat each stake seperately is one of the biggest reasons why the best regs are the best regs at each level, again its more important for you to be fundamentally sound than a "sick reg"
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