Choparno from PNW wrote:The following hand occurred in a $109 freezeout on Stars:
No-Limit Hold'em Tournament, 150/300 Blinds, 225 antes (9 handed) - Hold'em Manager Hand Converter from HandHistoryConverter.com
CO (t10530)
Hero (Button) (t10630)
SB (t5918)
BB (t10306)
UTG (t7234)
UTG+1 (t10608)
MP1 (t4149)
MP2 (t7987)
MP3 (t7480)
Preflop: Hero is Button with 10h, Jd
6 folds, Hero bets t600, 1 fold, BB calls t300
Flop: (t1575) 9c, 2h, 3s (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t850, BB raises t2100, Hero raises t9155 (all-in)
The first and most important point to note is that I know villain is a winning HSMTT reg, and I know that he doesn’t know me. I can make two assumptions based on this.
1) Villain will be actively looking for profitable bluffing opportunities, and not just be playing fit-or-fold.
2) As an unknown in HSMTTs, regs will tend to assume that I am on Level 2 – that is, that I will take what they are “representing” at face value, and that I am not thinking about what they think I have.
With those assumptions in place, when considering the merits of bluff 3betting a check-raise, we must take into account effective stack sizes, the board, villain’s range, our perceived range, the odds we’re laying ourselves on the bluff, and our equity if we happen to get called.
Effective stacks to start the hand are approx 34bbs. Because of that and our weak-looking flop bet sizing, on a dry flop like this villain has an excellent c/r bluff spot vs a level 2 player – he’s only risking about 20% of his stack, it’s very difficult for us to have hit the flop hard, and to continue we either have to flat and potentially face a committing turn bet, or put our “tournament life” at risk by going all in.
While our cbetting value range is rightly considered weak, the range of hands he can have to c/r with for value is even narrower. The only realistic hands he is repping here are sets and 9x (as a good player, we are assuming he is not defending hands as weak as 92/93/32, even to a min raise). So how many of those can he have?
99 almost certainly 3bet/calls it off preflop, so we can exclude that entirely. I’m less certain how he plays 22/33 – let’s say approximately one third of the time he 3bets those hands, and two thirds of the time he flats the min raise. So instead of 6 possible combinations of sets in his range, there are now only 4. But of those 4 combos, because he knows I’m so unlikely to have a hand I can stack off with on this flop, he probably slow plays at least 50% of the time.
So that leaves us with literally 2 realistic combinations of sets, an extremely narrow part of his overall range.
Analysing how many 9x combos he can have that play this way is more problematic. Maybe he c/rs and calls it off some of the time, and maybe he doesn’t. In my (admittedly limited) MTT experience, good villains are mostly check-calling here with 9x and giving us rope to barrel, knowing that they are infrequently ahead if all the chips go in on the flop.
Note that if villain were on level 4, he could potentially own us here – he could make this c/r with, say, A7o, expecting us to recognise how weak his value range is, and then call it off vs our anticipated level 3 bluff shove. But without history, I never expect that to happen.
His range is therefore comprised mostly of bluffs. So how often do we need a rebluff to be successful in order to show a profit?
We are risking 8831 chips to win 4525, so our bluff needs to work a bit less than 66% of the time to show an automatic profit. However, this does not consider our equity when called. Those times he happens to have a 9x hand like A9 and calls it off, we have 27% equity. I.e., more than 1 in 4 times we will win the hand anyway and virtually double up.
If stacks were a little deeper, say 45bbs, our play would not be as attractive, because our shove would need to work more often to be profitable. The shallower we are, the wider range we can be expected to 3bet shove for value. The deeper we are, the less credibility we have for reraising a flop like this, and with enough chips left behind, villain would retain the option of 4betting.
Finally, consider the importance of having 2 overcards to the board, even on what is seemingly a “pure” bluff. If we had, for example, 44 instead of JT, our play would be less appealing. I believe it would still show a profit, but our equity vs an expected calling range is that much worse, as we are typically drawing to 2 outs instead of 6. We are therefore actually better off having a “worse” hand in an absolute sense.
Now this is a level of thinking well beyond most of us and the norm for most winning players.
I love this post and the way it portrays all the truer intricacies and thought patterns of a HS players, and the fact this all is thought out in the space of seconds.
