Poker Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Let's take a look
Let's take a look at an example where your opponent is opening 23.4% of their hands. In a 6-max cash game, your opponent in middle position open raises to 3 BBs and the action folds to you in the big blind and you call the raise with AsTs. The flop comes Qs7c3s. You check to your opponent who bets 5 BBs into a 7.5 BB pot. You check-raise to 14 BBs.
First off
First off we know most good opponents will continue in this situation with a wider range than mediocre regulars or weak players in general. Still, they'd have to re-float with a significantly wide range for this play not to be +EV for you. If you're balancing your range properly in these spots, your better opponents will begin to know that you can do this with top pair, sets, and so on. Even before your opponents have a better idea of what your range will be here, they'd have to continue with such a large portion of their range and call 48% of the time or more for it not to be a profitable play. As it stands, if we say that roughly 8% of the time they'll re-bluff you with their air range and you'll have to fold, the math would look like this: -14(.43) + (12.5(.57) = -6 + 7.1 = 1.1 EV