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Raising up front

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Raising up front

Postby Hofstra » Mon May 09, 2005 9:28 am

Reading Berman's section in SS2 on PLO, I noticed that he advocates never raising in early position. His main argument is that you are at a huge positional disadvantage, and that playing a big pot only gives your opposition more ammunition to play back at you.
In the special case where you have AAxx up front, he says that it is even more important not to raise, since if the pot gets big you will be forced to defend your hand.

Now I understand that if you get in 2/3 of your stack before the flop with AAxx you are going to bet the rest of it without even looking what the flop is. (Hellmuth says he would even do this if half of his stack was in...) But if you make a raise UTG and get 3 callers, you're not at all forced to continue if the flop looks ugly. If you hit the flop you win a pot with some substance to it, and moreover you have reduced your opponents implied odds if they are drawing.

Of course, Berman plays in quite different games than most of us do, so maybe the deciding factor is the quality of the opposition. Surely, if you are out of position and you are playing a pot against skilful and tricky opponents then you'd rather not invest too much chips before you have a decent hand. But then, if you raise first in you commit 3% of your chips, and I don't understand why that is too much. If it gets reraised after a bunch of callers then the pot is so big that you can get most of the money in preflop (ideal situation), if you get callers then you are just going to play a nice pot which you easily can get away from if you miss. In the worst case, it gets folded to the tricky expert on the button who puts in a raise. Then you can call, and if you miss the flop you lost about 10% of your stack.

If you play in small sized online games such as most of us, then you figure to make better decisions on and after the flop than your opponents. I think that one of the ways of exploiting this is to ensure that there is a non-trivial pot on the flop, so that if your opponents make a mistake, it is a costly one.

Anyone who has some good ideas about this?

Pieter
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Postby Felonius_Monk » Mon May 09, 2005 4:54 pm

Well, I don't raise in EP generally unless it's an attempt to spice the table up a bit. Mostly for the reasons Berman mentions, though I've not read that SS2 section. Nothing wrong with raising early, however.

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