Raising middle pairs over limpers in the early stages (regardless of buy-in) is somewhat risky.Set mining can be a profitable play for you when you can keep your entry costs low. Most of these calls in early stages are correct for implied odds strategy. If you raise it that much, it’s still not a big hit to thier situation, and you will likely NOT get others to fold. You’re immediately faced with a more difficult decision regarding a continuation bet man you’ve got over cards on the board. Why not open raise, but once there are limpers, avoid attacking them when its deep stacked and when the blinds are very small.
You also can’t forget about the 2:1 odds. If the pot is 1.5BBs pre flop, there is 1 limper, that makes it 2.5BBs. You now decide to raise to three big blinds, making the pot five.5BBs and the limper (assuming everyone else folds) has to call 2BBs to see a flop with 5.5BBs in it. As at result he is getting good odds to make a call here at nearly 3:1.
You have to consider the fact that you’re likely to never be worse than a three to one under dog pre-flop. However there is a problem. Or rather a couple of problems.
Firstly your problem is bet-ability of a marginal hand. This could mean rags facing off against ace king. The flop comes down 5 J Q. Sure you’re now ahead, but really how much can you afford to bet at this point? will you even be able to call a continuation bet if it comes? What if you lead into the pot? What happens when he calls? Do you fire again on the turn? It’s an expensive guessing game now with just bottom pair?
But what if you have something like pocket threes pre-flop? With three big cards flopping, you can theoretically assume your opponent miss the flop, but you are stuck with how much to bet since it missed you as well?
So yes, you had correct odds pre flop, if you could get to showdown for something approximating that pre flop investment. But when everyone has a lot of chips you can’t do it. You still have 3 betting rounds before you get to fifth street.
But that leads to the second problem. You are out of position and that’s not good poker tournament strategy. What this also means is that when you do actually hit the flop, the pots will be smaller. It also means when you don’t make a big hand, you will lose more than your fair share because the player in position will bet you off marginal hands with a worse hand himself.
If you think about it, in deep stack play, you shouldn’t be concerned with pot odds too much. Implied odds is what you need to be looking at here.. i.e. what is the size of my chip stack and my opponents chip stack. I’ll call with a massive range when the bet is 5% or less of the effective stack. If they have AA, and I have 53s, all the better. If they have AA, and I want to be playing my little cards. But if the raise is getting up to around 10% of my stack, then I fold all the weired stuff, except PPs. But in all of that the only thing I am thinking about is the size of the bet I have to call compared to the effective stack.
My cards may be 56s and be up against big slick. But unless I make and OESD, Flush draw or 2 pair or better, I will be surrendering pretty much every pot on the flop especially if I am OOP. Occasionally I might check call on a low board with a low pair, but still there would have to be some read to make me do that.
In Gus Hansen’s poker tournament strategy book, he often sounds angry at himself for calling early position raises from his big blind blind. The reason is that he keeps getting faced with all these tough post flop decisions. Now he has physical tells to work with, and, as mentioned, he is Gus Hansen. There are no person to person tells and we can’t play like Gus. Take into account, your opponent is weaker than the players Gus plays against. It’s also important to know if your opponent can get away from a top pair, or are more willing to let it ride.
If the pre-flop bet isn’t going to hurt you much, then look to the potential stacking off your opponent. You might choose to play a given hand anyway, but do it for the reason of implied odds and not pot odds, if that makes sense. You have to know how to calculate poker odds when getting into hands like this becuase it may very well determine your long term success in tournaments. Just knowing Poker rules are not enough to win, you need strategy too.
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