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Jamming the flop from oop with a draw
Here’s one from yesterday’s game. We’re five-handed. Folds to the big blind, with a stack of 20bb, who opens to 2.5 bb. SB folds. I’m in the big blind with T4 of spades, with a stack of 26 bb. I call. The flop is 5 of spades, 3 of spades, 3 of hearts. What’s the right play for the big blind here? I just jammed, he called with QQ and they held up. Check-raise? Check-call? Thanks.
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4 Replies
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Ok, I’m replying to my own post because put this scenario through some analysis. Snowie likes a small lead 24% of the time and a small check-raise the other 76% of the time. But putting the Preflop scenario through HRC pointed up a complication—at 20bb deep, the button may not be opening his full range to this size. He may be jamming most hands and only raising to this size with his most premium hands. HRC says he should jam everything other than KK, A7o, K9o and KTo (I get KK, but why not AA? dunno). That would change things.
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Using solvers to study situations you run into is a great way to hone your game and improve your strategies. We need to be careful when analyzing a particular spot. The player pool is not always using a GTO strategy. In most of the games that we play very little of the population is playing this way. The solver strategy indicated that you should check/raise this on the flop. I would check this 100% of the time. You may end up getting it all-in on the flop but if your opponent jams you have the opportunity to get away from it.
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Interesting spot. This is a board we can lead in theory, but rarely and always small when we do. We should never be jamming it in my opinion. In theory land, our lead here doesn’t accomplish all that much and makes for a very complicated multistreet plan. I think we start to twist ourselves into knots, and shouldn’t really often find donk leads on paired boards. Our bread and butter donk leading boards are low boards that are unpaired and where a straight (especially where the Ax wheel straight) can’t be completed. If this board was 6s3s2h? Now, we LOVE a lead with Ts4s and should do it with abandon.
But the have it or don’t nature of paired boards make them incredibly tricky to play from a leading strategy. On this 5s3s3h board, which 3x do we lead out and which do we xR with? Same with 5x? Flush draws? We have to mix and randomize so much that we may twist ourselves into knots. At GTO, the solver likes to lead small with 10% of our holdings. In practice, I don’t think that is enough and these spots are so complicated, I like a check 100% strategy on paired boards OOP.
Okay, so we check and now V continues. We can and should have an aggro xR range on this board. But should it include all of our flush draws? Should this combo be one of them? If we look at all of our possible flush draws, our best raising candidates will contain a 6, 4, or 2 in them with a high card (or be exactly 6s4s, 4s2s, 6s2s). Because now we either have a combo draw OR we have a backdoor straight to go along with our big flush possibility. Our flush draws like As9s/KsTs make really ideal calls (we have two overs and a nice flush draw and can see how the hand develops on the T). This exact holding feels like it is right in the middle of things. The 4s is a nice addition (it gives us back door equity and blocks some scary holdings like As4s). The Ts is okay, but doesn’t really block our opponents better flush draws.
In theory land, we check raise this holding a decent amount of the time. In practice, against most opponents, I’m almost always check calling a small bet and evaluating on the T.
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Really really interesting. Snowie hardly leads on the unpaired board at all.
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