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Twitch Hand for EastCoastBidder
Loved this hand on Twitch that Ben played and I think we can learn a lot from it in our multiway conversations. So here’s the hand first of all. Ben opens off a stack of around 60bb from the HJ with KdTh. Co flats and BB flats. We have ourselves a sandwich multiway pot.
Flop comes Tc7d3d. BB checks. Our move? In the hand, Ben elects to cbet small and then faces a very uncomfortable raise from the CO.
Until I started looking at these spots very closely last month, this is exactly what I would do. I’m continuing my story, and I even have the Kd as an emergency backup/extra equity. But as we covered in the Deep Dive, we can’t play these spots like they are heads up, and let’s look at why.
First, let’s pretend the BB folded. If we enter this spot heads up, we’re still checking a LOT at GTO (see first graphic). We’re doing this in part because of the board and in part because we’re a little in the dark if we start firing at this flop. We have a nice hand, but we don’t want to get our stacks in with it. Plus, we’re nearly equal in terms of equity, so we can check this spot a decent amount even with a top pair like this one.
But BB didn’t fold, so what does that mean? It means our equity in this hand is even less. BB still holds 28% of the hand equity across their range in this spot. If this was a check before, it is even more so now. (in the three Flopzilla charts shown, player 1 is the big blind, player 2 is us, and player 3 is the cutoff). Digging even a little deeper, we can see that at the top of range, the CO is stronger than us (see the third image of the equity graph). This often happens in these spots because the in-position flatter should have a very specific and condensed range.
When we check, we have easier decisions and benefit from getting lots of information. If this checks through and then the big blind checks on the T, we’re almost never behind. We can almost bet with abandon if that happens. And if CO bets when we check, they should mostly bet small, and we have an easy call behind without putting in a ton of our stack. The only situation we hate is if CO bets and BB cRaises. But guess what? We can now get away cheap.
If you’re playing these multiway sandwich hands like you would heads up spots, I’d encourage you to look at these charts and think a bit about that practice. Our cbets here should be much more polarized with hands we’re happy to get it in with and hands we’re happy to fold to a raise. And we should be discarding the notion of “initiative” a lot in these multiway sandwich pots where we don’t have position and finding many more checks than we might be used to.
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5 Replies
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Hi. I’m new. Agree that a check is probably GTO, based on my little bit of knowledge. If you are going to c bet, would bigger be better?
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In theory, this is a really good flop to go for a bigger bet. It isn’t one that the flatting range is likely to hit as often and it makes it harder to raise in theory, especially with the big blind still act. So yes, I do think that checking is optimum, but if we’re going to bet, this is a good spot to go larger.
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Hey Guys – How many players at the table? How’d the rest of the hand play out? Grant it, a larger bet would have been warranted, but I imagine one or both of the other players have massive draws vs. Ben’s top pair / decent kicker.
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I, too, would feel the pull of “initiative” on the flop. A pair of Tens/ second kicker feels like it needs protection. We have 5 outs to improve plus 1 more for the backdoor, meaning we improve by the river about 1/4 of the time.
But Chris’s reasoning is spot on. When we bet, how many better hands are our villains folding? And of course, we want worse hands to come along. Checking disguises (maybe?) the strength of our hand and protects our checking range, preventing villain from indiscriminately betting every time we give up initiative. And checking range allows us to do the best play in poker imo, the check-raise.
My question is… if we are checking here, what are we check-raising?
All sets? or just the bottom two? We WANT them to have top pair when we hit a set, don’t we?
2-pairs?
Draws?
If we are check-raising we also need to find some bluffs, and we also need to protect our check/call range.
What do we slow play to protect our range? Nut flush draws and top set? Where does 9d 8d fall?
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