In some of your previous posts on this site, you have written about how there are effectively only two premium hands in NL, AA and KK, and that you frequently see people overplaying AK, espeically these days. I also seem to recall you saying fairly recently that if you have KK and your opponent has AA, you are going to lose your cash, regardless. I can also recall, and apologies if this is incorrect, you saying that in certain tournament situations, you must be prepared to lay down any hand, including AA.
Would you suggest that is only the very best players who will have such confidence in their reads to be able to lay down KK pre-flop, based entirely on a read, in a cash game situation? And what about in a tournament situation, very early in a tournament? I seem to recall that someone threw away KK heads up at the final of the Big One in the WSOP in the early 90s. Do you believe that for those of us who are not at this level, we should never throw away KK preflop, unless, for example, to do so would be to automatically go up the cash rankings in a tourney? I note from the (extremly helpful) charts you posted elsewhere that if you are heads up even with QQ it is 110-1 against him having a bigger pair.
I have a specific reason for posing this question. In a home game freezeout NL tournament I play in, with a mix of loose players, from passive to aggressive, I found myself in the first round, with pocket kings, against a guy whom I was positive had aces- I told him he had them before he turned them up but, sadly, after I had called.
So my question, I suppose, is will you weaken the rest of your game by effectively playing in fear of massive but unlikely hands if you make that kind of lay down? Could thinking like this make you end up 'playing scared' of monsters in the closet, or hole, that aren't really there? Similarly, would you ever think for a good but not expert player you should never be laying down, for example, middle or bottom set on an uncoordinated board?
Of course, the simple answer would be, I suspect, 'it depends on your read of the player and the situation', but I for one would very much appreciate your thoughts on this.Statistics: Posted by Telemachus — Wed Dec 22, 2004 4:27 am
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