Re-raising (PLO--rambling post)

[Aisthesis]

I guess I should preface this with some observations about the problems we've discussed at length here and to which I suppose everyone has his or her (? no women here as far as I know?) strategy.

Anyhow, whatever you re-raise (AA being the obvious candidate), getting 1/4-1/3 of stack in can be difficult at best and, in my own experience, a good way to make your AA into a loser. Essentially, you MUST CB, and you're pot-committed. So, while you may win it even more than the 60% or so of the time you should, you lose your whole stack whenever you lose and win only 1/4-1/3 of it when you win.

So, an idea I had was to re-raise consistently to about 10% of available stack-depth. Then, if it's HU, regardless of what you're re-raising with, bet out 2/3 pot and take it from there. If it's still 3-way or more, I'd say pot it (or checkraise if you're OOP and a LAG will attack your check) if you still like your hand and check if you don't.

This at least seems to me to have some potential if and when re-raising is a good play at all. I should perhaps add that I have had good experiences simply not re-raising at all unless I could get almost all of stack in play. It makes it a LOT easier to bet your AA because you have deception on your side, and you're not pot-committed at all. Anyhow, on that strategy, you just play your hand on the flop, can get away easily, etc.

On the other hand, if you play it that way, it's extremely rare that you get into a situation where you actually CAN get the majority of stack in PF--and maybe that's not a bad thing, since even with AA, you're still only a 60-40 favorite against a lot of hands (probably more like 65-35 against most, but 60-40 against strong wraps).

Also, re-raising seems to me to be a good preventive measure against excessive raising, as often occurs.

So, that brings me to my first big question: Under what general circumstances in terms of table texture do you want to re-raise at all?

At very raisy tables, it can be difficult, but it does discourage all of these frivolous raises, and you're more likely to be a big favorite. The downside is that that kind of player is going to be very likely to attack your AA with rather unknown hands. So, it's also presumably important, if you re-raise here, to have a very good mix of other hands in there--I'm think maybe that any 2 pair hand (even 3322?) as well as a lot of ds hands with big cards, ideally including an A that can give you TP and allows repping the AA set.

At fairly tight tables, I'm thinking maybe re-raising just isn't so great a play. First, you run into another AA too often and just end up splitting a tiny bit of dead money with very high variance play. Second, by losing the deception value in your AA, you take away a lot of ability to take down what would otherwise have been a split pot (vs. another AA).

My provisional conclusion (hopefully others will have some thoughts here) is that re-raising is a good play at LAG-ish type tables but that you need a very healthy ratio of non-AA hands in there. They're going to attack a lot of pots where you'd be inclined to lay down your AA, so I think you need at most 40% AA hands in your re-raising range (probably ideal would be about 1/3).

The second big question here is what hands you want to re-raise with. Doing it with more or less all truly premium hands would be one idea, but I don't completely like it. For one thing, it seems like you're actually taking away some equity from a hand like 89TJds, which is super in a raised pot with 5 players seeing the flop. I really think I'd prefer to play it in THAT situation rather than a situation where you're HU and have yourself already put 10% of your stack in.

The thing is, you're going to be playing very short-handed more than likely in whatever pot you re-raise. Hence, my liking for the 2 pair hands. HU, even bottom set seems quite strong, whereas a hand like 6622 is virtually worthless in a 5-way pot. While I haven't added up just how many of these there are, I'm pretty sure there are far fewer of these than there are AA hands, so I don't think bluffing missed flops HU should pose huge problems.

Other hands that I intuitively like for re-raises are strong but not super ds hands including an A. Good examples: AKQJds (which is not so great in straighting terms but should play very well HU). Or AT87ds, where the lack of closure on top makes it significantly worse multi-way imo than AT97ds but where this doesn't matter as much HU, since any straight becomes a very strong hand.

One might actually consider a fair number of ds wraps with holes on top by the same reasoning (namely, that the location of the hole matters less HU).

Anyhow, that's about as far as I've gotten in thinking about this. Hopefully others will have some further ideas and/or critique of my suggestions thus far.

[Stoneburg]

The re-raising idea with lesser hands opens up the possibility of the original raisor re-re-raising with AA and managing to get HIS stack in preflop though.

[Aisthesis]

True, but that's the idea of keeping the re-raise at around 10% or so. Then, if they re-raise their AA, they're in the limbo area of being pot-committed.

However, one thing I'm not at all sure about is whether it's a good or a bad thing to have an A in your hand. Particularly if you hit top pair, it's very unlikely that they have AA, and it's less likely just given your A (and also since I'm advocating re-raising mainly against loose raisers, who are going to have a wide range anyway), but if they do, you're in bad trouble in those cases where you flop top 2.

Another downside to having an A in your hand against possible AA: You now only have 3 live cards rather than 4.

I think it's also desirable to only re-raise some AA hands but not all--just how many I'm not sure about.

I guess there are really 3 questions here:

1) Under what table conditions should you re-raise when this means getting less than 2/3 of stack in PF?

2) How much should you re-raise under such conditions? (on this one, I'm suggesting re-raising to about 10% of stack-depth)

3) What hands should you re-raise? Here, AA definitely has to play a fairly sizeable role, and I also like other 2 pair hands (perhaps the little ones most of all). On the other ones and the optimal mix between AA and other hands I'm still unclear.

[Felonius_Monk]