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Raising a Raise for information
After a few hands posted on here a couple of people have commented it is a bad idea to Re raise a raise to gain information.
I'm just wondering what everyones opinion is on this.
Those have said you should only re-raise if
1) you think you have the best hand and are doing it for value
2) if you dont think you have the best hand and are doing it as a bluff
and some other reason i cant remember!
It was said it is bad to reraise to find out where you are.
I quite like this move in poker, re-raising to see where I am. Sometimes, you are in a hand and you don't have a clue where you are, you are sitting with 2 pair and you are raised for example. You bet, are re-raised. In this position sometimes if i dont know a lot about oppo, to reraise here can gain a lot of information,and help you save value on later streets. If you flat this bet, and are fired into again, you have no idea where you are.
Or say you have AQ/AJ flop comes down, A 7 3 Rainbow, you bet out and are re raised. And it's been reraised pre.
A lot of times it's obvious what is happening, tho certain times its unclear. In these times i see nothing wrong with re-raising for information. A lot of the top poker pros do it too, to see where they are.
Any thoughts:D
I'm just wondering what everyones opinion is on this.
Those have said you should only re-raise if
1) you think you have the best hand and are doing it for value
2) if you dont think you have the best hand and are doing it as a bluff
and some other reason i cant remember!
It was said it is bad to reraise to find out where you are.
I quite like this move in poker, re-raising to see where I am. Sometimes, you are in a hand and you don't have a clue where you are, you are sitting with 2 pair and you are raised for example. You bet, are re-raised. In this position sometimes if i dont know a lot about oppo, to reraise here can gain a lot of information,and help you save value on later streets. If you flat this bet, and are fired into again, you have no idea where you are.
Or say you have AQ/AJ flop comes down, A 7 3 Rainbow, you bet out and are re raised. And it's been reraised pre.
A lot of times it's obvious what is happening, tho certain times its unclear. In these times i see nothing wrong with re-raising for information. A lot of the top poker pros do it too, to see where they are.
Any thoughts:D
Comments
Edited should have been A Q or A J.
He bets and you raise, so what information are you getting? If he folds, you know he had a weaker hand but you also know that he was willing to put money in the middle with it. So you've raised and made him fold a worse hand and lost value.
If you raise and he re-raises, you may now think he has a better hand so you fold. What you've done is pay him more money with your raise than you needed to.
If he calls... now what? Does that mean he has a better hand than you or a worse one? You won't know unless you have history with your opponent.
All this assumes that your opponent is incapable of bluffing. If he is, then you're just paying him lots of money and still folding the best hand. You're paying for information, essentially buying it, but you're being sold a lemon.
Now look at the other option of calling his bet:
You call and the range of hands he can have still includes i) any bluffs, ii) weaker made hands, iii) any draws and iv) better made hands.
You have to remember that the call itself gives you some information: You're calling a bet on an Ace-high board. If there are no draws on that board, what do you think that shows to your opponent? If he keeps betting, what does that tell you now? You're not "calling for information" but you're still gaining information without losing value if you're ahead.
You don't know which of those hands he has but it's better to not know and retain hands in his range that you beat than it is to be certain that either you were ahead and have forced him to fold his weaker hands, or you were behind and paid him more than you needed to for that information. You profit from neither of those situations. The certainty you've gained has no monetary value to you. The only monetary value it can have is for your opponent.
The game is one of incomplete information, that's why we talk about hand ranges and how to exploit those ranges. Sometimes you can buy reliable information from some opponents because they never bluff, make moves or put you in tricky situations. However, even against these players, that information is almost never accompanied by profit. Certainty is overrated in poker.
BorinLoner basically posted what I wanted to say but couldnt be bothered
lol ah I knew Borin and Paul were going to say that!
"You call and the range of hands he can have still includes i) any bluffs, ii) weaker made hands, iii) any draws and iv) better made hands.
You have to remember that the call itself gives you some information: You're calling a bet on an Ace-high board. If there are no draws on that board, what do you think that shows to your opponent? If he keeps betting, what does that tell you now? You're not "calling for information" but you're still gaining information without losing value if you're ahead."
Sometimes when people raise it will be a bluff, but most times it's not.
A weaker made hand if you re-raise yes they can fold, but most times it will be a call.
If you have A K or A Q on an ace high board for example, if its a particuarly wet board, then a lot of people will perhaps just call. Or raise, get re raised and call.
We have an opponent on a range and know what beats us/ what we are beating. Based on past history with a player, we will know roughly how they play (you are playing cash at same table for a period of time).
If think's somethings not right, and raise a reraise it's gives a bit more info where we stand. It allows us on later streets to get away from a hand. That's the point, we can get away a lot cheaper. If we are reraised again we can call to reassess. If it's just a call to our re-raise, it can also slow the action down.
Basically, it 1) slows the action down, which we are quite happy with as we're unsure on the hand at that point in time
or 2) against further aggression, allows us to get away from the handa lot cheaper than say committing our whole stack to a pot when we are not 100% sure we are ahead.
"The game is one of incomplete information...."
It sure is, thats why i think sometimes we gain so much information from a re raise.
If we just call the raise then it could mean many things, a reraise put this into a context.
I know the re-raise is way 2 much, i should have 3 bet 2 about 50p.
I am check folding river, to atleast save some of my stack.
Few of the arguments you've just made relate to raising for information, which would be: "I've been bet into but I don't know where I am so I'll raise and find out." Raising because you can be called by worse is raising for value. Raising because we can make him fold better is raising as a bluff. Raising because we can be called by worse but know we'll only be re-raised by better is still raising for value.
Your argument that raising for information allows you to get away on later streets, so saving money seems flawed because you're suggesting that you'd raise, be re-raised and then flat that so you can reassess on later streets. In those circumstances you're paying the price of your own raise, plus the re-raise of your opponent. You also know that in those circumstances, which means at least a 3-bet has been made on the flop, you are virtually certain to face further aggression.
You're suggesting you'd raise for information, get that information and still pay him on the flop, just to fold to the next bet which you know is coming anyway. That's not saving you money on later streets, that's costing you a bundle.
If you're going to say that "Alot of the top poker pros do it too, to see where they are." you must provide quotations and references to justify it. In my estimation, any top pro who advocates raising for information without knowing what they want to happen is not a top pro at all. I doubt you can provide such quotes from any reliable source.
You seem to have misunderstood what I was saying about certainty being overrated. You can narrow an opponent's range down by raising, that's a granted. Why do you want to do that, though? The information we get is either that 1) They have us beat or 2) They don't have us beat.
If they just fold those hands that don't beat us, what's the value of that information to us now? It's the negative value of the money they might have given us if we hadn't made them fold.
If they raise the hands that beat us, what's the value of that information? It's the cost of the raise we didn't need to make.
Occasionally, in any given hand the amount we save by raising the flop and being told we're behind may be greater than the amount we'd win from our oppponent holding a weaker hand if we'd called. So in any particular hand, it might save us money. However, we can never actually profit from raising if our opponent just folds worse and raises better. So our result is necessarily -EV because our Expected Value is not calculated on the basis of the outcome of a single hand. It's judged against the outcome of our play versus the entire range of our opponents potential hands.
Let's say we raise to £5 for information:
Our opponent folds weaker hands to our raise: EV = 0 (less the value of future bets that don't happen)
Our opponent only raises better hands and we fold: EV = -£5
This excludes the possibility that our opponent may bluff us some of the time.
So our raise is demonstrably and necessarily -EV. The information we've gained may be reliable but it's cost us money. We have to think that he calls with worse some of the time if our raise is to have any possibilty of being profitable.
Our opponent calls with worse hands: +£5
However, if we know that our opponent can sometimes call with worse, we already have that information on our opponent's potential range so our raise is not "for information". We're raising for value.
So in this example, we narrow our opponent's range down and "find out where we are". However it's cost us money to find that out. Sometimes it means saving money in a particular hand but it NEVER means making profit.
If we call and keep our opponent's range wider, leaving us less certain of where we are, we have the possibility of making profit. If we end up losing more money sometimes, that's the price we pay. Learning not to lose that extra money with the worst hand and maximising our profits when we have the best hand is something that tests our skill but we should at least give ourselves the chance to make that profit.
That hand is a really good example of why raising for information is bad if you indeed fold on the river.
You've raised on the turn with a strong value hand with the idea that you can never be ahead if you get further action. So you're putting that 72p extra into the middle, knowing that the best result is that you just get it back. You can never actually make a profit of 72p from that raise, in your thoughts at least.
It's also an example of a bad raise because, if you hadn't made it and had just called, your opponent could bet the river with weaker hands, allowing you to call and profit from it. The pot would also be alot smaller on the river at just 72p total, so any bet he makes on the river is likely to be less than that. It's unlikely he overbets the pot, but you should know what that means for his hand strength anyway. You might even be able to call that river bet and win.
This play didn't save you any money. It cost you more money on this occasion if you were behind and cost you more value if your thought was correct and he couldn't continue with worse than your hand. It was guaranteed to cost you money in long-term EV.
Yep in this hand you are right, if i call reraise, check call, it is cheaper than how it played out.
I turned my hand into a bluff and shipped river:(
I have seen pro's do it on high stakes pokr, Daniel Negraeau was in a hand wth the grinder, he had something like Ace Queen, on an Ace high board. Negarneau ended up folding on river i think after he had reraised turn when big bet comes in on river he folded.
As borin said, call raise, check call river.