Plugging the Gap

A leak in my game that I've slowly plugged over the past 12 months or so is calling raises with trap hands. For instance, if I have AQo and raise, and then get re-raised by a tight player, I'm almost always better off folding the AQ than cold calling to see a flop. If I were to call, and an ace hits, the AQ is either way behind or way ahead, but I will have a devil of a time figuring out where I stand, especially if I'm OOP (out of position). In cash games, I've learned that I should almost always fold in this situation unless I have a really good read on the opp. In single-table SnGs, especially turbos, the line between cold-calling and folding is a little more blurred, but the concept still holds true. Folding is usually the right play.

Of course, none of this is earth-shattering news to anyone familiar with David Sklansky's Gap Concept, which says that it takes a stronger hand to call a raise preflop than to make the original raise. In a sense, there is a "gap" between the hands that you can raise with and those hands that you can cold call with. For instance, stealing the blinds holds a lot of value, and thus one can be fairly liberal with open-raising pre-flop in order to make a steal. However, to call a raise requires a much better hand because you cannot win the hand preflop uncontested. In other words, the gap concept is intimately related to the whole fold equity thing; i.e., by calling a raise you're forgoing any fold equity and therefore you need a pretty damn strong hand because it has to stand up on its own. Remember, there are only two ways to win a pot: a) show down the best hand on the river; or b) get the opposition to fold before you get to the river.

The gap concept is one of those things that every new poker player learns about early in their playing career, but it's not one that they usually start employing until much later. It took me nearly two years to truly get it, and probably another full year before I was entirely comfortable folding, say, KQo to a raise preflop. Now I can do so without really thinking about it too much, but I can still remember when I'd look at the KQ and believe it was pretty strong. Ah, the foolishness of youth.

The Guru likes to call these instances "aha" moments. In my case, however, we should substitute the word "moment" with "year," as it's roughly the amount time needed for this particular aha to sink in.

All-in for now...
-Bug
PS. WOO HOO! I was multi-tabling $10NL 6max while I penned this, and was up a couple of bucks in the two games I was in when I deselected the Auto-Post Blinds buttons and started my last lap of the tables. On the very last hand of the session, on the last table I had open, I was dealt AA UTG+1. The UTG player raised to $.30, I 3bet to $.90, got two cold callers downstream, then the UTG player 4-bet all-in. I of course shoved, and then got a third all-in caller. The two opps each turned over AK. A King popped on the flop, and then a Queen came on the turn. I had to fade the case King plus any Ten. Fortunately, my rockets held up and I closed out my session with a nice triple up. As I said: WOO HOO!