Poker Quiz Question #19

Q#19: You're in the BB in a cash game. The blinds are $1/2 and everyone at the table has $50,000 in front of them. It's folded to the button, who raises to $7. He accidentally exposes his cards in the process and you see that he holds Ac-Ad. He knows that you saw his hole cards. He did not see your cards. What range of hands should you call with? Which hands should you re-raise with?

1. Fold all hands
2. Call with any two cards (ATC), and RR with KK, QQ, and JJ
3. Call with any pair or suited connector, fold everything else
4. Call with ATC, do not RR with anything
5. Call with ATC, and RR only with KK
6. Call with ATC, and RR only with AA

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A#19: To answer this (and, yes, you knew this was coming), let's use our trusty RED-I method. First we make our Reads, which, obviously, are incredibly easy here. We know that our opponent holds two aces. We also know that he knows that we know this.

Now we Evaluate. Our direct expressed hand equity with almost all cards at this point is clearly horrible. Only if we hold aces ourselves do we climb up out of the twenty percent range to a mere tie. For all other cards we hold, our equity is way down around 15-20%, max. We also are out of position against this player. Sounds awful, doesn't it?

Yes, but all is not lost. First of all, we have a perfect read, so we have the edge of knowing whether a flop will hit our opponent or not. And, perhaps more importantly, we are super deep stacked here, so we have incredible implied odds to take a flop. We may only have 20% equity, but we're getting whopping implied odds of 10,000:1 to continue. This, folks, is HUGE.

Decide: With lousy hand equity, we're certainly not going to try to build a pot preflop; our hand currently has very little value. We're also not going to try to bluff, as our villain knows we know he holds rockets, and he will therefore simply re-raise PF if we get stupid with a bluff-raise.

Therefore, our hand is neither a value nor bluff hand (at this point, preflop), but it does, however, have extremely good drawing potential-- regardless of what two cards we actually hold. We therefore decide to take a Draw line.

Generally speaking Implement gives us two basic choices with a draw; i.e., we could raise or call. Now, raising a draw is basically a semi-bluff, and we just said that bluffing was stupid. Ergo, we are NOT going to raise our draw. Instead, we should just call and see a (relatively) very cheap flop.

Answer: Call with any two cards.*

All-in for now... -Bug
*After the flop, things get very interesting with this hand. If our opponent doesn't improve, we can put a lot of pressure on him regardless of the flop. If we raise (or check-raise) any flop fairly big, he will have a very hard time continuing-- unless he specifically puts us on a bluff, but good luck to him doing exactly that. We may be out of position against American Airlines, but we have an incredible edge in this hand that we can exploit. And hell, we might even hit the flop...but we're going to be OOP, and our opponent knows we know his hand strength, so extracting value is going to be somewhat difficult...but...but...but.... like I said, this becomes a very interesting hand postflop.