Chris B

Hey guys,

The essential plan promises "1 new video a month from Phil Galfond"

However, there's already been 2 months without a PG Essential video in 2015, which is a bit of a shame.

I know for my $10 I can't ask for much, but I love to watch Phils video's :)

Any plan to make up for this, Phil?

Hey guys,

In a session today I ran into a spot where my gut feeling told me that the villain made a mathematical mistake. Being relatively incompetent in math I'm looking for some pointers in how to figure spots like these out.

Stacks are 147.80 BB deep. It's 5PLO 6max

Villain opens Qd Kd Jh 10c UTG to 3.40BB, it folds to Hero on the button who 3bets AxAx5dTd to 11.60. Villain being an aggressive 'regular' decides to 4bet seeing as he has the premium rundown and a suit to go with it. Furthermore Hero has probably been spotted 3betting non-AA some times. I guess the hand is probably slightly harder to play OOP.

Villain 4bets to 36.20 BB, hero makes it 110 BB and this for me is when the fun begins for discussion.

Assuming villains point of view there is no doubt hero has aces. He could play good kings similarly but the fact that we have a king and he does not seem worried about AA, it's AA.

If we jam we'll play a 300BB pot with around 37% equity against random aces. Since we've already put in 36.20 BB we're getting a good price on that play, and so its probably at this point fine. The question that this entire thread builds on is; Can we call and make more money than we can 'lose' by shoving?

My gut instinct as hero was that hero in the hand leaves too little behind for us to gain some kind of edge by calling here. So the question I went to research was, are we better off shipping it pre or calling?

This is the rudimentary math I did:

36.20->110

BB to call = 73.80

Pot odds: 147.60/73.80 = 2:1 = 33% breaks even

Equity vs range: 37.97% = call/get it in

To be played for on the flop: 37.80 BB

Future Pot odds: 221.40/37.80 = 17% for breakeven

I then went onto ProPokerTools and plugged in our hand vs AA** and found that we flop greater than 17% equity on roughly 67% of flops. This means that we fold and lose 110 BB 1/3 of the time.

I also looked at how often the hand had more than 50% equity, and this happens less than 30% of the time.

And thats how far I got, I can't seem to evaluate the play numerically. Losing 110BB 1/3 of the time while we have less than 50% equity 67% of flops the times we do get it in seems pretty bad? Help a new player out here :-)

I guess the question, rephrases is how can I evaluate the spot whether I should be jamming pre or just calling if I were in the same situation and what are the cutoffs? Can the villain call with his QJTK if I had 25bb behind, 10, 57? where's the breakpoint.

Thanks for reading my wall of text and helping me out!