Should I Jam A HUGE Draw On The Turn?

Today Iโ€™m going to answer a question from Lukasz. This is a hand played at 10 No Limit, 6 Max,  and in this situation we have ace/king suited in the small blind. Thereโ€™s a raise, Hero decides to three bet, totally standard. Hero ends up getting called on both spots and classifies both players as fishy, which isnโ€™t too, too shocking, stack sizes are pretty indicative of that.

Cold calling on a three bet by GCE is a little indicative of that, not something that a good player will do a tremendous amount of, particularly off that stack size. So yeah, Iโ€™m totally in agreement here. Size looks fine, three bet looks fine, good to go.We end up going here and now we have to make some sort of decision. Before we even look at what should we do in this exact spot, letโ€™s just back up one quick moment and look at the SPR.

Against Jimmi, we have roughly a 2 SPR, against GCE we have just slightly more than a 2 SPR, and what that means is if I had caught something like top pair, Iโ€™m not going anywhere. When I catch a monster draw like this, Iโ€™m also not going anywhere. Itโ€™s really just simply, how am I going to get my stack inside, not so much how can I try not to or anything like that, simply how and what line is best to get my stack in the middle?

In this exact situation, we essentially have three different options. We can check, looking to go for a check shove, we could bet a normal, maybe 2/3 pot for like $2 or something like that, or we could consider going for something a bit more creative and over-bet jam it.

Now, Iโ€™m probably not going to check jam here, only because thereโ€™s really like no semblance of fold equity. If we decide to check, someone bets $2, we check shove over the top for just a few bucks more. I donโ€™t think anyone is going anywhere, I donโ€™t think any fold equity is gained. I just donโ€™t think that itโ€™s going to work out as favorably in that scenario, so Iโ€™m going to scratch that off the list. Betting $2 again is kind of the standard, or you could consider going for the over-bet jam.overbets-and-aggression-compressor

A lot of players wonโ€™t even consider the over-bet jam, but what I want to just point out real quick, if you pull out something like Flopzilla, you plug in some sort of range to the left, board here, dead cards over here, think real quick about say a typical kind of range that one of these players may have. Now, obviously because theyโ€™re both fishy, they could have very different ranges that maybe you or I would ever have in this situation, but keep that in mind when youโ€™re building the exact range.                                                                                                           My Premium Videos For Only $22

Letโ€™s say we assign something thatโ€™s pretty pocket pair heavy, we assume that hands like this wouldโ€™ve been four bet, maybe queens as well, so maybe we think that this is the kind of range that they wouldโ€™ve called that three bet with.

Notice that thereโ€™s a lot of hands over here that have nothing, a king high thatโ€™s probably going to go away, ace high that probably just goes away. I mean, if either of them want to stick it in with ace/queen/nothing, thatโ€™s okay with us, too, because we annihilate that.

This is just the kind of situation where yeah, theyโ€™re going to have things like weak pairs, but maybe they consider finding the fold button if they all of a sudden see a $7 or 6 jam in their face, maybe all of a sudden they go away.

fold-equity-calculator

At least consider that. Iโ€™m not saying that itโ€™s a spot where Iโ€™m always going to over-bet jam, but if you donโ€™t at least consider it, I think youโ€™re doing yourself a disservice.

Now, Hero did go for a more traditional 2/3 pot-size bet, again, Iโ€™m not too shocked about this, but at least consider the over-bet jam. Itโ€™s really simple to do, you just pull out something like Flopzilla, you see how often theyโ€™re missing, whether or not you really think theyโ€™re going to fold when they miss and if not, how does that affect your equity, plug that into a fold equity calculator, and youโ€™re good to go.

But like I said, in this situation, Hero decides to bet for $2.25, gets called on both spots, goes to the turn and now we have a decision.

In Lukaszโ€™s write up, he mentioned that he thought that there was pretty much no fold equity in this situation. I might disagree with that slightly, simply because I think if someone has maybe like sixes or sevens or pocket nines, they might go away if you drill it here, and obviously thatโ€™s a good thing for us.

But I agree, I think overall youโ€™re probably not going to get folds if someone has like ace/jack or jack/ten, if someone ever improved on the queen in any way, definitely agree thereโ€™s going to be super minimal fold equity, if any, against that sort of hand.

In this situation, I always like to proof it mathematically. Yes, when youโ€™re in real time, youโ€™re not going to have the actual time you need to run this through a spreadsheet or run this through a fold equity calculator. This is all stuff you do off the table. This is stuff that when you do it enough, you just start to get an inherent feel for it. When youโ€™re playing in real time, it actually becomes easier to estimate whether or not this is going to be a good jam or a really terrible jam.

Letโ€™s proof it real quick and weโ€™re going to do this using a tool, Iโ€™m not sure if Iโ€™ve used this in one of these videos before, but I want to introduce you to it. This is a spreadsheet that I created, which is a little bit more powerful than just a basic fold equity calculator, so I want to introduce it real quick. This is also available for free, if youโ€™re interested here is the link to it over at Red Chip Poker . I would definitely pick it up and mess around with it a little bit.

When I created it, it was originally meant for all in pre-flop scenarios, but really, you can use this on any street, itโ€™s not pre-flop specific, by any stretch.

Letโ€™s just start filling in some of the numbers and then weโ€™ll talk about kind of what weโ€™re seeing here.

Pot size before we shove is going to be $9.75. How much do we have to call? Nothing, weโ€™re not facing any bets.How much are we drilling it for? Letโ€™s just do the $5 effective, and again, you always use effective stack. The absolute smallest one is $3.82, but Iโ€™m just going to use 5, because I always like to do kind of a worst-case risk when Iโ€™m doing this kind of stuff. My equity when called, we can use Equilab for that. Iโ€™ve plugged in the board, plugged in our hand, letโ€™s plug in the hands that we think theyโ€™re never going to fold when we decide to drill it here. Again, assuming that they probably donโ€™t have aces and kings or queens, those probably got all in pre-flop or something, so letโ€™s just say all of those, letโ€™s say that, letโ€™s say eights, letโ€™s say fours, letโ€™s maybe say ace/queen suited and if you want to say tens and nines, letโ€™s do that, too.

Letโ€™s just rock and roll with that. Notice that we have 31% equity, thatโ€™s pretty awesome. There we go. Youโ€™ll notice that at this point, even assuming that no one ever folds, weโ€™re actually profitable by about a dollar.equilabs

For A Video On How To Use Equilab Click Above!

Letโ€™s assume that we have slightly worse equity. Letโ€™s nuke out that, letโ€™s throw in all the jack X, good, good, good. This is a pretty worse-case scenario, Iโ€™d say.

Eval at, notice we have 29% equity, go back and reproof it, and you notice again that itโ€™s roughly break even.

The other option here is you could check and put yourself in hell and Iโ€™m not really loving that option, especially if I think thereโ€™s any semblance of this being plus EV and it looks like it is.

Just for the record, you could also do a fold equity calculation and here you just click on this box. Use Solver, which is baked into Excel and then you rock and roll from there. You just see itโ€™s roughly about break even.

Now, the graph down below, just in case this is your first time seeing this, is something I created simply so I could say, โ€œOkay, what if the scenario were slightly different, so I donโ€™t have to go in here and manually plug in all these different numbers of bunch of different times?โ€ What I did is I said, โ€œOkay, well, hereโ€™s our actual, this is what we just proofed for, and then what if we had 5% extra equity or 5% extra folds or 5% of both. Thatโ€™s what the E, the F, and the B stand for. This is 10% equity boost, 10% fold equity boost and then both on 10, and then the negatives of both of those.

This gives you a nice way of saying, โ€œOkay, well, I think this is roughly break even or slightly positive and then if it were like slightly better case scenario, maybe there was a little bit more fold equity than I originally envisioned, then all of a sudden you notice this goes higher and higher, or maybe I think itโ€™s slightly worse, and blah, blah, blah, maybe itโ€™s down here somewhere.

Again, even if itโ€™s just slightly it works. Notice that weโ€™re still hovering around slightly profitable.

This looks like a decent scenario to jam it and this is one that I think a lot of players wouldnโ€™t always think about it, theyโ€™d say, โ€œOh, crap, itโ€™s a really bad card, thereโ€™s no fold equity, so Iโ€™m going to say forget it and get out of here,โ€ whereas I think this is a much better situation to say, โ€œOkay, Iโ€™m happy getting my stack inside it, slightly profitable, itโ€™s not the most profitable jam weโ€™ve ever made in our lives, but itโ€™s profitable nonetheless.โ€ Even with very minimal, actual no fold equity, this is okay. If thereโ€™s even a semblance of fold equity, this is even better.

Unfortunately after doing all that awesome exploration and analysis, this hand ends in a very boring way. A turn goes check, check, check. The river, we brick, and it goes check, check, check, and we end up losing to both players and queen/seven of diamonds ships it.

Now one quick thing is you notice that in none of the ranges that I assigned are in this video, did I assume the queen/seven of diamonds or queen/seven suited in general was going to be in here. Sometimes people are going to show up with hands you just did not assume were included. Thatโ€™s okay, what you do is you just go back, you reanalyze the hand with that new information, understand that if they call three bets with queen/seven suited, theyโ€™re going to call three bets with queen/nine suited as well, and then go back and explore.

Now, the major takeaways here are on the flop, again, at least exploring the over-bet jam, thinking about which hands you would do that with when itโ€™s going to be good versus bad, if thereโ€™s any fold equity, using Flopzilla is going to be huge and/or a fold equity calculator. The other one, of course, is going to be on the turn. Again, exploring whether or not there is fold equity or whether or not the jam is profitable, even if there is no fold equity in a spot that you may have otherwise just snap judged and said, โ€œWell, I canโ€™t jam here,โ€ when the case shows that maybe you could. Thatโ€™s a really, really important thing to understand and a very important thing to explore.

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