Continued from Part One…
Position: This is of course insanely important. I know players who swear you need implied odds of at least 40:1 to set mine out of position. The reasons are obvious. It’s a lot harder to extract value from players when you are forced to act first. The days of many people shovelling in their stacks over three streets with an overpair are over. Once you have check-raised or check-called a couple of times, opponents get suspicious. Once that happens, or even when they check behind on the flop, you are faced with the tough decision of whether to lead out or keep checking and hope that they bet. Then you have the river value bet decision. Do you check again to uber-disguise your hand, or do you take the mega strong line of check-call, check-call, lead?
Out of position you also cut down on the chances of getting free cards to hit your set on later streets. Players are much more likely to c-bet you off the pot once you have checked to them than if they are first to act. When in position conversely we can win the pot when we don’t hit our set. Firstly by managing to secure a free/cheap showdown versus a passive opponent and our pair being good, and secondly by being able to manoeuvre our opponent off the pot irrespective of our holding.
True reason to enter the pot: This brings us to an important factor when deciding whether or not to play a certain hand. Are we playing this hand purely to hit a set or fold, or do we consider ourselves in with a good shot of outplaying our villain post-flop? Now I’m feeling nervous as I type that. Please be honest with yourself. Don’t make a bad call because, ‘Hey, I’m a great poker player and I will get this fish to lay down pretty much everything with my mad hand reading skillz.’ Mr. Dwan, if you’re reading you can probably ignore that last bit - the rest of us can’t.
There are certain spots though when we feel we have good reads on a certain player and can allow ourselves slightly lower implied odds because we expect to win the pot more often. Don’t mix up why you are playing a hand. If you are playing purely for set value, make sure you have the full implied odds, if not, you can allow yourself to concede some. Don’t get into a spot where you are getting half the correct implied odds and think you might outplay your opponent half the time. That’s a good way to get in two bad spots at once.
Villain tendencies: Here’s an area where we are often guilty of some serious tunnel vision. The player in the example above had a tight preflop range, which seems good for us because A-A is the type of hand we might stack, but he was also capable of folding to pressure on the flop, which was bad because we got less value from the rest of his range. We might think that a player with a much looser preflop range is optimal as they seem to spread their chips around more freely, however, as all kinds of funky holdings are possible, much more of their range will play like the A-K above.
Aggressive serial bluffers are obviously the best, as they may give us their chips regardless of the board, but we need to be sure on who those people are before we give too much leeway with regards to implied odds. Again, be honest with yourself and try to paint a more complete picture of your opponents and how they are likely to play later streets.
Board textures: Something we stipulated earlier for simplification is that we were going to ignore straights and flushes. We need to go back to this now as board texture can play a big role in how our hands play out. Certain boards will kill our action, such as three-heart flops or when straight cards appear. Also certain boards can get us into trouble like holding fives on a 4-6-7 board. We need to have a good idea of how hard these types of board will hit our opponents’ pre-flop range so that we can act accordingly when they occur. If we are up against the type of player that will mean we are lost on a bunch of draw heavy boards, our required implied odds should probably go up.
Multi-way pots: This is a tough one. Here we are likely to be getting greater actual pot odds, meaning our implied requirements are lower. Also, there is more chance that someone will make a hand they are willing to put some money in with post-flop. In general, because of these factors, multi-way pots are often pretty optimal for set mining but that statement does come with a few health warnings. On the whole, people are probably less likely to go crazy with marginal holdings because there is more chance someone has them beat. Therefore, just because it is more likely you’ll get someone to put in some money post-flop, it doesn’t mean it’s more likely that anyone will stack off.
Also, you need to consider the ranges of each of the players in the pot. If someone raises from early position and another player calls in front of you, how likely is it that the caller also has some kind of implied value hand and won’t be contributing any more to the pot unless they hit? In this case it is possible that their only function most of the time will be to detract from your implied odds as they may discourage the original raiser from c-betting.
Table dynamics: Something important to consider is once you’ve made your seemingly correct call, what are your actual chances of even seeing the flop? You need to decide, particularly when calling from early position, how often a squeeze play is going to occur behind. Short stackers can be the bane of our existence in these spots and you should be less inclined to set mine if you have lots of short stacks to act behind you.
In general, set mining in three-bet pots is almost always a bad idea, but if effective stacks are very deep then it is a possibility. Even deep enough however you need to consider the three-bettor’s range. If you hold 6-6 in the big blind and someone opens from the cut-off, for example, when a player who likes to steal a lot three-bets from the button, it’s not a good spot to call regardless. Even when the cut-off just folds it might be tough to get the button to stack off with whatever random junk they were stealing with.
The way we have been playing is important too. Doing things like limp-calling with small pocket pairs is often bad because good players will pick up on our exact type of holding. This will then obviously affect our implied odds when we hit and all of a sudden seem to show a keen interest in our hand.
Rake: It sounds like a minor consideration but it adds up. When you are out of the blinds you can set mine at marginally reduced odds because the blinds are there to offset the rake. In the big blind, however, it will come almost entirely out of the value you’ve extracted from your opponent. Tournaments of course are without this problem, and so you can adjust your cut-off line accordingly.
Hopefully you can see now just how many things there are to consider when working out your implied odds. I know it seems like a lot to think about whilst your time bank is ticking down, or everyone in the casino is staring at you, but in time all these considerations should become automatic. Soon you should have a certified spectrum of set mining profitability on which to place each situation in your head. In the meantime, my advice for dealing with the intangibles would be to err on the side of caution and seek to compensate for the areas you are not sure about. My recommendation would be to take a starting point of around 25:1 in position and work from there. For those situations you consider to be at the sparser end of implied value you want to be looking for even greater implied odds from the effective stacks. For most of the middle-grounders, between 20-25:1 should be profitable and against someone really spewy we can occasionally drop to as low as 15:1. Out of position, we never ever want to be dropping below that 25:1, mostly looking for 30-40:1 and against a real solid player, greater still. We need to make sure that when we get that entire stack it more than makes up for the times that we don’t.
There are other ways to improve our profitability with pocket pairs, such as raising with them instead of calling. Full strategy for playing these hands is a subject for a different article, but it does bring me on to the next area where implied odds are often misapplied which we’ll discuss tomorrow.
Read Part Three...