hi skates, i wanted to ask about the hand at min 12.30

you min raise 87o to 100 chips, with effective stack 850. on the video you say this is standard.

 you're raising 11.75% of effective stack, giving him the chance to shove over you, with an hand you would fold to a shove. 

unless opponent is folding a lot oop (wich is not the case here), isn't limping a better choice with this hand in this kind of situation?

 Raising here is a standard for me.  You are correct I will fold to a shove, but villain hasn't been very aggressive preflop so I don't anticipate his 3bet range to be very wide.  It is true that villain could have jammed ATC there profitably vs. me because my raise/fold range would have been much much wider than my raise/call range... It's a question of whether or not I am going to be exploited by having too wide of an open range and too small of a calling range.

I watched a few minutes of this video again, and yes, it looks like a limp is a better line.  I think I made a comment on this in one of my other videos too where it appears as though I should have switched to limping much sooner.  This one is because villain switches to donkleading late in the game, which eliminates my positional advantage post-flop when stacks are short.  Limping would allow me to keep stacks a little bit deeper for post flop play.  Nice catch, and good thought.

I am still raising 87o at 17BB vs. the majority of opponents though.

hey man loved your videos, you articulate your thought prcess well.

there is one part in the video i didn't know what you meant, 3:46, villian donks and you have the 2nd pair with 57o, you said that in every spot you want to have hands that you can "raise for value" but you ended up calling the flop turn and river. not sure what you meant by that.

can you re-explain your thought process and justification about the 57o hand?

Yes,

In general, we want to make sure that we can be betting in every spot.  What this means is that we don't want to be defining our range or playing in such a way that villain is free to bet as he/she chooses without fear of us raising.  If we do that, then villain can value bet very thin and we're forced to constantly play guessing games with our villain's frequencies.

One easy way to see this is to think about a 9999Q board OOP.  99% of villains will always bet the river if they have an ace, regardless of stack size.  What this means, is say the pot is 320, at 1500 eff. stacks.  Then when villain checks to me, I can value bet King high without any fear of getting c/rai.  (actually, I could probably bet like, 320 with Kx, and jam with everything else, aces and air included).  If on the other hand, villain only fires with an ace, say, 75% of the time.  Then we have a much much much more complicated problem to solve, and our correct play is very difficult to determine, since we could easily bet 320 to get minraised back or jammed back with a polarized range that isn't exclusively Ax. 

Okay okay, so in a more "real" sense.

If villain donkleads alot, and you flat with your made hands to induce turn bluffs, then you're letting villain value bet midpair on the flop.  You want to be able to raise his/her leads with a polarized range.  For example, say the flop is A84r.  Most people will flat a flop lead with Ax.  If this is true, then villain should lead out with 87, Ax, air, lots of stuff.  This is because we are unable to represent anything by raising the flop.  So, we call his leads with 45, even stuff like KJ that is ahead of villain's air and has significant equity vs. part of villain's range.  This is a losing strategy.  Although we want to be able to call flop sometimes with Ax to allow villain to "hang himself", we need to make sure we raise it sometimes too.

In the 75o hand, this is an example of not having hands to raise with.  I thought calling was exploitively the best play.  In terms of balancing, it certainly isn't something you can always do against some tougher players.  Against many weaker players, you can do it over and over and over again so long as you're willing to call multiple streets.

ok, so to assimilate what you said, basically we called with 57o because it is marginal hand with certain strength to it, and villian is donk leading with polarized range? we also don't want to raise 57o because it is not the nuts or air, therefore doesn't fit the purpose of getting op off worse hands or value betting with nuts.

furthermore, we want to even with polarized ranges, we want to balance our range and play them by raising sometimes, and calling sometimes.

interested on your take

Short video with some interesting spots.

I rated this video 4 Stars.

Two questions:

I am trying to digest your comments above about the 75o hand. What you are saying is that calling here with 75o is not good versus a good opponent because he can exploit you, but against this particular villain, he will not exploit your play here?

@13:10 You minraise 96o @25/50 blinds and 13bb effective stacks. You say we polarize our range here to look like JJ+ or air. I haven't seen this move in any of 40 videos I've watched yet. Can you explain this any further? I don't know exactly what my question is here, but after seeing this, it's definitely something I cannot understand well enough to incorporate into my game.