I was playing in a somewhat wild $75 - $150 stud game at Foxwoods the other night. It's not my normal game, and I had been warned that it tends to be a bit more aggressive than the $20 - $40 game I'm usually in. The warnings were prescient. Typically, there was a lot of what I call "bouncing around" early in the hand-when players pushed very aggressively to try and get the hand heads up. With the very high ante structure, it made sense to do this-to get a piece of the substantial money already in the pot.
In $75 - $150, players ante $15 and the bring-in is $25. The initial pot at a full table is $145. That's nearly double the initial bet of $75. Compare that to $10- $20 when the initial raiser is betting $10 to win $11. You can see why the bigger game favors more aggressive play.
So players were bouncing around on third and fourth street, with hands frequently conceded by fifth street. Then this hand came up.
Charlie, showing an ace, raised the bring-in. Tony, with an exposed 6 re-raised. Then a third player, Yu, with a queen showing, re-re-raised. Charlie, the initial raiser with the ace, capped the betting and the other two players called. Everyone else folded. There was three-way action going into fourth street.
On fourth street no one seemed to improve. Charlie, with the ace, bet. Tony, with his 6, raised. And Yu, showing a queen, re-raised. Charlie capped the betting when it got back to him and the other players called. Two streets, three players, and $1870 in the pot. Wow! We're not in Kansas anymore. On fifth street the betting slowed to just a single bet from Charlie, called by the other two players. It was more of the same on sixth street. By the time the river card was dealt there was $2,770 in the pot. No one bet and they showed down their hands.
Charlie, who started with the exposed ace, had a split pair of aces. He started with aces and didn't improve. Tony, who started with an exposed 6, had a wired pair of aces in the hold. The final player, who started with a split pair of queens, had queens up and won the hand.
As the Yu was raking in the enormous pot, Charlie and Tony, each with an original pair of aces, were chiding Yu for such wild though eventually lucky play. Yu defended his early aggression on the grounds that against two players, each with aces, he was in the lead since his queens were live and their aces were dead. All of the players turned to me, the poker writer, to sort it out. I told them that I thought the queens were behind from the beginning, even though the aces were dead, because the value of the aces was primarily in the possibility of making aces up. I checked my math when I returned home. Here are the results from twodimes.net.
Depending on side cards, the two aces are each going to win in a showdown about 35 percent of the time while the queens will win about 30 percent of the time. Things don't change much on fourth street, assuming no improvements to any of the hands.
Though each player was an underdog to win the pot, their raising made sense as a means of getting the pot heads up-an advantage over three-way action. When the pot goes heads up, the winning expectation for the pair of queens increases from 30 percent to 40 percent, while the aces improve from about 35 percent to 60 percent.
As things turned out the queens did get lucky, but his early raises still made sense. Interesting, no?
