Don't You Hate It...

[flafishy]

By calling third street here, you're essentially thinking that you don't know if this hand is any good but you want to try to improve. What could you hit on fourth street that would improve the hand enough to make you think it's good to go? Another 8? I don't think so. Js up might be good, might not be. So you're still in a chasing mode trying to find out, but now you're going to have a hard time throwing it away at any point and it's going to get very expensive playing it through seventh street without even knowing if it's any good.

Certainly, you'd think a third J would put you in front, but how far do you want to chase that two-outer?

By raising third street and following up with a bet on 4th, you're going to get rid of the riffraff and find out which of your opponents might have a particularly strong hand.

And now that you've gone on the offensive, you can choose to do what you want on fifth. You can bet on fifth to try to take down the pot. Or you can check it down to possibly get a free card or two or to see if anyone's strong enough to take over the betting -- in which case you could confidently throw it away.

If you do that, you've saved yourself possibly three big bets for the price of a small bet on third.

[snoogins47]

I do see what you're saying, but I think a few things are important to remember.

Firstly, there are plenty of times that our situation has 'improved,' while our hand strength has not. The beauty of stud.

By raising third street and following up with a bet on 4th, you're going to get rid of the riffraff and find out which of your opponents might have a particularly strong hand.

This is part of the problem. Raising on third then betting fourth does like, nothing to get rid of the riff raff... everybody, and their mothers, are already in the pot for one bet. They're gonna have tons of incentive to call the 3rd street raise, and that gives them even more incentive to call the 4th street bet. By flat-calling here, we keep the pot smaller, which gives our bets on 4th street much more leverage, and makes it much more likely that we can force at least some opponent to call two-cold on fourth as well... thin out the riff raff, as it were.

I think this gets us a lot more information too. How do we know where we stand more if we raise 3rd, everybody calls, we bet 4th, and everybody calls?

[flafishy]

Not sure where you're playing, Snoogins, but most of the tables I play at, not everybody and their mother calls a fourth-street bet with a brick after you've already shown aggression on both streets. Maybe they will at the micro-limits, but in my experience, people will start folding here once you move into $3/$6 and $5/$10 territory online.

[snoogins47]

Not sure where you're playing, Snoogins, but most of the tables I play at, not everybody and their mother calls a fourth-street bet with a brick after you've already shown aggression on both streets. Maybe they will at the micro-limits, but in my experience, people will start folding here once you move into $3/$6 and $5/$10 territory online.

Well, I wasn't necessarily saying that everybody has to call... but the idea is that by raising 3rd, and betting 4th, we're basically sowing the seeds for a very large, multiway pot... after the entire table has entered ahead of us, most of them are going to want to peel off the next card, and then everybody will be getting a billion to one on the 4th street bet. By refraining to raise now, I think we generally have a better chance at eliminating a lot of folks by fifth-street-ish.