Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em

While reading the Ebook, I was surprised the Ebook was entirely written from the perspective of the raiser (or re-raiser) and never from the perspective of the caller. Granted, we are the raiser more often than we are the caller, but even the section on floating is about playing against the float instead of executing the float. I know seeing flops and defending the BB by calling has gone out of style at 6max, but shouldn't it be addressed?

The problem is regardless of whether or not Calling < Raising in terms of VPIP, the amount you stand to lose or win as the Caller is much higher than the amount you stand to lose as the Raiser. If you raise and continuation bet every hand on the button, it can be a profitable strategy, but if you call and fold every hand on the button, it's a losing strategy. Every time you raise or re-raise, you can win 1.5 to 4bb, but every time you call, you can either stack or get stacked.

So even tho' Raise vs Call is disproportionate in terms of VPIP, the Call portion of our VPIP is significantly more important, because it's where we stand to win or lose the most.

It's like teaching how to play the White pieces in Chess and not teaching how to play the Black pieces, if you know how to play the Black pieces, you better understand how to play the White pieces i.e. you've only taught 32 squares.

IMO, something like BobbFitos' 2nd Expert Hold'em DVD would be invaluable.

Post edited 2:40 pm – June 30, 2009 by breathweapon

When you raise or when you re-raise, either the blinds or the raiser can fold their hand, but when you call the opponent will see a flop, will have equity and will have the initiative as well. Because calling has less advantages than raising or re-raising pre-flop, it has to have a greater risk vs reward or implied odds to compensate for the pre-flop disadvantages. If you can’t potentially stand to gain more by calling than by raising, then you can’t possibly justify calling with out those long odds of flopping a set vs an over pair etc. Basically, the book really lacks a section on when and where to call vs when and where to re-raise and/or fold. Calling, floating, bluff raising flops/turns and shoving rivers are important concepts that just aren’t covered in enough depth IMO. Compare your book to Easy Game, where the author spends a lot of time discussing calling and merging check/raise ranges in a 40 page booklet compared to your 300 page Ebook, and you’ll see how little you really wrote on the subject.

Edit: My quote in your post was an over simplification, the majority of the time you raise or re-raise (i.e steal) your opponent is going to fold. You essentially simplify poker into a single betting round by stealing, but when you call, you're either bluffing or showing down across three streets and the sizes of the bets are exponentially larger for every street.

Essentially more money is won or lost in called pots than they are in re-steals, unless you get into the 3bet vs 4bet vs shove stealing games or two big pre-flop hands run into each other, but those events are reasonably uncommon.