After my first long intense session since my return, I’ve come across many questions that I should have known the answers to last year. Anyways, with my ego not being a factor anymore, here goes:
1) Set mining – I realize that it’s very wrong at higher levels to open limp low pp’s, but at low stakes where they don’t really pay attention to that, isn’t it ok? Isn’t it smart as long as I treat it as an adjustment to the players, so it’s not a bad habit I’m forming, but rather a profitable adjustment to $10NL play? Or am I completely wrong to assume that they don’t know I’d only limp low pp’s? (Of course this implies I wouldn't do it if my table at $10NL is adjusted to this play)
2) Blind stealing – This seems important to me for building awareness of bluff profitability and position, but at the lower levels, bluffing shouldn’t be much of a factor in play. Therefore, unless you have a high number of hands on your tracker and the stats justify a steal, you should avoid it in all cases?
3) Subquestion – Is it better to try to steal blinds with marginal hands or trash? Marginal hands can flop decent at times while still being easily foldable to a re-raise. Whereas a trash hand serves the same purpose, but with less flops helping. However, I understand how a trash hand with no value is getting a huge value boost as a mere blind stealer, where the marginal hand isn’t getting as much of a boost.
4) Shoving with AK – Found AK PF play to be a problem area. Not exactly sure when you should shove AKs. Poker Stoving, I found that the highest equity you can get is ~47.8% with the lowest being ~34.1% when heads up against pockets. Against a tight player who will shove 4.5% of his hands PF (AK, AQs, AA-99), my equity is 47.645% and against a looser player who will shove 9.8% of his hands PF (AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, ATs, A9s, KJs, AA-66), my equity is 57.740%. I found that my opponent has to have a PF shoving range of about 5.6% for it to be break even, therefore making it profitable to shove against an opponent who shoves 5.6% or more of his hands PF (even higher if it’s unsuited). However, when in play, how do I determine if he’s shoving 5.6% or more of his hands and is there a better way to think about it than to memorize the profitable range for AK? I mean I couldn’t possibly do that for all starting hands and be able to think of it in 10 seconds or less.
5) One thing that made me cringe really badly was how I sometimes played hands without looking at the villain’s stack size. It wasn’t often, just got caught up in the moment and my cards and clicked the button before analyzing implied odds. (Obviously this isn't a question, just a confession of the worst conscious mistake I made in my session)
6) When would you ever call, rather than raise a PFR? And when would you ever limp into a pot?
*Edit* Also, what's the exact thought process when putting someone on a range? Is it by elimination? How do you translate tracker stats into his range? I have trouble thinking of every hand that is in a villain's range.
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