Quote Originally Posted by Element187
pay more attention, the guy raising has saxton covered, implied odds are enormous.. if saxon hits 2 pair or better he had a very high chance of doubling up.
Excuse me - "pay more attention"? Am I back in math class? Mr. Reynolds, is that you?

I've posted on these very boards - twice - about the strategy of calling pre-flop raises with low hands and taking someone's stack. The difference is, I advocate a very specific type of hand: low suited connectors or suited gapped cards, 4 and up. So the least hand I would call a raise with would be 45 suited or 46 suited. The reason is obvious - these hands give you a decent chance at flopping something "two pair or better." Two pair won't flop very often at all, but you've also given yourself a good chance to flop a flush, flush draw, straight, or straight draw.

With 36o you've got no flush possibilities at all. The odds of flopping two pair or trips are almost insignificant, so essentially you're chasing a straight - and since the hand is two-gapped and low, you're not as likely to flop a straight or straight draw like you want. For example if I play 56, I can flop any of these and feel good about it: 34x, 47x, 78x, 234, 347, 478, 789. If I play 36, what am I looking for? 45x, 245, or 457... that's it. Any other flop gives you a gutshot draw and then you're stuck folding or calling raises for horrible pot odds, which means losing money in the long run.

Implied odds... what you need to make on the hand is enough to cover your marginal (or we could just say "bad") call pre-flop. If you call a $4 raise pre-flop, you need to get that back in a great enough amount when you hit to cover all the times you miss and have to fold. Even if we count straight draws as made hands, and ignore the possibility of a low two pair getting counterfeited and costing you money, you're still talking about a chance of hitting the flop well under 10% with a hand like this. So to give this play +EV, or just break-even EV, you have to get something like 12 to 15x that raise on the rest of the hand. Here he's got a stack of $53 after calling the pre-flop raise; that's barely inside the range we're talking about, and he has to get his opponent to double him up pretty much every time he hits.

In my obviously-not-very-humble opinion, implied odds is a shorthand for "I'll call whatever I want as long as he's got some money left and I've got some money left." Good, winning poker players actually calculate those implied odds to the best of their ability; they don't just hope to make enough to pull it out in the end. Calling a 3xBB raise with 63o, I have to say, is almost guaranteed to be a -EV play unless both you and your opponent have something like 70xBB in your respective stacks, and the raiser is aggressive enough to pay you off even on an unhelpful flop - which you'll notice, this one was, and the raiser folded the hand.

(No offense saxton - I still say there's at least educational value in playing these hands from time to time and trying to break even or better with them. But I do think if you're just trying to win money on this hand, and not learn something specific about loose play, there's almost no part of this hand that was a good move. Basically every call here is a loose call that will lose money in the long run.)