Royal draw but the math doesn't work — does it?
Routine weekday afternoon in a Las Vegas locals room playing 1-3 live no-limit cash.
Not running great after some tactical miscues.
Toward the later end of the session, a guy UTG +2 or +3 raises to $20. This is a bit of above average since most raises are in the $12 to $15 range.
One caller behind him.
Hero looks down in BB and sees Ad-Qd. Hero calls.
Also UTG calls, creating $80 pot before house drops its outsized rake of $7 or $8.
Flop comes Kd-Kh-Jd.
Hero checks, UTG checks and raiser goes all in for $200+.
Hero thinks briefly, decides he's not getting correct price to combo draw of flush, royal flush and straight. Also figures the ace alone is not a good out.
Hero factors in bonus for royal, but folds.
Raiser shows A-K.
Correct fold or not?
6 Replies
It depends on the size of the bonus for the Royal Flush, but I'd be pretty surprised if you don't have the price for calling. You have a 4% chance to hit the Royal Flush; I'd have guessed that alone is worth more than 200$.
You don't know villain has trips. He might have a combo draw, which you have crushed. He isn't likely to play a full house this way.
I think I'd prefer to raise pre, rather than flat from the BB.
Check-folding the flop to a 2.5x jam seems like a no-brainer, even with our exact holding. Anything that isn't KQ or better is just going to hit the muck.
Does this room have a high hand or bad beat bonus? Assuming we need to make a royal to win anything here, we need our upside to be around $5k minimum to call this off, drawing to one out.
The thing is, if the bad beat requires V to have KK in order to pay out, we're probably not getting the right price, no matter how big the jackpot is, because it seems really unlikely V is 2.5x jamming with quads, especially not if V knows about the bad beat jackpot. This looks like AK or KQ exactly.
If there's a high hand promo to go along with the bad beat, it needs to pay us around $4700 to make up for what's not in the pot.
Against AK, your hand has 36% equity. On the basis of that alone your EV is -$28.
That includes the times you win with a royal or just a straight or flush.
There's 1 card that brings a royal, out of the 45 remaining cards and you have 2 chances at it, which was estimated above as hitting 4% of the time.
So to make up the loss of EV you need a bonus payoff of $28/.04 or $700 (after taxes)
I wonder what the math works out to be if we assign V some sort of "reasonable" range that also includes AA, KK, AK, KQ, KJ, and JJ.
