Do you call to go five-way with AJo in SB? 3bet? Just give up?

Never calling. I fold on this table but I'd raise if I thought we had a good chance of either folding everyone out or getting heads up.

I'd rather have 65s and both are easy folds.

Reasons it’s a fold:
Worst position every street and likely a multi-way pot. If it was suited, there would be more incentive, because you could make a nut hand. You beat AT. With 5 other players the chance of 2nd best hand is strong.

In short, there’s too much reverse implied odds to ever call here. You hit your hand and you lose your money.

Sure you could raise huge and likely fold everyone. You could jam and they all fold. But you could do that with any hand, why pick this one?

You can fold and lose a dollar, or you can raise to 40 and maybe lose a lot more.

Against a min raise im pumping this to 55, never calling

It's probably a 3!, but call is better than fold to the minraise.

I called and whiffed the flop. Next time, I’ll fold. Only in deuce’s home game do I 3bet.

There is no way call is better than fold with this rake structure.

3B huge or fold.

3bet to 65

I don't get 3! AJo when we're OOP vs a raise and cold call, with a straddle at a "loose" table. Do we think we are ever getting folds?

How often do we get heads-up and do we even want to play AJo HU OOP in a bloated pot?

Seems like a good way to be in a poor position with a bad hand. I could kind of not hate it from the button, but going three+ ways to a flop OOP with AJo with roughly a 2 spr sounds a little less fun than getting a root canal and a great way to lose $500 instead of $1.

I see your points, and they're good ones. I want to know if H has been getting big value (AK, JJ+) OOP 3!s called, or if everyone's folded. If they're calling, we don't need to flex with this. If they're folding, we should keep them doing so. I also want to hear H's interpretation of the min-click. It means different things, different tables.

Yes, bombing into 4 opponents, then likely being OOP, sucks. We have blockers, and it's not a lot of fun for them either.

Then fold.

I agree that it's a 3-bet or fold spot. Calling isn't profitable with the high rake and RIO.

If a big 3-bet can get it heads up or even down to 2 callers, that can be a profitable setup.

At these stakes opponents don't like to fold preflop, but they'll often play fit or fold postflop in a 3-bet pot. When heads up you can often just cbet any flop that doesn't have two or more Broadway cards, and take it down a large percentage of the time.

All that being said if everyone is just going to call your 3-bet so that you're often going 4-ways to the flop, then yeah it's probably better to just fold.

more interesting question is what to do with AJ suited IMO

The whales are correct, the preferred play here is to raise. I'll give them that.

But please don't listen to the garbage spewing out of their blowholes about folding. That is an absurd level of nittiness brought on by their brain-rot solver addiction. Their AI robot coaches won't ever fold the top of their range and so they go broke in stupid spots where a human would obviously be able to smell that they're beat.

You're getting almost 5 to 1 on a call in a pot where there's virtually no chance anyone has AQ/AK. You can absolutely call and play poker post flop.

There are some heuristics floating around the fishbowl about folding AJ from early position. These guppies picked it up, stored it in their NPC dialog database, and spit it out whenever they see a thread about AJ. But it doesn't apply here. The reason you fold AJ from early position is because of the risk of a raise behind you from a dominating hand. However, in this hand everybody played passive and we're nearly closing the action for cheap, with great implied odds. Calling is fine. Raising is still better. But calling is not bad.

I see you're one of those people who thinks that only the winner of the pot pays rake.

That makes no earthly sense whatsoever.

LOL

A $10/hand rake (wtf??) means that roughly $200-$250 is coming off the table every hour. Divide that by 8 players and that means everyone is playing $30-ish per hour to play. Yes, it's really that simple. I doubt anyone's win rate is even close to that, which is why nobody makes money at 1/2. Nobody. So LOL at accounting for rake in your strategy. If you really cared about rake you wouldn't even be at this table.

It doesn't matter if you win one pot an hour, or ten. Your rake impact is exactly the same. When other people win raked pots, they end up with less money. When you play against them, they have less money. When you win, you win less money from them. If money is coming off the table then it impacts your win rate, even if you folded the hand.

Consider this....

At one of my home casinos, poker players can make a "prop bet" against the house on what the flop will be. You can bet $5 pre-deal and get different payouts when the flop is a straight, flush, or 3 of a kind. Does that prop bet affect your win rate if you never play it but other people do?

Of course it does. Just like your winrate is affected by the rake taken out of pots you don't win.

When money comes off the table, that's bad.

You can't fix that by folding.

Are you trolling?

It isn't simply the money that comes off the table in aggregate that means it's correct to play tighter as the rake gets higher, but the odds the pot is laying you / you only personally lose money to the rake when you put money in the pot.

You make a decision to put money in the pot based on the amount you expect to get back. The EV of that same decision decreases as the rake gets higher, as you will get less back.

This is established mathematics.

Your example of prop bets doesn't affect your EV in any particular hand (unless it's literally taken out of the pot).

No. I'm not.

Your win rate is a function of: Variance, skill edge, and the amount of money on the table.

Imagine a game where everyone is sitting 100BB's deep. Now imagine a game where all the same exact players are sitting 300BB's deep. Would one of those games result in a higher win-rate? Of course, because you can win more when there is more money on the table.

When money comes off the table, it impacts everyone.

Consider another scenario. Player A buys in for $200, plays for two hours and wins 10 pots. Those pots contained $200 of his opponent's money, but because a $10 rake from each pot, he only won $100. He now sits with $300.

Then, you play a hand with him and get all his money. You get $300 - $10 rake. So +$290.

Using fish-math, we paid $10 in rake.

However, if you consider a game without rake, you would have won +$400. The rake diminished your winnings by $110.

Sure you can say that gets offset by the times you lose less. Or could be negated when a new player buys in full. But over the long haul, the rake will impact everyone equally.

Yes, of course your win rate gets higher as stacks get deeper if you have an edge. That's not the question here though and nobody has said otherwise.

And what happens if stacks get shallower because the house is pulling $250 an hour off the table?

The main takeaway here is that the difference between an $8 rake or a $10 rake is not going to affect our decision to play AJ

That's just another example of of GWF saying something that's ostensibly true in a narrow sense (i.e. "Rake is high") and then using that obscure factoid as the basis for his entire strategy.

Let's say that given stacks, players, and table dynamics, you have a win rate of X

Then, you stand up, leave the poker room, and go eat pizza for an hour.

You come back. All the same players are still there. They've all won an equal number of pots while you were gone and are all sitting with 10BB's less than they had before you left for dinner.

Is your win rate still X?