Introducing Small Perturbations to Your Preflop Reraising Distribution in No-Limit Hold'em

Poker Player, Dec 2007

To recap my article in the last issue of Poker Player, reraising preflop in deeply stacked no-limit hold’em games with predictably narrow and tight hand distributions (i.e. AA-QQ) can sometimes get you into trouble against skilled players. To avoid playing your premium hole cards face-up, you either can widen your reraising distribution or never reraise. Becoming comfortable with both approaches is essential. But sometimes, game conditions can exist in which you can eek out a few extra big blinds worth of profit each session simply by introducing a slight perturbation to a very tight reraising range.

If you’re only reraising with AA-QQ, you’re reraising about 1.4 percent of the time that someone has raised preflop (conditional probabilities associated with your opponents’ particular raising distributions may skew that number a bit, but it’s a good first approximation). If you’re playing at a nine-handed table where 50 percent of pots are raised preflop, you’re only reraising .7 percent of hands dealt – about 1 out of every 143 hands. In a traditional cardroom where about 30 hands are played per hour, you’re reraising once every 4 hours and 46 minutes. In an online shorthanded game, where you might be playing around 100 hands per hour, you’re still reraising less than once per hour! With such a small reraising frequency with respect to time, an extra 2 or 3 preflop reraise bluffs over the span of a long session will exist in the realm of statistical noise...

Read the rest online on page 34 of the 12/24/2007 issue of Poker Player.