A Disagreement with Pete “Carroters” Clarke

Recently, Pete Clarke (Carrot Corner) had me on his twitch stream to watch him play some hands. We agreed on most spots, but had some disagreements on some hands, one of which concerned a hand Pete played as the CO in a BTN vs CO 3 bet pot. The flop was AA4, the BTN c-bet 33% and Pete raised 65s with a backdoor. I remarked on stream that it just had to be a pure fold, while Pete thought the raise was fine because of blocker and backdoor properties.

Pete and I both ran sims on the hand after the stream and in Pete’s sim, 65s is raising at some frequency, while in mine, it is pure folding. Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, a common pitfall when we study GTO is not paying close enough attention to the EV. In the process of recording my series for the subscription site I obviously looked at some sims on paired boards and in almost every case, I saw backdoor type hands like 65s were pure folding. This gave me the impression that these types of hands are “just folds”. However, if I had paid closer attention to the actual EV of these hands, I would have seen that they were close to 0, even if they were slightly negative. If the preflop parameters or rake structure were changed slightly, perhaps they might start to raise. So one thing I learned was that this hand class is way closer to a raise than I originally thought, and having a better understanding in this regard is valuable in and of itself. WIth this being said, I still believe that in practical play, there is no real reason to incorporate raises with this hand class. Let’s call the best backdoor flush/straight hand the nut backdoor (NBD). The NBD on KK6 would be 87s, for example – it interacts with the low card the best. NBDs on paired boards are either pure folds or low frequency raises. I have yet to come across a sim where this rule is violated and if someone does please let me know. If the spot comes up in practical play, I will not know whether the hand is a pure fold or low frequency raise.

So in my epistemic position in a real game, I should fold NBDs, knowing that even if the spot is one where the NBD is low-frequency raising, the EV loss both in theory and in practice of pure folding that hand is negligible and impossible for your opponents to exploit. Thus, the heuristic that I gave in episode 3 of my series, that bluff raises on paired boards are comprised of pocket pairs, and not suited connectors, I will stand by as the best heuristic in practical play, even if it might not be 100% fully accurate in theory. The fully accurate theoretical heuristic might be, “On non-monotone, A and K-high paired boards in BTN vs CO 3 bet pots, bluff raises include low pocket pairs, and sometimes the NBD at a low to very low frequency.”

Given my BTN vs CO 3 bet pot series was first and foremost a theory series, this would have been a better explanation of this specific spot, even if I had followed it up by clarifying that there is no point in actually implementing bluff raises with NBDs in practical play. However, I cannot go back and change it now, so consider this post an addendum to my third episode of that series.

An argument against what I’ve said so far is that if Villain responds poorly against raise (namely, by overfolding)? Shouldn’t we start raising NBDs high, or even full, frequency as an exploit?

Well, here is BTN’s theoretical response to R33. Judge for yourself if this is unintuitive or likely to be misplayed by the average reg (I think not):

Another point to make is that even if we knew BTN was slightly overfolding against R33, the first exploit I would implement would be to start raising my low pocket pairs at a higher frequency, not necessarily to go crazy with the NBDs.