Being aggressive with middle pairs to me is rather costly for early stage play.Set mining can be a profitable play for you when you can keep your entry costs low. In the early stages, loads of players are correctly playing for implied odds. If you raise it that much, it’s still not a big hit to thier situation, and you will likely NOT get others to fold. You end up most times trying to decide whether to continuation bet into an overly large pot with over cards on the board and it all gets a bit too much like hard decisions for me.Sure you can open raise, but if there are multiple limpers I would just avoid attacking them when everyone is comfortable stacks and mzones.
You also can’t forget about the 2:1 odds. So if the pot is now one.Five big blinds, with one caller, which makes it two now.5BBs. You now decide to raise to three big blinds, making the pot five.5BBs and the limper (assuming everyone else folds) has to call 2BBs to see a flop with 5.5BBs in it. So he is getting nearly 3:1 on his call.
You have to consider the fact that you’re likely to never be worse than a three to one under dog pre-flop. But there is a problem. Or rather a couple of problems.
The main problem is betting ability of a weak hand. You could end up with three gapped connectors versus big slick. The flop comes down 5 J Q. Sure you’re now ahead, but really how much can you afford to bet at this point? Can you even call a standard Cbet with bottom pair out of position? But what if you just bet into the pot? Then what are you going to do when he smooth calls? Do you fire again on the turn? How deep a hole are you going to dig for yourself with your bottom pair hoping that it is good?
What about if you have 33 pre flop? There are 3 over cards (which statistcially are likely to have missed your opponent), but how much can you bet at this situation?
Sure you had right odds preflop here, but you are assuming you can get to showdown as well. But in deep stack situations you can’t. You are going to have to play 3 more streets of poker before you get to showdown.
But that leads to the second problem. You are out of position and that’s not good poker tournament strategy. This means when you do make you hand you will win less. It also means when you don’t make a big hand, you will lose more than your fair share because the player in position will bet you off marginal hands with a worse hand himself.
If you think about it, in deep stack play, you shouldn’t be concerned with pot odds too much. Implied odds is what you need to be looking at here.. i.e. what is the size of my stack and my opponents stack. If we are talking about five percent or less of my stack, I am calling with a LOT of cards. Even if they have pocket aces, my small cards and when a huge pot. I want them to have AA when I am playing 53s for a raise. When it gets higher, like ten percent, I am more likely to fold. But in all of that the only thing I am thinking about is the size of the bet I have to call compared to the effective stack.
I might have 56s and be up against AK. But unless I make and OESD, Flush draw or 2 pair or better, I will be surrendering pretty much every pot on the flop especially if I am OOP. Occasionally I might check call on a low board with a low pair, but still there would have to be some read to make me do that.
If you notice in Every Hand Revealed, Gus Hansen frequently berates himself for calling early position raisers with trash when he is in the BB. Partly because, such calls often become more difficult place post flop. Now he has physical tells to work with, and, as mentioned, he is Gus Hansen. We don’t have physical tells and we are not Gus. Importantly also, our opponents are not Gus’ opponents. Whether you are up against people who are capable of folding strong hands or whether they just can’t surrender TPGK is an important distinction.
To sum it up, pre-flop pot odds are less important than post flop implied odds. Hey, you may play the hand anyway, but look at it from an implied stand point, not just pot odds. You have to know how to calculate poker odds when getting into hands like this becuase it may very well determine your long term success in tournaments. Just knowing Poker rules are not enough to win, you need strategy too.