Reraising PF tactics

Mr. Flibble

After reading pok3rplaya's blogatron I notice that he has a much wider range for re-raising preflop than I.

I tend to only re-raise early position raisers with a PFR% between 11 and 15 if I have pairs JJ+ and AK.
If a TAG raises I would usually only re-raise with KK or AA.
Only if the raiser is raising a whole lot will I re-raise with AQ or worse (upon the strength of my hand that is. Of course, I'd raise with anything if I felt I'd take it down there).

Would most of you cold call or re-raise with AK if an unknown UTG/UTG+1 player opens and its folded to you in the cutoff? What about TT and AQ?

I'm talking .50/1 NLH 6 max games, as per usual.

pok3rplaya

I guess I should respond here.

I think my reraising range would be a good bit tighter at .5/1 then in the games I play. I don't think you find as many of the players who I like to reraise in those games. For me a TAG is a 20/14 to 25/18 good aggressive kinda player and in certain situations I reraise these guys very light. A guy with a PFR of 11 is a relative nit.

Consider the situation where a 25/15 guy open raises OTB and we're in the SB with AJ. This guy knows about position and he could easily be raising 30% of his hands in this position. My AJ is in good stead against his range. For me, reraising is the best option if I want to play back at him for a number of reasons. Mainly it gives me the post flop inititive (ie it forces him to a decision for a lot of money).

Even beter situations occur when a fish limps in EP and then a TAG raises in LP. The TAG is most likely trying to isolate the weak player and I know that he would do this with quite a large range of hands. I also know that many of these hands cannot take the heat of a reraise which is quite a large show of strength.

Also I like to have quite a large reraising range to try and generate a rather aggressive image and so that I look like I am bluffing alot. I'll often take the high variance aggressive line in marginal or neutral EV situations simply because of metagame considerations. If you look towars the end of my blog there are 1 or 2 hands where I ended up AI preflop with either dominating or flipping hands which I usually would never consider pushing preflop. I could pull it off in those particualr hands because of the image I had created by reraising a lot and pounding on the players with constant aggression.

Another consideration is that in my games some of the players are actually pretty ok post-flop players. It can be difficult to extract money from them in normal situations. Reraising a lot adds another layer to the game and creates different, additional oppertunities for me to outplay and decieve players who I am better then.

FWIW, when an unknown player raises in MP, my reraising range is AA-TT, AK. Sometimes I call with AQ, sometimes I raise. In oppertunistic situations versus players who raise a wideish range, I will reraise people as light as 67s and 66. I won't reraise with Ace high hands less then a Jack. I reraise alot with KQ also.

Mr. Flibble

Thanks for that. I defiantly had a tighter player in mind when I thought of TAG.