preflop raises in O8B - tournament strategy

I was playing a FL tournament the other day where someone claimed that it was foolish to raise preflop, no matter how good your hand is, saying that it's like buying a scratchoff ticket. While this is obviously wrong in a ring game, it got me wondering about in tournaments.

Raising with a good hand will obviously increase your expectation value - but also your volatility. In a ring game, I don't really care about volatility that much. But in a tournament, if your volatility is too high you'll lose.

So...should this impact my thinking at all?

I think what they were trying to say about raising pre-flop in O8B is that there is no hand more than a 60% favorite. So you are often building a pot (and building again with a c-bet) that you are not that strong a favorite to win. Raising should have more of a purpose than just "I have a good hand so I raise". For instance if you want to narrow the fields and someone raises in front of you, you may want to reraise to force people to call three bets with a chance of another raise behind. However, if several people have limped in front of you and you raise chances are nobody will drop and you've built a bigger pot you probably won't win.

Thanks for the reply. So the particular situation was I had a good hand -
AA4x double suited. There was a guy at the table who would basically raise every hand. I was sitting 2 to his left, in late position. 3 or 4 limpers; he raised, the person in between called, I reraised. I was hoping to get some people out - I had been playing pretty tight - but we still ended up with 6 callers or so even after he made it 4 bets.

As it turned out, I did end up losing the hand.

A similar situation ended up happening a few hands later. I hit the nut straight on the turn, but there was a live flush draw. Normally it's pretty tough to get rid of chasers in fixed limit, but since this guy was still raising everything I figured I could get people out by reraising in anticipation of capping the hand. We did cap the bet, but I didn't chase the flush draw out. In the end the flush draw hit.

It wasn't long before I busted out of the tournament.

It seems like whenever I'm playing with a crazy person, decisions that seem smart at the time end up being my undoing. Clearly there's a flaw in my logic somewhere.

Its just bad luck. You want to get money in when you have the best hand (usually not the case since unless you have a FH or better you are statistically behind all the combined draws) or can draw profitably to make the best hand. Maybe I should say you should get your money in when you have the best chance to scoop, like when you flop the nut low draw with the nut flush draw, or the nut low draw plus top set (even though you have a draw you are the favourite since you have the most pot equity). By the way I would not recommend 3 betting your AA hands unless you will make a similar play with a good unpaired hand or hand with a lower pair, because it gives too much away. In all forms of poker you have to have balance so that you're not too predictable. I personally will 3 bet my AA hands because I know I will also 3 bet AKQ2, A23K, A24J, A345, A234, A255 etc unless I think it would be unprofitable (you definately don't want to get the field to fold when you have a hand like A234ds!). The purpose for raising should mostly be to just build a bigger pot when you have a hand that has good drawing potential. When you have AA49, that doesn't really have good drawing potential, and against a field of four or more, thats a fairly junky hand.

The more players likely to call your raise, the more you should have a closely nit four card unit that will achieve its purpose best. A234, well you want to scoop with that so you're gonna need a low flop or the nut flush with hopefully no pair on the board.

Also if you find yourself continuing past the flop when you didn't flop that big after you raised pre, then you should try to plug this leak. When it comes 27Q and you have A3J9s, well you should probably reconsider your position, especially if there is a lot of action. Sure you got the nut low draw, but what else - its going to have to come running K, T, or T, 8, or 4, 5 if you want to scoop it, or maybe you hit running cards for trips and you're lucky enough to have made the best hand (I would say it mostly wouldn't be after a flop like Q72 since the lack of coordination combined with a lot of action means that you will very likely be against a full house on the river, since that is a good flop to fast play a set).

When you have a crazy person on your table, you should be pleased. They are playing AFC poker, and you do have an edge against them if you pick the right spots. But you have to be patient and perhaps overly tight in a tournament to overcome their aggression, especially if they play back at you playing back (I have played this type of player)! They are putting money in with hands that have bad drawing potential much more than you are, and that means that they will either get scooped or only get half the pot far more often if you are playing for the scoop.

It might be worthwhile to know that scooping a full pot is not twice as good as getting half, its four times as good. This is explained in the High Low Split section of Super System 1. This will encourage you to play to scoop more often.