Posted by Howard on Tuesday, 21 October 1997, at 3:59 p.m.
I was in a loose passive 4-8 hold 'em game the other night in a casino with a bad beat jackpot that hadn't been hit for a long time. I was dealt JJ under the gun. I called, 5 other callers, one off the button raises, myself and (only) one other person call the raise. Flop comes JJ2, two suited. I check, caller bets, and preflop raiser raises. I reraise (being pretty sure that I'd get one or both callers), but both of them folded.
Question: I showed my cards to my buddy after hand, and he was insistent that I should have just called the raise - his main point being that I had the makings of a jackpot hand, and I gave away too much information by check raising. I truthfully did not even consider the jackpot when I raised, but thinking about it later, I'm wondering if I should have. If a decision is borderline, should jackpot equity sway you one way or another? Also, I'm wondering if I should have just called in order to try to extract as much money as possible from the raiser on later streets if the flush card comes. Any thoughts?
You shouldn't have reraised for two reasons:
1) These two guys are going to war while you're sitting on the nuts. You shouldn't do anything to discourage them. I'm usually scared to death of the guy just calling in these situations, and might ease up, but I don't know if that can be extended to 4-8. This action may well have cost you 4-8 big bets.
2) Tho players error 99% of the time towards overvaluing jackpot considerations, you *probably* have errored the other direction -- depending on the size of the jackpot. Assume for argument sake that opponent preflop would only raise multiple players with a big pair. You're at 1/3 that he has aces. Given this, the odds of ace hitting on turn or river (I hope I don't fumble this, I know the math dudes will be all over me) are (2/45) + ((43/45)*(2/44)) = 8.8 % Since you'd be getting the low share (25% in most places), you're losing 2.2 % of the jackpot by ending the hand. In most places, you have to fill out a 1099 for any score over $1200, and some places any score over $600. Assuming you cannot document gambling losses as an itemized deduction this year (and what reader of Forum possibly could??), you'll probably take an 18%-30% bad beat on the jackpot. You now are looking at forgoing 1.6% or so of the jackpot by terminating the hand. So you lost 2 big bets for every $1000 in the jackpot. Where I play at Ft McDowell (but not jackpot-drop games -- ripoff!!), the jackpots are maintained at a minimum of $5000, so in that locale you would've cost yourself at least 10 big bets just due to jackpot considerations by your action.
Even in a 4-raise game, you couldn't have got any more than 23.5 more big bets besides your own into the pot. So unless you think the pot will go nuclear over 75% of the time, raising is a mistake. I'm sure there's enough math in here that I could be erroring all over the place. However, I think the conclusion will remain intact.
As an aside, JJ doesn't play too well 5 handed unless you hit that jack on the flop, so you should've probably reraised and tried to make the pot heads up. This depends, though, on what you think the odds of flushing out the limpers with a double raise are. This also assumes disregarding my earlier assumption about the preflop raiser's holding :) .
Last Modified 2/9/00