[mac40k]

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the first one and one of the things I find frustrating is that he often leaves you hanging on a hand. V1 is all about pre-flop and flop play. One of the biggest concepts is randomizing your play, so Dan is always giving a couple of options on how to play a hand expressed as percentages. So for example (and I'm making this up since I don't have the book in front of me), you are raised by the button after it is folded to him and the SB folds. You look down at a pair of Kings. Now most of us would suspect a blind steal in this position and since we're going to be out of position the rest of the hand, we would raise here. In this case Dan might recommend 80% raise, 20% call. Lets assume you call and an Ace comes on the flop, you check and the button makes a cbet. Dan recommends calling, because you've got a good hand and it's too early to give up on it just because the button raised preflop in an unopened pot and followed up with a cbet when you checked to him.

Now here's the frustrating part, after that recommendation, it's on to the next hand example. Meanwhile, you are left wondering what to do next. Assuming you don't improve on the turn, are you going to fire at the pot now no matter what comes on the turn? Aside from the fact that you don't have any info to rule out an Ace, any card that doesn't help you, potentially helps your opponent and you've still only got a big pair. I understand the concept of disguising a strong hand, but as Dan often states, the value of a pair goes down the further in the hand you go with it. Are you going to check-fold when the button fires another shell? If so, what did you gain from calling the flop bet? Yes, a bet on the turn will get a pure steal attempt to fold and an Ace will probably raise, in which case you can fold, but if your opponent just calls, you're left with an almost manditory check-fold on the river if you don't improve. But Dan just leaves us hanging. If you don't get a chance to showdown the fact that you just called with a big pair, how does this help disguise your play?

Now I'm assuming that v2 will cover similar situations, but in the meantime, I'm left wondering why I'd call a flop bet here in the first place rather than just cut my losses and wait for a better situation. Perhaps Jojo can enlighten me.

I haven't gotten to the part yet that deals with multi-way pots, but those are the kind I find myself in most often in the $1/$2 home games I play. Even a raised pot routinely gets 4-5 callers in a 8-10 seat game. Since heads up play is more straight forward than multi-way pots, I'm curious to see how Dan addresses the multiple variables of position, relative stack sizes, pot size, hand strength, table image, etc. along with the desire to balance your play in these situations.