[2-4]: Should you fold KK here?

Snap call, you're barely over a 100 BB effective with the straddle and against a whale? I'm beating him into the pot with my chips.

There's also extra money in there with V1 donating, even against a confirmed OMC i don't think I can fold here.

It's an impossible challenge to definitively exclude a spaz factor from this player's preflop 5bet/GII range. I would call without the straddle in this spot, with the straddle it's a mandatory call IMO.

I would open for a larger size, first to act, in a splashy game with deep stacks. At least 25, maybe 30.

V2's 3B size is kind of large when he's IP. I'd probably size down with the 4B size, to 250 at most, and maybe a tad smaller, like 225. More than that, and we're committing ourselves to get the rest in.

If our read is that V2's 3B range is strong, we should be careful not to pot commit ourselves when we 4B.

As played, we're not raising to 300 off 900 and folding to a jam, so we have to call, like it or not. At just over 100 straddles deep, it can't be terrible to stack off with KK vs a splashy V who's up for the night and sitting on a big stack.

Seems like an easy call to me. If it's a cooler, then it is what it is.

what is with all of the "should i fold KK pf" posts on here?

there should be a sticky at the top of the page. something like, if you are < 150 BB deep, NO you should not fold KK preflop to an AI.

this post is nuts, you are vs a whale, you are 100BB deep, no brainer call. sorry you lost to AA. would you be making this post if you won?

We have all lost a stack to a whale with the second nuts. It should be considered a badge of honor.

There are some relatively standard 9-handed configurations where KK is a preflop fold 100bbs deep, both in theory and even moreso in practice.

They're somewhat specific, so they won't be super frequent in 25 hand/hr poker, and will be invalidated by stand-up game or the presence of whales (stops to stare at OP) or whatever else, and the EV gain for making the correct fold is minimal compared to the EV loss of making the much more numerous incorrect folds, etc, so you can argue you're functionally correct.

But also the exceptions are pretty easy to identify with study so it feels like you might as well be aware of them, if nothing else to have peace of mind stacking off in all the places where you're *not* in one of those 1-in-10k+ hands type spots. (Not to mention the same principles extrapolate into when not to stack off with QQ/AKo, when you SHOULD stackoff with JJ/AQs, etc. so I feel like this type of study is useful in general.)

So I guess I'm saying I could see two people taking opposite positions on this debate and both being correct in a sense.

Maybe my forum mantra for 2026 should be "I'm getting too old for this shit" and I should start making "Here's why you're both right, now shut up about this forever" style posts wherever possible.

Didn't go well in the Tipping Containment thread; you can't win 'em all!

I prefer snarky RaiseAnnounced tbh

"Here's why you're both right" and "Here's why you're both wrong" are two sides of the same RA. Whichever one you prefer is always just a small inference away.

Alright so everyone thinks I posted this thread because I ran Kings into Aces. Tbqh I feel a little bit hurt that no one is giving me more credit than that. I wouldn't post a hand because I got a cooler.

(Apologies for breaking the rules by not waiting 24 hours, but it doesn't seem like there's much discussion happening that I'm interrupting.)

I folded. This was the first time I've ever folded KK in live poker; that's why I thought it was worth posting.

I felt like I needed to call almost out of obligation because you're not "supposed" to fold KK at this stack depth, but when I simulated what was going to happen next, I felt very confident that I'd see Aces, lose, and then I guess sigh and be like "well it's not my fault, you're not supposed to fold Kings here, nothing I could have done". And that's dumb; I'm not making a play because I'm supposed to make it. If I'm calling I'm doing it because I think he could have QQ or AK, and my intuition was screaming that he only does this with KK and AA. Maybe (probably?) the intuition was wrong, but still, I make my plays based on what I expect the EV is, not what I'm supposed to do.

Seems like people are hung up on the term whale. Maybe I'm using the term wrong; I've just called him whale because he's the most losing regular player (by a lot I think). But for the most part he's just very loose passive (very loose!), with the the occasional random bluff that usually gets called because he has no clue how to bluff well. When he gets a bluff through he usually shows, and it doesn't happen very often (twice in the ~3 hours on that day, and keep in mind that he's in more pots than anyone else on the table). When he's on tilt he starts going crazy, but he wasn't on tilt, I've been careful to make that clear in the OP. His non-tilt 3bet range is already really nutted, and if he 5bets... well as I said, I genuinely thought he 5bets exactly KK and AA here. It makes sense to jam much wider because V1 has dead money, but I just don't think he's strategic enough to think that far. My theory of mind for him says that with all but extreme premium, he just flicks in an automatic call.

Anyway, so I asked the dealer if I could keep my cards after folding. V1 folded as well, so I offered V2 to both show our hands. He didn't want to. Then I offered him 20€ for the hand, which is more than I've ever paid to see a hand, but he asked for 50€. I didn't want to pay 50, so he mucked. Then a minute later he told me he had AK and "had to play this way to push V1 out of the pot".

Today I talked to Villain from this hand about the KK hand, and he said he was sure V2 had Aces because of how he reacted, and him not showing initially. Well I'm definitely not sure. I tend to believe people when they tell me their hand, although I'm more suspicious of this guy because I think he has ego problems, and it is odd that he wouldn't take the 20$ but then volunteer his hand.

So, yeah, I still don't know what he had/whether the fold was good or not. It takes a lot to deviate from the prior of "it's almost never correct to fold KK", and like I said this was the first time I've ever done it, and yeah idk maybe it was just a huge blunder. Idk.

If you ever wanted to fold, then your sizings was atrocious.

You invested 1/3 of your stack which means you can probably stack off with ATC.

Yeah strong agree with that, there was no reason to go to 300. It didn't achieve anything that 250 wouldn't have also achieved.

Polite RaiseAnnounced just makes me think he's setting us up for a bigger bit of snark. It's quite scary.

Maybe he's found religion.

Right, so I had a little over 900 iirc and there is 50€ rake for a pot over 2000, so let's round and say I had to pay 620 to win 2100. Then I need 29.5% equity. Against KK+ I have 22.5%. Against KK+ plus just one combination each of AK and QQ, I have 34%. Going lower than that would require over 80% confidence that he doesn't do this with QQ and AK, which is not very realistic.

Alright fair enough, if I had done the equity calculation properly, I'd have to have called even with the read. Even with betting 250 I'd have had to call. We'd need to not have V1's 300 in the pot before it even becomes possible.

But I didn't do the equity calculation right, I undervalued the importance of the dead money, actually by quite a lot. Okay so the fold was wrong regardless of the read. I'm still separately interested in how likely he is to have Aces though.

Thats some crazy rake there.

And I thought I'm the only one here paying atrocious rake

The easy math I always do is try to get all bets 1/4 of our stack or less. Any more we're probably pot committed. I got this math from 4betting online no more than 25bb(25%).

As for AA thing, it all depends on what learning material villain has read or been taught.
An aggro whale I've played with was 5bet shipping 1000+ w/QQ who usually never 4bets. Obviously someone taught him this. Everybody at the table was saying it's a cooler etc. How much truth to it being a cooler is questionable, he was the obvious spot at the table.
I guess the only reliable indicator how passive is he.
3bet range?
Does he overvalue hands?
If he is super passive and doesn't overvalue hands then the more likely he is to have AA.

Based on those post-hand shenanigans I'd say it was likely he had AA. Smells a lot like he was counting on you to call given the action and was then salty because you folded, and wouldn't buy his hand for an absurd 50 Euros.

Also LOL at offering this guy 20 Euros, I'd maybe give him a white chip if he asked nicely.

I just really wanted to know if my first ever KK fold was good :(

Another thing about this hand is that I'm not used to playing this deep. I only ever buy in for 400 and used to just go home when I reach 800+ to minimize variance. Nowadays I force myself to stay to get the experience, but haven't done it often enough yet to feel comfortable. And 800€ is still a not insignificant part of my bankroll.

The rake is actually really good! It's just a different system than you play in the US where all pots are raked roughly equally at 2-2.5%, rather than having a crazy high rake with a low cap. It allows you to play a lot more small pots.

I prefer this (both in practice and in principle), I never understood the logic of taxing small pots more than big pots.

I unironically have. But posting here is an unhealthy compulsion, so if my name comes across your feed, then that necessarily means I'm not being my best self.

This gets at the limitations of HH as a form of study. I don't know how you could possibly communicate all this to us without weighing in on your own question so much that it makes asking it in the first place seem redundant.

Of course winning an internet argument is usually the type of motivation I need to run an EV calc I've been meaning to get around to (see above comment on unhealthy compulsion), so it has its uses. Speaking of which.

NGL I didn't double check your math, but this is why there's so little to be gained from correctly folding the 2nd nuts as compared to the potential for catastrophe when you do it incorrectly.

In the interest of maximal pedantry (see above on unhealthy compulsion), one hand that can fold after investing 1/3 of its stack is a dominated pocket pair.

Who knows, this could be useful to keep in your back pocket if you ever get around to implementing the r/f 40% of your stack strats that crop up at equilibrium in some configs (I certainly don't have it anywhere on my radar yet).

Wait, rake is half of what it is online? I thought Europe had relatively higher rake...

In some places in Europe, the rake winds up being the same or lower for low stakes. In the US, they try to take almost what the time charge would be regardless of stakes.

I used to try to anticipate what useful things people could tell me, but then gave up because they usually end up saying different things than I was expecting anyway, so nowadays I just post if I'm personally uncertain about a hand, and then see what happens.

Yes; this is actually my main practical takeaway. Looking at it again in more detail, if we think that

• opponent also has QQ and AK (in addition to KK+), we have 57.2% equity
  
• think there's a 50% chance they don't have QQ and AK (so we take away half of their combinations), we have 48.5%
  
• think there's a 79% chance they don't have QQ and AK (including 3 of 14 combinations), we have 37%
  

And if you've committed a quarter of your stack, then you need 37.5% to call down (a little more or less depending on whether the other dead money in the pot can pay for the rake). So the baseline for folding would be, you have to be 80% sure he doesn't get it in with the next weakest hands, and have at most 25% of your stack invested. (Or a little higher percentage/lower stack.) But yeah that's pretty tough. It's really hard to be 80% sure about any read in this game. (And then even this is simplified because it assumes 0% chance of AQ, JJ, or an outright bluff.) Here I was maybe, idk, at most 70% sure he wouldn't include QQ and AK, probably less, and had >30% of my stack invested, and then there was also 300$ in dead money. So, not even close. Although you could add some positive term for reduced variance; I'm not particularly interested in gambling away a noticeable chunk of my bankroll. Also I'd have to go home after and lose some +EV from future hands. But still, not enough to fold.

Less than half actually, GGPoker has an additional 6th percentage of rake for cash in Germany iiuc. And then a jackpot fee on top of that. You basically have to crush the game to break even before rakeback.

I've heard a bunch of times that people think rake is very high in Europe/Germany. Afaik it's just completely not standardized. Each casino can just do whatever it wants. The closest really large one (>10x as large as mine) has 5% rake; I've never played there. There's one city where I did play that has 1% and rake-free tournaments. It's just a big FFA. And casinos don't tell you how large their rake is on their website, and there's no online resource that compiles it, so you kinda just have to know, or I guess call each place.

Yeah, even though this is usually AA, you have to call due to pot odds.

GG is in a league of its own with preflop rake. The feasibility of beating the games long-term is a matter of some debate.

In any case, I imagine there are far fewer unraked pots than online, and the rake cap online has a big effect at any meaningful stake. Even at 100nl the rake is almost half of what it is at the effectively uncapped games, so ~200nl is probably about the point that 5% capped becomes better than 2% uncapped.

But whatever, whether it's 40% or 60% or even 120% of online rake at any given game, I didn't realize it was comparable with online rake to begin with.