Ok, so after my 58s thread, I was made aware that I suck preflop. That said, I still have some questions about how we determine whether or not to play the more borderline hands, and which hands those are.

Basically, where my level of understanding is at is that set mining is a pretty clear, and well-discussed topic, which I'd like to believe I have a decent understanding of. Also, playing the premium hands is obvious and clear in fr cash games, because hey, thats where you get the majority of your profit (assuming your postflop play doesnt suck as bad as my preflop game)

So that leaves two other main groupings of hands: questionable ones, and shit hands. Shit hands are obvious (eg, 27o, 93o, etc), and theres probably some overlap between what I consider questionable hands and what other consider ldfo shit hands, but for the sake of this, Ill just say that questionable hands are the ones that I personally am unsure of.

The sort of hands im thinking of here are mid/high gappers/connectors, and almost all suited connectors/gappers (down to 5 low or so, lets say)

With this beginning, we can start to consider the other variables at hand, namely position, opponents, chipstacks, and actions.

There are some situations here that are pretty clear, imo, for example, when a tag ep with a normal stack opens for a standard amount, you generally shouldnt call with easily dominated hands like kjo from the blinds, because you get yourself into awful situations postflop with terrible reverse implied odds, and you lose lots of money.

But say instead, for example, youre up against a tag ep with a full stack, and you find yourself in oh...mp/lp with a mid suited gapper(<.<). How do we mathematically determine whether it is a +ev decision or not to play this hand? How does this change as the opponents stats change (eg., instead of tag, lag, loose passive, calling station), with consideration given for different chipstacks.

I have a fair idea of some basic parts of this, like being able to call with wider ranges against opponents with weaker opening ranges, and weighting your calling range to more premium hands as your implied odds diminish with smaller chipstacks, but I include those so as to be comprehensive.

I recall seeing a thread a while back where someone (i forget who) posted some tables of how different hands hit the flop over the long run, using flopzilla. In retrospect, I probably should have saved those tables, but ive only just now downloaded flopzilla, and am trying to figure it out (if anyone can give hints on how to use it/links, that would be greatly appreciated too)

Ive read through a bunch of the preflop strategy articles both in the beginners digest, and in rpm's awesome link post, but I havent seen anything that actually discusses the math of these decisions instead of just general strategy ideas, and from my studies, I know that sometimes mathematical analysis can lend counter-intuitive insight into seemingly obvious situations.


OK, tl;dr, i know, so ill recap. What is the MATH we use to determine whether or not to play a given questionable hand preflop, either opening, calling someones open, or whatnot?


[disclaimer: i know this may be pretty newb, but hey, this IS the bc, after all]