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December 22, 2024 14 mins
Today we will talk about the concept of dead money and 3 bets. More information and notes at the bottom of this section.

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If someone raises 20, someone flats, and you can 3b and gets heads up with PFR you now have 20 dead money in the middle. It’s the same as PFR have to put 40 in the pot to your 20. Or another way is if you are a 2/1 dog if you were only heads up and they put half the money in and you put half the money in, you are in a losing spot. But with the 20 dead money in, you are 2/1 against. But there is 2 (20) in the pot to your 1 (20) in the pot. 2/1. This is a break even to profitable spot. And any time they both fold you auto profit. This is why 3b with playable hands is so important. When there is a middle player flatting.
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So today we're going to be talking about dead money.
I noticed over on our discord whereas some members, you know,
we post hand histories a lot. It's one of the
best ways people learn and get better is by posting
hand histories and you know, getting feedback from me and
some other great players, and you really learn how to
think about a hand, and you start discovering how you're

(00:23):
thinking wrong about hands and how you could be thinking
correctly about hands. And one of the things that comes
up a lot, especially when I'm telling people, you know,
you should have three bat here pre flowed. It's a
great spot to three bat and I talk about there's
dead money and things like that, and people just don't
seem to understand the concept of dead money. So I thought,

(00:43):
maybe we should do a episode of the podcast on
what dead money is and why it matters. So I
want to say just up front, I get ninety nine
point nine percent of the messages I get on social media,
people that follow me on the Instagram or on the
Facebook or whatever. It's Low Limit Cash Games podcast. By

(01:05):
the way, if you're not following me, people send me
messages on there. It's like nine percent positive. But there
are the people that love the hate, and they love
it when they can nitpick either where an episode of
the pod doesn't go far enough, or it's they don't
think it's in depth enough, or they think I didn't
get something right, or they think I over simplified something.

(01:25):
If you're one of those guys and you listen to
the pod just to hate on me and send me
hate mail, you're going to love this because I'm going
to give an oversimplified, not very mathematical, not very fundamentally
in depth explanation of dead money. But I'm going to
try to do it in a simplified, explanatory kind of
way so that the average person that doesn't have a

(01:47):
grasp on what dead money is and why it's important
can understand it from just just from a you know
something of a light bulb, I need something to make
a light bulb golf And they head and go, oh, yeah,
that makes sense. So hate do what you will. Here
we go. So what's dead money? So let's look at
a scenario. Let's say someone raises the twenty dollars pre
flop and then a player after them just flats the

(02:10):
twenty dollars. And let's say you can three bet now
it's on you. And let's say you're in the cutoff
or you're on the button or something like that, and
you have a hand that you could three bet with.
And if you three bet, and the pre flop raiser,
who's the first person to raise, if they're the only
one that calls you, and the person that just flatted them,

(02:33):
you know, they can't have that strong of a hand,
or they wouldn't have just flatted, right, Like they can't
have aces and kings and queens and probably not Jack's
and ace kings, suiteds and ace kings, and you know,
states can't have that grat of hands, right, So if
you can just three bet here, of course with all
your premiums, but then maybe we go a little bit

(02:55):
less than premium, right, and we three bet here, and
we can get heads up with this person who originally raised,
and then the person who just flatted them, who can't
have a very strong hand, they just fold and leave
their twenty dollars in the middle. That's called dead money.
That's twenty dollars of dead money in the middle. It's
twenty dollars that's in there, and nobody with a hand
to defend it. Nobody in a hand to win it, right,

(03:17):
they have forfeited that twenty and just left it in
there for me and the other person playing heads up
to get it. And it changes a lot of things
mathematically about the quality of hands you can have and
where you're at on the break even profitability scale against
various hands your opponent can have. So, you know, imagine

(03:41):
the classic scenario where somebody has ace king and you
have you know, I don't know, nine eight suited or something,
and it's a sixty forty thing or something like that.
It's a sixty forty thing. So if you put in
exactly let's say you put in exactly twenty dollars and
your opponent with the ace king puts an exis exactly
twenty dollars. You've both put in this. You've both put

(04:02):
in the exact same amount of money, but your hand
is only gonna win forty percent of the time. Their
hand's gonna win sixty percent of the time. You're just
gonna come out a loser in in that situation. But
what if let's say you could put in twenty dollars
with your nine eight suited, but you could force your
opponent to have to put in forty dollars with their

(04:25):
ace King. In other words, that's put in twice as
much money as you do. You only got to put
in twenty with your nine eight suited, and they've got
to put in forty with their ace King. Well, now
suddenly your forty percent proposition doesn't look that bad because
they're having to put in twice as much money than
you and they're not gonna win twice as often as

(04:46):
you do. That makes sense. Now, that isn't exactly what's happening.
I told you this was gonna be an oversimplification, but
I'm trying to do it in a visual, simplified way
so that we get that that snap and somebody goes, oh,
I get it, now I understand the dead money concept. Uh,

(05:07):
clearly that's not one hundred was inaccurate because they didn't
have to put in forty. They only put in twenty.
But there's forty out there for you. Right, you can
win forty dollars of money that you did not put
in because there's only one player contesting for it rather
than two. So it's kind of that. It's kind of

(05:29):
that a simplified way of saying it. This pre flop
raiser essentially had to put in forty and you only
had to put in twenty. So another way to look
at it is, let's say you're a two to one dog.
If your head's up and they put in half the
money and you put in half the money, right, it's
a losing spot for you over the long run mathematically. Now,
this is assuming you're all in pre flop, right, So again,

(05:49):
don't hit me up with the hate mail and go yeah,
but man, that's only if you're all in preflop at
sixty forty. Men, if you've got money behind and you're
able to play across multiple street, that's change things. Yes,
of course that changes things. I don't need to know this.
I'm doing an old first simplification of this explanation so
people can grasp what we're talking about. This is why

(06:14):
three betting with playable hands is so important. So often,
when you have this player flatting in the middle with
it just to really cap brains, they can't have much
of a hand and they fold a ton. You get
to be heads up with another player with extra financial
incentives when you win. Right. Not only that, sometimes when

(06:39):
you three bet, just both of them fold. Right. If
you get that first guy. If the first the person
who is the pre flop brazer with the RFI guy,
if that person were you raising with let's say, I
don't know they were filling frog in. They came in
with like the Queen nine suited or something, and the
other person just flatted, and you have a reasonable table

(07:03):
image and they're gonna be out of position, and they
have two players to act after them, Like if they're
a decent player, queennine suited doesn't look that great once
there's a flat, and now you three bat because if
they call now, this person who flattered in the middle
position is incentivized to kind of call now because there's
so much money out there. And now this Queen nine

(07:24):
suited who was the RFI guy, the reasonal raiser, he's
got to play a Queen nine suited against two players
out of position, which is just not really going to
be profitable over the long term. So he's highly incentivized
to fold. He's very pressured by that player behind him,
So you get him to fold. If he's a person
that raised his hands like that, he's not just raising
aces and kings and queens and stuff. I mean, now

(07:46):
suddenly you can put in the race with the nine
eight suited, which by the way, is heavily dominated by
Queen Nune suited. But he just has to fold it,
you know, unless he's just the worst fish ever. And
if he's the worst fish ever, that's still good for
you because you have position on him and you're just
gonna win more than your fair share of hands in position.
But if he folds, which he should do with a handlight,
Queen I suited, and now it's left to the guy

(08:08):
who was who was the second person to just flat.
He can't have that strong of a hint. He folds
a lot, and you just went up all the times
that happened. You just pick up, you know, forty dollars
for your twenty. You're just getting two to one on
your money, I mean, which is huge. So when you
add all those times together, you add in the times
where you three bet and both of them fold, and

(08:28):
you just pick up forty dollars for your twenty's. It's
not technically your twenty right because you're three betting. I
guess you'd be making it at seventy five or eighty
or whatever. But this is a I'm comparing when you
three bet versus when you just were flat, like a
lot of people make this decision to flat. And that's
the whole point of this conversations. Why you just ship
me flat in a ton? Here we need to be
doing a lot of three betting or folding tons of

(08:49):
three beting or folding. So again, not with the hate.
I understand when you're three betting, it's not twenty I'm
trying to make a point though, I'm trying to compare
the two. But so when you get all those times
when you make the raise, you just pick up the
forty plus all the times when you raise, and then
the raiser just flat you, and then the middle position

(09:10):
player just folds, and you have dead money in the middle.
And you add all these scenarios together and you average
them out over time, it's just a hugely profitable scenario
for you. So this is the concept of dead money.
There's a lot more to it. This is a very simplified, basic, rustic,
rudimentary visual thing to make it snap in people's heads

(09:34):
and understand why dead money is important. But dead money
is the number one reason why three betting is so profitable,
so profitable. People think it's caused position, Well, it is
position if you're three betting in position, oh for sure,
you're getting a huge benefit from playing a hand in

(09:55):
position versus players whose ranges are pretty capped if they
just flat when you're three bet So sure, positions part
of it, but when you get those flatting ranges to
just fold and dead money in the middle, it just
becomes you're just compounding your profitability of your hand. And
so you know, every time somebody asked me, I didn't

(10:17):
know what I should do? Should I just call here?
Should I raise? I'm like, no, raise, Well I don't
think I could raise. Well, then fold. There you go.
There's your answer. You couldn't raise. Your hand was just
there's just no way you could raise with the hand
you were thinking about. Uh, then just fold. There you go, simplified.
It simplifies the game tree for you. It simplifies your decision.

(10:40):
It moves a lot of math into the equation. Like
it just makes breeflop so much easier. Now when you
get in there with this guessing game about it, I
need to be you just see it too much at
low stakes people just calling, They just called I just
flattered with my suited. It just flatted with the ace
five suited. I just you know, I could go on,
I just flattered with the Jack ten suited. There's a
I'm in a place for it, primarily on the button

(11:01):
and primarily in specific situations that we will get into here.
For sure, it can be done, son, but just mostly
if you'll just adopt a three better fold strategy with
your hands, it'll clarify your range, it'll clarify decisions you
should be making, and it will move the mathematical part
of the equation in addition to the position by the
equation into your favor. And it's just a highly profitable spot.

(11:25):
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