Poker Lesson #5: Third Man In

Poker Lesson #5: Third Man In
by Oliver Butterick

NHL Rule 56(d): A game misconduct penalty, at the discretion of the Referee, shall be imposed on any player or goalkeeper who is the first to intervene in an altercation already in progress except when a match penalty is being imposed in the original altercation. This penalty is in addition to any other penalty incurred in the same incident.

This hockey rule, commonly referred to as “Third Man In,” is considered a serious offense on the rink. In poker, there is a similar offense: overcalling. Overcalling occurs when there has already been a raise and a call. The second person that calls the raise is overcalling. Though it’s not an offense that will require you to spend time in the penalty box, it could involve a hefty fine, namely a large stack of chips.

I’ll use one common scenario to illustrate how overcalling can be particularly dangerous and, more importantly, unprofitable. You’re playing in a No-Limit Holdem cash game, and there has been an all-in bet before the flop and before the action gets to you, another opponent calls (or reraises all-in). You have Big Slick (A-K) and go into the tank to decide what to do.

The first thing you need to do is determine what types of hands your opponents might be playing. Here are some possible situations:

The first raiser is on tilt and/or is an extremely aggressive raiser. He’s gone all-in several times with sub-par hands. He could easily have something like J-10 suited. The caller/reraiser is an average player who tends to overvalue pocket pairs, preferring to go heads-up all-in before the flop with medium pocket pairs like 7-7. Depending what suits everyone has (and whether or not you’re suited), you should expect to win between 35-40% of the time. This may sound great: you’re only putting in 33% of the chips and winning more often than that, so you have a positive expected value. But before you get too excited, there are a couple of things to consider: a) Do you want to risk a large amount of chips when you are only a marginal favorite?, and b) these hands are probably a best-case scenario. In other words, it is entirely possible that your opponents have better hands than these.
Let’s consider that the aggressive raiser on tilt still has a marginal all-in hand, but it just happens to be better than J-10. Let’s say that he has A-10 off-suit. Two things happen: a) Your odds of winning the hand drop to make your call even less profitable—you will now win between 34-38% of the time, and b) you are no longer the favorite to win the hand. The pocket 7’s are now the frontrunner, favored to win nearly half of the time since one of your Aces is tied up by your opponent.
Let’s tweak the scenario further to make it look like an all-in confrontation by two better players. The original raiser now has A-K and the caller/reraiser has a bigger pocket pair, something like jacks. This changes the scenario in three ways: a) The other A-K has two of your outs, so you are less likely to hit your hand, b) the jacks are taking up two of your straight outs, so you are less likely to hit your hand, and c) even when you do hit your hand, almost all of the time, you will have to split the pot with the other A-K. Because of these factors, you are now at a great disadvantage to the pocket jacks, and you’re expected to win only between 17-22% of the time.
If it turns out that one of your opponents happens to have pocket aces (which tends to be a hand that people like to have when they are all-in before the flop), then you are at an extreme disadvantage, expecting to win around 10% of the time or less.

In short, overcalling with A-K before the flop is generally either a marginally profitable or largely unprofitable play, and thus should be avoided. I understand that, most of the time, professional poker players make their money off marginally profitable situations. Their opponents make slight mistakes and are punished for them. Unfortunately in this case, the “marginally profitable” situation is not the situation you will usually find yourself in. Furthermore, if you apply this concept to a different situation—tournament play—I believe that most top professionals would agree that you shouldn’t risk your tournament life on situations like these if you don’t have to.

Oliver can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.