Why 10? How is that number arrived to? And what if it's 1 combo and villain only takes the line he took with that 1 combo?

@OP: This number is arbitrary, it's roughly determined by the value:bluff-ratio necessary to get a good call. If for example you need odds of 2:1, it means, at least 33% (1 out of 3) has to be bluffs. When you now got 10 value combos, it means, he needs 5 bluffs. That's a number which normally is pretty easy to come up with.

BUT (big but), I'd be very hesitant with these "guidelines". It sounds cool to say, that we should not cringe and flee when the amount of possible value combos is so low - on the other hand, this only makes sense against unknown. And in a live game it's even less applicable imho.

When we know something about our opponents and come up with the conclusion that there "never" should be any bluff combo in his range, then it does not make sense to stick to any guidelines. In an onlinegame, when "one" bluffcombo would be enough, I'd might be satisfied with the possibility of a "misclick", but here it's live. We face two "tightish" players who are not bound by any timebank. In a live game everybody has enough time to think about his decision. It's a multiway pot and the K is the most obvious card on the table. UTG +1 (which on a 10-handed table (?) is VERY early) opens ... EVERYBODY should assume AK here as a very vital combo. Who - being sane - would x/-3bet against what most likely is AK? Even KQ I would NOT expect.

Now one comes and say "never say never" ... which is reasonable. But - we need 40% equity (given that we likely will end up with the entire stack in the middle), so either he overplays KQ or he bluffs. In case he "ever" does one or the other, we probably have sufficient equity, but if not - we are 100% dead. So, back to the numbers: if we actually have 40%, we are break-even!! We don't win anything. If we are wrong, we lose $500. If we just fold, we lost $45. So actually, we are risking 455 to defend our 45 in the middle. Seriously?! Probably not.

That means, if we are talking about 40% equity, we can likely end the discussion here, right now. What we need is probably more in the range of 45%+ - against TWO PLAYERS! But that meant, we would actually be totally wrong in our assumption of Villains being tight "nits" - in both cases (as we need to beat both).

Long story short - fold and feel happy.

@ecomommy, poker is a game of incomplete information, your opponents are not absolutely predictable, you will never be able to tell with absolute certainty what your opponents hold. Claiming you can tell that your opponents only hold one combo is highly specious.

Even if you are shown 44 and KQ here, you cannot conclude that your opponents always have the nuts. If we flipped a coin and it came up heads, we cannot conclude that the coin has "heads on both-sides".

If we flipped 100 times and it came up heads every time, then we could conclude that the coin was likely either heavily weighted toward heads or contained only heads.

The issue with this situation is that it comes up to rarely to ever conclude the latter situation.

@BigFish I'm assuming this hand was played "live". If it was online and our opponents were long time high volume full ring players , then yes I think you are correct.

However as a rule of thumb folding nuttish hands is still a money loser.

@twinskat it certainly would in some situations. A top ten combo is top two pair on most board textures (roughly top 1-2% of all flop combos). This cutoff is effective for even nitty players.

@BigFish I reread your post. I guess this deserves more technical analysis than my previous posts.

This is a serious logic flaw to play with more certainty live than online. We have much smaller sample sizes, much worse data collection techniques and the average player in the pool plays more poorly and is less experienced. We simply don't have the ability live to collect meaningful reads in low frequency situations such as this.

Folding nuttish hands is the biggest game theory mistake possible. You turn a high profitable hand into a zero EV hand and open yourself up to high levels of exploitation (3-bet 4x highly +EV).

In this particular case, even without game theory considerations, this fold is at best questionable. We have 23% equity against 44. In our worse case headsup scenario (AK vs 44), we have 23% equity and 16% equity 3-way against Ak vs KQ vs 44. In our worst case scenario's we'd lose roughly 40 big blinds and this ignores the possibility that one of these two players is bluffing and one has a worse king. Before the action this is much much more likely with the range sizes multiples larger than the cold deck scenarios. In this situations we win (80% equity) roughly 100 big blinds.

Essentially, you are saying that a situation where we have by definition lower confidence in our reads, we should actually have higher confidence in those reads. This makes no sense.

It makes no sense to assume AK vs. KQ vs. 44 and ignore the possibility that each player can have 44 as well as AK ... just run a sim in CREV and include {44, AKs, KQs, AKo} for MP and {44, KQs, K4s, AKo, KQo} for BB (do we agree on that ranges?) - and you will see that we lose like 40bb in EV. When you add some bluffs (i.e. 54s to MP), we still lose by a great margin (20bb). Even adding some bluffs to BB does not turn it into a profit.

Finally, when OP describes the players as "tight", "nit" etc., then I assume that we shall sufficiently assume that they are not suddenly start x/3-betting with crap ... at least not by any meaningful frequency.

What assumptions would you modify to turn that into profit? I must be missing sth. :|

I agree we should fold if the ranges are (AK, KQ, 44). However I know that I can't tell live that the range is that small for a number of reasons stated above.
The primary issue is that you're completely discounting a range (Kx or bluff) substantially larger a priori based on a weak live game read and giving your opposition a tiny a priori range. Making highly exploitative folds based on weak reads is ridiculous.

Let's agree to disagree.

Overplaying trips is not sufficient, unless we expect a x/3bet from KJ ... but seriously, have you ever seen that - in a live game?! Against an early position raiser that is almost "expected" to have AK (by recreational players)?