Is QT > T9?

I'm not gonna lie. The past few months on the poker front has been brutal for me. It's not so much that I'm losing money as it is more that I'm not making money... uh oh, do I sound like the well known "breakeven" player? Hell, he's probably better off... I mean he's got ad revenues and rake back. I got neither. 2-4NL 6 max has been brutal and there would be days I would make a killing... and then there are days I would lose like 5 buy-ins... that's a lot of money... Couple that with the fact that my entire work paycheck is still going straight to savings/stock market (ie, gone) and I'm using my poker fund to pay for my daily expenses, my account balance is a lot lower than where it was last year. In an effort to turn that around, I decided to start watching some videos on DeucesCracked.com and also, I started playing a lot more 1-2NL FR games instead of 6 max games where I just knew that the additional hands I'm playing was not making up for the difference in the edge that I'm giving up. And then I remembered how ridiculously soft 1-2NL FR games are... especially since the aggro level at 2-4NL 6 max is fresh in my memory.

I think it was Don that pointed this out but these days, the blogs are definitely low on strategy posts... well, it may be that it's not... I currently show 600+ in unread posts so I guess there's a good chance that there are some out there that I'm not seeing... I'll catch up to them though... But anyways, I'm hopefully gonna be back to posting some more strategy posts or at least poker thought posts since I've been getting away from them for some time.

So, last night, I watched Late Night Coaching series on DeucesCracked and the first vid I decided to watch was a 5 star rated vid of a 6 max NL game, coached by Chaostracized. Even though there were a few interesting concepts in it, it was very very elementary for me. I did post something to that effect in the forums there and I was pleasantly surprised when Joe Tall (founder of DeucesCracked) responded to my post with another recommendation. So, I decided to give that a shot as well. It was the Late Night Coaching series by DogIsHead. Once again, it was pretty elementary even though this one did a little bit more of a deep dive into some strategies. After I posted another comment in the forums, I did discover that the Late Night Coaching series is catered for more of an amateur + crowd who is still trying to grasp some concepts and the vids try to answer the questions that maybe some people might be afraid to ask. Let me clarify one point. The vids are great. The concepts covered was not as interesting or new to me as I wanted but that's not a knock on the quality of the analysis or the questions addressed so if any of you are playing .50/1.00 NL or lower (6max) and you want to learn to kill it, I think these vids will be a tremendous help.

Nonetheless, I take all vids seriously so one thing I was interested in was a discussion about QTs. There was a hand where a MP taggish player put in a standard 3.5x raise and the hero (the one that is being coached by DogIsHead) called with QTs. Joe Tall who is also part of the vid discussion asked if he would rather be calling here with a hand like T9s instead of QTs and DogIsHead thought about it, talked about it, and basically concluded that QTs is almost always better than T9s in that instance.

This stuck with me because I can't seem to get it out of my head. My thought (as Joe also described) is this... QTs shares so much more in terms of the hands that you are beaten. In other words, if you hit a Q, what do you do? In other words, I feel like a hand like QTs is worse than T9s against a tag because it's more likely to be dominated. Of course, if you hit your Q, then you beat a hand like JJ or TT which are two more hands that would be beating you if you only had T9. But when you hit your Q, do you call a double barrel? Do you raise the flop? If you raise the flop and you get called, what do you do? I just feel like QT puts you in a far worse spot than T9 is... but maybe that's more indicative of my lack of post flop play. I really don't know. In the example, the hero hits the Q but gets stacked off and the initial raiser has AQ. And I feel like you're more likely to run into situations like that with a hand like QT. Anyone disagree? What am I missing?

I'm gonna write this out to see. Let's say a TAG's MP raising range is any pair, AK, AQ, AJ, maybe ATs, KQ, KJ, QJ, JTs. I think that's fairly normal for a normal TAG's MP range in 6 max. Maybe a little too tight? I don't know. But let's say that's the range. If you have QT, if you hit your Q, you are behind AA-QQ, AQ, KQ, QJ. That's a lot of the range. If you hit the ten (either QT or T9), you are behind AA-TT and the maybe ATs. Of course, you are ahead against JTs with QT but not with T9. But besides that, it's easy to get away from. So the fact that it beats out two more pairs in the raising TAG's range is enough to make QT better than T9? I'm not so sure. What are everyone else's thoughts? Are middle connectors easier to play in position rather than the two broadway one-gappers?

I'm gonna have to think through this one some more. I just wanted to get it down on virtual paper.