MUBS
Not all acronyms associated with poker find their origins within the game and MUBS definitely doesn’t. You’ll often see it in forum posts when someone considers laying down K-K preflop or folding A-A on a seemingly innocuous flop. That’s because MUBS stands for Monsters Under the Bed Syndrome and refers to the irrational fear that you’re getting outflopped on every hand, usually after a couple of overpairs have been cracked by sets.
Range merging
Although the theory here is fairly complex, in its simplest form range merging is similar to the idea of thin-value betting. It’s most commonly practised by betting a middling hand on the river when the board texture is such that your opponent believes you’ll only be betting with the nuts or bluffing with a weak hand. Instead, however, you ‘merge’ your range by betting hands that fall in between these two extremes, such as say top two pair on a flushing and straightening board. Because your opponent believes you can only have the nuts or air he’ll often call you with hands he believes to be a bluff-catcher, which beat your bluffs but are probably behind your marginal holding
Effective stack
This is a pretty simple idea but if you’re in the dark you can imagine it to mean any number of things. The concept of effective stacks comes into play when there are a number of differently sized stacks at the table. Let’s say the blinds are 100/200 and it folds to you on the button. You have a stack of 10,000, while the small blind is playing 6,000 and the big blind also has 6,000. Here the effective stacks are 6,000, as that is the most any one player can lose in any given hand. The effective stack is commonly referred to in terms of the number of big blinds – in our example therefore you’d say, ‘effective stacks were 30BBs.
Backdoor outs
Often you’ll hear someone comment, ‘I called the all-in on the flop with top pair, backdoor hearts and a backdoor straight draw.’ Backdoor outs are ones that can come on the turn and the river but are not a primary reason for making a call on the flop. This is usually because you usually only refer to backdoor outs when you need to hit both the turn and river. For example, if you hold Ah-Js on a Jh-Th-2d board you’ve got a backdoor flush draw and also a backdoor straight draw.
Nut/nut
‘Nut/nut’ was to 2008 what ‘top/top’ was to 2006. Some of you may recall seeing an intoxicated Scotty Nguyen enthusiastically saying ‘Nut/nut, baby!’ at the final table of the 2008 WSOP $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event. Having the nut/nut refers to having the best possible low hand and the best possible high hand in a split-pot game.
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