Again, I have flopped low set (22, with a 237 rainbow flop), gone all-in, and top pair (ooh, sevens, with a J kicker) calls me. He turns two pair (but I’m not afraid of jacks and sevens), and then rivers the 7: that gives me a full house, but completes a higher full house for him.
How often can this happen? Because it’s three times in a week, and therefore probably more likely than it seems. It’s starting to tick me off.
If you take poker seriously and you haven’t read The Theory of Poker yet, you have a strange definition of the word "seriously". It’s important. Anyway, the theory applied to Hold ‘Em is basically that you are trying to make the move you would make if you could see everyone’s pocket cards. Do that, and you win long term. The flip side is that you should be trying to get your opponents to make a decision that they wouldn’t otherwise make if they knew what your cards were. It seems simple, but it’s very tough to put into practice.
I think of it because people here have been reading my previous entry about limpers, and I’ve come across another solution to that problem which I hadn’t considered. At a cash table, someone with a pile of money in front of him started talking about not having raises respected, and how bad play was winning out recently. His theory was a sort of wrestling-with-a-pig concept: "you can’t possibly raise enough to make dumb players not chase their straights and flushes, so just make your normal bet with top pairs or overcards and hope for the best. They’re bad players, and you’ll take their money eventually."
This was really appealing to me for a while, until I realized that his "normal bet" was a minimum bet, or maybe twice that, no matter what the pot was at the time. Now, by the principles of avoiding frustrating beats, this is absolutely correct: risking almost nothing at a weak table might chase away a poor player with a flush draw, and if it doesn’t, you’ve made up your mind that you couldn’t have chased him away anyway, and you only risked a tiny bet to do it. But when you factor the theory into it, it’s clear this is an awful move.
Giving your dumb microlimit player an almost free card is actually long-term suicide, because you’re actually giving him appropriate odds to call. That’s the awesome thing about no-limit: you can set the odds for your opponent, and you can exploit the theory all day long. Let’s pretend you’re past the turn with a nice top pair, and your opponent is drawing to a flush with one card to come. If he has to call a $1 bet to see the next card, and the pot is $10, he should take this bet every time. His odds are 4 to 1, and while you might like to chase him away with a bet like that, a smart player will happily call you there. You’ll survive the next card about 80% of the time, but you aren’t getting paid enough to play through the bad beats. That’s your money in the middle, and you let it get away with a weak bet.
But, if you bet $10 at the $10 pot, your opponent is only getting 2 to 1 odds to see that next card, and while the result might be exactly the same (remember, if he’s so dumb, you can’t chase him away, right?), you’ll win enough when you win to make it worthwhile.
I’m playing like this a lot lately: manipulating the odds of the pot so it’s wrong for an opponent to call with what I think he has. It’s expensive when you’re wrong, but overall, it’s been a huge help to my game. On the other hand, it makes limit Hold ‘Em look like Candyland.
Yesterday I failed to hit money in four PokerStars Sit N’ Gos. That’s not typically worth mention, but my average for July, going into yesterday, was 12 for 16. That’s 75%!
But twice yesterday, I went all-in with a full house, only to get called by a weaker hand (two pair or a set), only to have the weaker hand draw to a bigger full house. That’s just spectacularly bad luck.
And the other one had a maniac who was raising every hand pre-flop, and then reraising post flop to steal pots. He hit a few, too: he slowed down a little bit when he had to show down 63s and doubled up some short stacks, but when he started up again, I thought I’d trapped him with KK. After getting his standard preflop raise, I let him bring me all-in, and he turns over AA. How did I not see that coming?
July is still turning out to be a very good month, playing solid poker against some of the goofiest players. I think I’m up about a hundred over the past two weeks. And now there’s a deposit bonus! All right!
This one’s not even about me. Our subject ends up all-in with kings, but loses to a river flush. (Read the hand history, and then comb through again for my comments.) Let’s see how he can avoid this happening in the future.
PokerStars Game #2116734181: Tournament #10132514, Hold’em No Limit - Level IV (50/100) - 2005/07/16 - 15:05:33 (ET)
Table ‘10132514 1′ Seat #7 is the button
Seat 2: Phalconx (630 in chips)
Seat 3: bbocholis4 (715 in chips)
Seat 4: cannotblufme (1650 in chips)
Seat 5: wterrill (2340 in chips)
Seat 7: dnord520 (3475 in chips)
Seat 8: rntaz (3775 in chips)
Seat 9: Jerry4545 (915 in chips)
rntaz: posts small blind 50
Jerry4545: posts big blind 100
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to dnord520 [2h Qh]
Phalconx: folds
bbocholis4: raises 300 to 400
4 BB’s: a perfectly acceptable raise from UTG+1, but he’s put in almost half his chips now, and since he plans on putting them all in anyway, an all-in that takes the blinds isn’t a bad result.
cannotblufme: folds
wterrill: folds
dnord520: folds
Yeah, I like having a large stack, a suited queen and everything, but I’ve seen a raise, and I’m not participating.
rntaz: calls 350
This call with Q6s is insane. Is he on it because he’s small blind, and has already committed 50? I can’t say.
Jerry4545: folds
*** FLOP *** [8d 4s 5d]
rntaz: checks
bbocholis4: bets 300
I can’t think of any reason not to go all-in here. This is effectively the same bet, unless he forgot how short his stack was before all the betting happened.
rntaz: calls 300
This call looks insane, but it’s not quite so crazy. The inside straight draw is four outs twice, so that’s a 16% probability to occur on the turn or river. The running flush draw is maybe a 15-1 shot, but that’s that another whole six of the 25 percent he needs (since the pot is 900 now, and the price is 300) to call it. And he doesn’t know how much he’s behind at this point: a 4BB raise followed by a (for all purposes) all-in could be AK, AJ, 99… and in those cases, you have to add the remaining queens as outs. I would probably avoid this call, because it’s so close, and you hate to double up the short stack so early, but I wouldn’t have been in this hand with trash to begin with, since I play tighter than that.
*** TURN *** [8d 4s 5d] [Ts]
rntaz: checks
bbocholis4: checks
Blank.
*** RIVER *** [8d 4s 5d Ts] [5s]
rntaz: bets 300
bbocholis4: calls 15 and is all-in
*** SHOW DOWN ***
rntaz: shows [6s Qs] (a flush, Queen high)
bbocholis4: shows [Kc Kd] (two pair, Kings and Fives)
rntaz collected 1530 from pot
Phalconx said, "yo dude you are a lucky ****"
Phalconx said, "lol"
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 1530 | Rake 0
Board [8d 4s 5d Ts 5s]
Seat 2: Phalconx folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 3: bbocholis4 showed [Kc Kd] and lost with two pair, Kings and Fives
Seat 4: cannotblufme folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 5: wterrill folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 7: dnord520 (button) folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 8: rntaz (small blind) showed [6s Qs] and won (1530) with a flush, Queen high
Seat 9: Jerry4545 (big blind) folded before Flop
There are two possibilities: an all-in bet pre-flop could have saved the kings. You have to consider your stack size when you make your standard 4BB raise with a nice hand like this. If it’s more than half your stack, the leverage post-flop is going to be minimized (a drawing hand might just find calling more entertaining than not). But that brings up the other possibility: a 2BB raise, as ugly as it is, leaves a pot-size stack in your hands should you need to raise again post-flop. And, done from second position, it’s probably going to clear as many people as the 4BB raise would.
But do you really want to clear people out with kings? I guess you want ace-x to fold. Everyone else you pretty much want along for the ride.
Since observer chat doesn’t go into my logs, I can’t relay the tirade by the cracked kings, but it went on for a few hands and was mostly filtered down by PokerStars software to "u ****ing suck".
June’s been better. I got PokerTracker at the beginning of the month, so I can’t really say what my historic totals are, but I definitely turned some corners and learned some lessons. A huge home tournament saved my month - about $100 in one night, plus the respect and fear of my coworkers. I had two or three terrible cash hands, and only one or two awful tournaments, but I feel pretty good about both. The interesting thing is that I’m doing very well in MTT play: single table sit-n-gos are a money loser for me, but two, three, and five table have all been pretty good.
I’m officially done with Empire. I moved $50 in there last week and it’s 97 cents now. Their sit-n-gos are so aggressive: 800 chips, and blinds moving from 10/15 to 15/30 to 25/50 to 75/150 with every ten hands… if you don’t see something you love in the first three rounds, you’re pretty much playing short stack against the six guys that are left playing Party-style. I may try to open a Party account, since I have heard the play is atrocious (and it is, I just can’t catch a break in their tournament format), but I’ve been smacked down trying to install it (since Empire is the same thing).
So that leaves PokerStars. I’ve had great luck with their .05/.10 NL game ($10 max), but every time I try to move to the .10/.25 ($25), I get crushed. So I’m playing two-at-a-time $10 tables, and that’s working out. I’m also going to leave the $10+$1 sit-n-gos alone for a while and see if I can’t make $5+$.50 profitable. And, with the revelation that MTT is a good game for me, I may try to carve out a couple two-hours blocks of time and play in larger tournaments. That’s where the real money is, anyway.