I flopped the nuts!

Went home thinking I should try $1/$2 limit yesterday.  I don’t play limit that much, but I was eager for a new challenge.  Couldn’t get started there, so I switched over to my standard $50NL.  I had a few opponents call continuation bets with beaten hands, only to hit on the turn or river, and stick me for a bet on the end. 

Well, your hero fights donk play with donk play.  I loosened up considerably, didn’t back down when I was beaten, pushed all in when I knew any hand but an overpair would fold (overpairs… funny, they call), ignored reasonable bets from reasonable players… ahh, anyone else would describe it as tilt.  I had never gone through anything like it in my short playing career.  Actually, I had a lot of these runs right before I got "good": just trying to make something happen, pushing edges that didn’t exist.

Home audience, I donked off almost a quarter of my bankroll: maybe $150 all told.  I told myself that everything I have online right now is house money (which is true), that I’m only back about a week’s progress (also true), and that with my tremendous upswing lately, I was way overdue for a dose of variance.  It didn’t feel much better.

Then I moved from Party to Full Tilt, and picked up three or four nice pots, almost doubling up.  For some reason, that bought back all my self-confidence.  With your own swings, it’s important to have a short memory.

I read Phil Gordon’s book (I have to get caught up on the sidebar, I know), and he doesn’t exactly say "call with pairs for bigger pay".  What he says is that any pair is worth calling with, up to about 5xBB, as long as you know how to get away from the hand if you miss.  The implied odds, especially at low limits, are staggering.  You can miss on the 90% or whatever the odds are that you don’t pick up a set and still be comfortably ahead.

One other thing: the "raise to narrow the field" theory is sort of small-minded.  It maximizes your chance to win that hand (ie, pick up the blinds) and ignores the long-term implied odds of getting paid with a set.  However, it’s probably still robably valid with TT, JJ, and QQ.  Maybe 88 and 99, but it’s really only limited by your ability to fold your pairs after an unfavorable flop (and, obviously, there are more unfavorable flops to QQ than there are to 88).

Link: Instead of raising, call with pocket pairs for bigger pay.