I put in another session of 8-tabling 1/2 NL yesterday. An interesting situation came up where my lack of familiarity with the standard of play at these stakes may have hurt me.
As a big of an introduction, I should say that the tables yesterday were not nearly as juicy as I’d imagined they’d be when I decided to multi-table 1/2. There was rarely more than one fish at each of my tables. On the plus side, I found that the more competent regulars were less tricky and easier to play against than they are at 2/4 and 3/6. Even the ones who were as aggressive with their open raises as the better players at higher stakes backed down much more quickly to reraises, which led me to rely heavily on the squeeze play. At least half the time that I was in blind when an aggressive player raised to $7 and a looseish player called, I would pop it to $35 and take it down something like 80% of the time.
In this hand, a pretty aggressive player I’ve played with at 2/4 open raised to $7 from the CO. A tight-aggressive player whom I’d been playing with for about an hour on several tables called, and pretty loose-passive player in the SB called. This is a good spot for a squeeze play regardless, and when I found QQ in the BB, it was an easy reraise. I made it $35, just as I did all of the times I was doing this with air.
I fully expected the aggressive player, who had seen me do this to him before, to make a play at me at some point during the hand, so I wasn’t surprised when he called. Although I’m not generally happy about getting 100 BB’s all in with QQ pre-flop, in this situation against this player I would be comfortable doing so.
However, after the aggressive player called, the tight aggressive player on the button moved all in for $214.75. The SB folded, and I had a decision to make. This was a great time for him to make a play at the pot, because there was nearly $100 in there and none of the rest of us had to have a huge hand. However, I didn’t know if this guy was capable of recognizing that situation and re-squeezing with less than the huge hand he was representing. He had seen me squeeze from the blinds several times, which suggested he could be making a move, but that also may have motivated him just to call with KK or AA in the first place, hoping that I would make exactly this move.
Ultimately, I elected to call, because of all of the hands I’m capable of squeezing with here, QQ is one of the very best. If I’m folding hands as big as QQ in this situation, then my favorite play becomes very, very exploitable. The tight-aggressive player did show AA to take the pot, and I still don’t know whether I was correct to stack off with the third nuts. It really comes down to whether or not this player could be making a move (or shoving something like JJ that he legitimately thinks is best), and I just didn’t know enough about what level of knowledge he had about the game.