Warning: shameless brag ahead.
It’s irrational, I know, but like a few others, I have a real hatred for the min-re-raise. I guess I should be more tolerant since it’s really an awful play, telling your opponents you have a monster hand while simultaneously giving them good direct + implied odds to try to outflop you. If I had to guess, I’d say they annoy me because they force me to make longshot pot odds calls when I know I’m going to be check-folding the flop a huge amount of the time. In other words, I remember all the times that they force me to bleed off small amounts of valuable chips better than the times that I stack them.
It’s well known in my home game that min-raises throw me into monkey tilt, and the following may be an example of this, but whatever, it worked and it felt good. In the Sunday $200 on UB, I raised to 285 with Qs Ts from MP and the CO re-raised to 605. I had around 3300 behind, and he covered.
The flop came out Ah 9d 3d, missing me completely. However, if I was right that this guy had a big pair, then this was probably exactly the flop he did not want to see. That or he just made top set, but I decided to throw some stones at the hornets’ nest. I checked, he bet just 525, and I called, figuring he would tell me if he was strong or scared on the turn.
Turn was some blank, I checked again, and he checked behind. Just as I suspected. If he was going to slowplay AAA, I think he would have done it on the flop. Having bet the flop, I can’t see why he would check the turn, especially with the flush draw on board. So I assumed he was scared of the Ace.
The river was the 5d, completing the flush draw. Very good for me, as it gave me one more thing to represent. There was 2500 in the pot, and I had around 2800 left. I thought about shoving but figured 2000 ought to do the trick and leave me a tad bit of breathing room if I was wrong. I bet and got a fold pretty quickly. Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.