Posts Tagged ‘FLHE’

Been playing some 8-game mix lately. I’m pretty sure the games are good but I am not so it all evens out! Here are two of the best hands I played yesterday (sorry for the lack of conversion):

PokerStars Game #66507871933: 8-Game (Hold’em Limit, $10/$20 USD) – 2011/08/24 22:27:27 MT [2011/08/25 0:27:27 ET]
Table ‘Campanula VII’ 6-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: foucault82 ($500 in chips)
Seat 2: loooseslots ($657.90 in chips)
Seat 3: NCSU2012 ($924.45 in chips)
Seat 4: hav0cLOL ($1523 in chips)
Seat 5: boardrat ($501.70 in chips)
Seat 6: xx23xx ($522 in chips)
boardrat: posts small blind $5
xx23xx: posts big blind $10
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to foucault82 [Jd Ah]
foucault82: raises $10 to $20
loooseslots: folds
NCSU2012: folds
hav0cLOL: folds
boardrat: folds
xx23xx: calls $10
*** FLOP *** [Tc 2h 7d]
xx23xx: checks
foucault82: bets $10
xx23xx: calls $10
*** TURN *** [Tc 2h 7d] [6d]
xx23xx: checks
foucault82: checks
*** RIVER *** [Tc 2h 7d 6d] [2d]
xx23xx: checks
foucault82: bets $20
xx23xx: calls $20
*** SHOW DOWN ***
foucault82: shows [Jd Ah] (a pair of Deuces)
xx23xx: shows [Ad Qc] (a pair of Deuces – Ace+Queen kicker)
xx23xx collected $102 from pot  Read the complete post...

I hate and suck at FLHE, so I didn’t play this one. I just wanted to give a big congratulations to Terrence “Unassigned” Chan, who won both the $500 and $5000 tournaments. I had the privilege of meeting, playing with, and losing a big pot to Terrence in Barcelona. He was a very nice guy, and I’ve been following his blog ever since. He’s also a phenomenal poker player, probably one of the best FLHE players in the world, and it’s hard to think of a guy more deserving of a big win than Terrence.

I think this has been out for a few days, but I just noticed that Poker Stars has posted a tentative schedule for a yet-to-be-named tournament series in April. I love the format of offering a low-, medium-, and high-stakes option for every tournament and am frankly staggered that they think they will get sufficient interest in some of these events, especially the $2000 Triple Draw.

The 2+2 MTT community is mostly salivating over this, though some are a little concerned that the smaller events will actually discourage people from trying satellite into the bigger events. I don’t think they’re wrong, but I still expect the big events to be plenty soft thanks to tourney donks playing with relatively deep stacks for fairly big money.

The only issue for me is how to get enough money on Stars by April to enable me to play the ones I want without busting the bankroll. I may suck it up and make a wire transfer, which I’ve so far refused to do on principle since Stars makes the depositor pay the wire fees. It’s really preposterous- I pay enough rake in 10 minutes to cover the fees, and it’s clearly in their interest for me to have money on their site.

Anyway, the schedule:  Read the complete post...

I am just not very good at FLHE. The generic advice I’ve gotten about this game is to make tons of thin value bets and calls, which I try to do, but I think I’m choosing bad spots. My opponents yesterday did not even seem particularly good, but they were owning me left and right. A few examples:

I raise AK on the button, BB calls. Flop 776 with two hearts, I bet, he check-raises, I call. Turn 9 he bets I call. River 2 he bets I think his range is busted heart draw or trips+ so I call and he takes me on a tour of Valuetown with his 55.

Another one, guy raises UTG, I 3-bet JJ, and he calls. Flop 664, he checks, I bet, he calls. Turn blank, he checks, I bet, he raises, I call. River blank, he checks, I bet, he raises, I puke and call, he shows me 65o. Pretty questionable UTG raise even in 6max, but I must admit that he owned me pretty hard with the double check-raise. It’s humiliating to get served like this by fish.  Read the complete post...

I wanted to make this post about how bad people are at Stud/8, because they are. Split pot games will rip clueless players to shreds. O/8 is a pretty easy game to get, so you don’t see quite as many huge mistakes. Plus there are fewer betting streets and it’s easier to make the nuts. But in Stud/8, people chase absurd lows and call down with any pair even when they are clearly crushed or getting freerolled.

But I also made a pretty big error in a Stud/8 game, so I guess I’ll be talking about how I suck at Stud/8 (though this is really just a Stud high error). On the river, my opponent was showing 6655, and I had Aces up with both Aces and two high cards showing. My opponent bet, and I raised for value. Like I was saying, no matter how clear I make it that I have Aces up, people will call down with any two pair.

I forgot, however, to think about what my opponent would be value betting. Since his two pair was open, there was no way he could be betting on the strength of that alone. He had to have either a boat or a low, and in either case there was no value in a raise. Sure enough, he had 6′s full.  Read the complete post...

I might as well disclose up front that I am not very good at or knowledgeable about fixed limit hold ‘em. In some ways, that makes me unqualified to review a text on the subject, but it also plants me squarely within the target audience of Howard Lederer’s contribution to the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition. Reading Lederer’s chapter left me with a strong sense, not only of how to handle the individual, nuts-and-bolts decisions of the game but also how to integrate those decisions into a coherent, profitable strategy.

When feeling my way around a new game, I like to know where a winning player’s edge comes from, what situations he seeks to create. I am trying to figure out what I will need to do well, what concepts I will need to master in order to win. Oddly, it takes a while for Lederer to answer this question, and he doesn’t do in the section called, “The Starting Framework for Limit Hold ‘Em Tournament Play”. Eventually, however, he does tell me very clearly what I’ve been waiting to hear: “It’s not about winning pots. It’s about winning bets in limit hold ‘em. Being in position… is where you earn your bets.”  Read the complete post...