Posts Tagged ‘hand reading’

This week’s What’s Your Play? is a little different, in that it’s the first in a series of three posts about the same hand. Rather than asking you to discuss a plan for the entire hand, I’m going to start the discussion with a flop decision. Of course you may still choose to speak broadly about how possible future action influences your flop decision, but you won’t need to consider every possible turn scenario, because next week we’ll find out what exactly happens on the turn and discuss that particular situation in-depth. Make sense? Here we go!

It’s early on Day 5 of the WSOP main event. We’re in the shallow money, with 574 players remaining out of 7319, and Hero’s table draw is a great one for such a late day in the tournament, featuring several pretty weak amateurs. Hero (me, in my late twenties with dark sunglasses and no logos on my clothing) begins the hand with a slightly below average stack of 500K. Blinds are at 4K/8K/1K.

One of the weak players, a guy about my age sitting on a stack of about 450K, raises to 20K in first position. I call with 2c 2h in middle position, and a middle-aged player new to the table and sitting on 600K calls in the big blind. The three of us see a 7s 4s 2d flop, and both of my opponents check relatively quickly. What’s your play and why?  Read the complete post...

Thanks to everyone who commented on What’s Your Plan? Boated Up in a Blind Battle. The most recent comment is also the one that most closely resembles my own opinions, so I’m going to start with what Rant2112 said:

“Most of Villain’s range on the turn consists of bluff catchers and bluffs. We don’t need to worry about optimizing against his value hands anyway because the chips will get in regardless.
Betting the turn, even small IMO, is going to fold out a lot of his bluffs.

Villain’s bluff catchers aren’t super strong. He’s not going to be comfortable paying off two decent-sized bets.

I think checking the turn is best so Villain bluffs more often. He’s going to bluff almost 100% of the time when he has a bluffing hand – he called the flop for a reason.

Against his bluff catchers we can bomb the river and hope to get looked up.

We should also bomb the river when the turn goes check, bet, call because Villain isn’t likely enough to bluff the river. We should just hope he picks up something he’s willing to call with.”  Read the complete post...

I’ve now got another video up with Poker School Online, the PokerStars training site. This one focuses on mid-stakes no-limit hold ‘em and specifically on hand reading, so it’s a nice option if the last video I posted was too basic for you. Again, if you like this, please leave a positive comment and give it an appropriate number of stars. If there’s positive feedback, some more videos might start to show up!

Villain is an unknown who seems to play reasonably well. No idea what if anything he knows about Hero (me), but I did have my PokerStars Team Online red spade at the time this hand was played.

For those who have difficulty seeing suits, they’re not terribly relevant here. Hero’s hand is suited but doesn’t even have a backdoor on the flop, and there’s no flush draw possible on the flop but a second spade comes on the turn.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 400/800 Blinds 80 Ante (8 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

BB (t37804)
UTG (t23094)
UTG+1 (t55662)
MP1 (t53809)
MP2 (t3215)
CO (t24644)
Button (t37332)
Hero (SB) (t23870)

Hero’s M: 12.97

Preflop: Hero is SB with K♣, 5♣
6 folds, Hero bets t2400, BB calls t1600

Flop: (t5440) 6♦, K♥, 6♠ (2 players)
Hero bets t2880, BB calls t2880

Turn: (t11200) K♠ (2 players)

What’s your plan on the turn, and what’s your plan for how to proceed depending on how your opponent responds? Please post your thoughts in the comments section below.

As usual, I’ll leave this post up all week and then give you results and my thoughts on Friday.

PokerStars’ Poker School Online recently released a video that I made for them quite some time ago (as evidenced by my introduction of myself as “one of the newest members of Team Online”). It’s very basic, strategy-wise – I’m playing one table of $.05/$.10 6-max NLHE – but if that’s what you’re looking for, I think you’ll get a lot out of it. It contains clear explanations of important concepts like pre-flop hand selection, semi-bluffing, bet sizing, and building the pot. So far I’ve got a unanimous five stars from five reviews and ten positive comments, so if you like the video, please let PSO know! Who knows? You just might get to see more…

Thanks to everyone who commented on this week’s What’s Your Play, which dealt with playing out of position in a big pot against the chipleader at the final table of a daily live tournament. We’ve already said that it’s best not to end up in this spot by not 3-betting pre-flop, but now that we’re in this situation, let’s talk about how best to proceed.

There are two critical details to take into consideration:

1. The pot is huge. With 122K in there and and 210K left in Hero’s stack, we’re dealing with a Stack-to-Pot ratio of less than 2. Thus, your threshold for getting all-in must be rather low, despite the fact that you’d rather not risk elimination in fourth place.

2. Villain’s range is probably very wide. We know that he’s made some reckless calls before and it’s possible that he’s on “positive tilt”, meaning that he’s convinced he’s got a horseshoe up his ass after running hot so far. The Hero in this hand told me he put Villain on any two when he called the 3-bet. That seems a little extreme to me, but I do think his range is wide. Todd offers a reasonable approximation: ” any pair, any ace, any paint, suited connectors and gappers, and probably some Paint-rag combos as well.”  Read the complete post...

Edit: Hero holds Qh Th. Thanks to Georgios for pointing that rather significant omission!

This is a key hand from the final table of a tournament a friend recently won. It was a $125 freezeout at Aria. Hero is in his late 20′s and has been playing aggressively and well – you can read the trip report linked above if you want a better idea of what exactly his table image might be.

Blinds are 3K/6K/1K, and four players remain in the tournament. I don’t know the exact payout structure, but it’s not particularly top heavy.

The SB is an older gentleman with 110K who is exceedingly tight and cautious. Hero is in the BB with 265K. The CO is a very tight 22-year old with 150K. The BTN is the chipleader with 320K.

Hero and Button have been running over the other two over. The BTN seems generally to be on the reckless side of loose-aggressive. He opens tons of pots and hates to fold. He ran up a huge stack by getting slapped with the deck (he’s shown down Aces four times already at the final table) but has since given away nearly half of that with some questionable calls, including raise-calling 53s against a 110K shove getting nowhere near the appropriate odds.  Read the complete post...

This is a guest post from a friend of mine who just won his first live tournament last week. It was a $125 freezeout at Aria. He sent this to me in an e-mail and was gracious enough to permit me to publish it. There’s some interesting stuff in here about what it takes to do well in a small-stakes live tournament, what you can get away with, and what it feels to be really keyed up and in the zone while you’re playing. I think everyone can relate to the feelings of frustration that come from banging your head against the wall in poorly structure tournaments and also the exhilaration of finally taking one down. Of course once you’re capable of calls like this it’s only a matter of time before you win one!

“I was able to build a good stack pretty early on, even before we hit the antes I had about 38k from a 10k stack. I was pretty aggressive and the table never gave me credit for anything. Because of this I was able to get paid when hitting a straight and hitting Aces up vs my opponent’s worst aces up.  Read the complete post...