Gustav traffic / Hand that haunts me

I’ve been really low-key about poker for the last week.  Over the Labor Day holiday I took some time off work and made three trips down to Tunica, but this weekend for unrelated personal reasons I spent several days away from Memphis.

Playing at Tunica last Sunday was pretty interesting, though.  It was packed not just because of the holiday, but also because a lot of regulars from New Orleans (Harrah’s, and I’m not sure if others) were hanging out in Tunica waiting out Gustav.

This hand sticks in my mind.   The MP opponent here later told me that he was one of the people fleeing Gustav.

Harrah’s Tunica $1-3 NLHE

Reads: None, really.  I’ve hit a few lucky hands, including two sets in my first hour at this table.   The only one I’ve shown down was a set of treys which I only bet for two rounds of value because the flop had three hearts.   (Boo!)   I suppose it might look like I’m running over the table.

Stacks: I’ve built up my original $200 to about $400  behind; key opponent here has $313 or so.

Position: One off button

Cards: 98s

Preflop: Limped, 6 see the flop, I believe the button folds.

Flop ($17): T-7-baby, two hearts

Someone in EP bets out $10, MP guy calls, I call.

Turn ($43): Jc

EP checks, MP bets $25, I raise to $80, EP folds, MP calls.

River ($203): 8h

MP shoves for $220.

What would you do here against an unknown?

Some digging-out-of-a-slump hands

Well, it’s been way too long since I’ve posted hands, in part because just running bad had been sapping a lot of my enthusiasm.   I have more to say about this that I’ll put off until later; in brief, I don’t want this to become my repository of bad-beat stories, but I think there’s value to documenting the psychological journey as I learn to weather the storms and not let the downswings get to me.

But that’s for another time.  For now I just have some hands.

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Preflop short-stacked: Exploiting a LAG to my right

I’m going to try doing a “hand history” a little bit differently.   Here’s a situation I was in last night, but I’m not going to state my hole cards at the start.   I’d like feedback on:

1. Is my general approach sound?
2. What range should I be looking to make this play with?

Situation
Horseshoe Tunica $2-5 No-limit hold ‘em

In general this game is pretty loose aggressive.   A couple of people are raising fairly often, but there are still a decent number of limped pots.

Like many $2-5 games, these players are more perceptive and reactive than $1-3 folks.   Many of them want to gamble, but if they see me playing as tight as in GSIHE they’ll know to fold and get out of the way.

I’ve been playing pretty tight, but I’ve picked up several good pocket pairs and shown them down.   I’ve blown through a couple of $200 min. buyins on “cooler” type unlucky hands that I certainly wasn’t going to get away from.

I’ve decided to target the player to my right.   He’s sitting on a stack of at least a couple thousand and is the most aggressive preflop, raising at least two times per orbit.   He seems to especially relish raising a bunch of limpers to something like $40 or $50 to go, when in late position or a blind.

I’ve decided that I can exploit this by reraising him with a certain range of hands.   My question here is, what should that range be.

Effective stack: I’m the shortest at the table with $225.

I’m UTG with ?? in the hole.

I limp, 4 other players limp, RHO in the BB raises to $50.   I reraise pretty big.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose I make a pot-sized reraise to $175.  (I realize that most people would find leaving $50 behind to be stupid, but I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.)   If you want to suggest that I vary the size of my reraise according to my hand, that’s fine too.

For what range, if any, is this a good play?

Discussion

Key to my thinking is to not just wait for a premium hand, because he’ll probably fold to my reraise.   But I think it is good to play my premium hands this way, and also play a range of non-premium hands, so that he risks either incorrectly folding or incorrectly calling.

Semibluffing theory suggests that, since my fold equity on my semibluffs doesn’t depend on my hole cards, I should semibluff with hands that stand to have some equity against his calling range.   For example, KJ offsuit would be bad to make this play with, because if called I may more likely be up against AK or even KQ.    So 87s is a better hand to make this play, even though it loses to KJ in an unimproved showdown, because 87s has more equity if called.   (Of course it doesn’t matter much if he calls with aces anyway, but I want to semibluff with a range that has some equity against the range of hands that might call me.)

I arrived at a range of something like this:

  • Pairs down to about 88.
  • AK, AQ
  • SCs down to 65s
  • A few suited Broadway hands — In addition to the connectors, KJs and maybe QTs

How well did it work?

Well, first I should mention that I had tried more or less this same play once before with QQ, got three way action including a calls by another loose-agressive player with 44 and a call from my target who didn’t show cards.   That worked great as I tripled up after turning queens full!

The hand in question, though, it turned out awful.  I reraised to $150 (yeah, pointless to leave $75 but I figure it makes my play look more authentic) with 99.   He 4-bet all-in with aces, I had to call, and that was that.

I made the same play a third time, this time limping AA from the small blind in a Mississippi straddle hand.   Because my target acted last on the button straddle, he made it $40 or so to go and I reraised to $100.   I was hoping that seeing the 99 would induce him to call me with KK-99, AK, AQ, and maybe a few other hands.   Instead he muttered about how every hand I’d played all night was a pocket pair, showed 44, and folded.   (I didn’t show my aces.)

So my limp/reraise worked great once, not so good twice, but both times he was at the part of his range where I didn’t want him.   Obviously AA was at the absolute tippy-top of his range, and I figure 44 had to be pretty near the bottom.   With his PFR somewhere around 20%, this might be a typical range for him:

22+,A2s+,KTs+,QTs+,J9s+,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,A9o+,KJo+,QJo (20.1%)

Against that range, I’m a 58-42 favorite with 99.   However, he’s not going to call with all that range.   Let’s suppose he calls a reraise with about a quarter of his raising range:

99+,AJs+,KQs,AQo+ (5.7%)

99 isn’t too bad there, actually: only a 61-39 dog.   Given his later remark about me always playing pocket pairs, and including the 9s among good pairs he thinks I’d play, I would imagine he’d probably talk himself into playing KQs or AJs.

Now, how does my general semibluff reraising range compare against that calling range?

88+,AQs+,KJs+,QTs+,JTs,T9s,98s,87s,76s,65s,AQo+ (8.6% of my starting hands): 43.5%

99+,AJs+,KQs,AQo+: 56.5%

So to recap: Roughly 3/4 of the time I try this play, I take down the limps and his raise.   The other 1/4 of the time, we take a flop — but I still hold my own with 43.5% of those pots.

Nasty EV estimates

Figuring based on a $200 stack that I will commit to call any further action:

EV when I take the pot down: $65, say his $45 raise plus 4 limps

EV when I get called: 0.56 * -200 + 0.43 * 200 = -113 + 87 = -26

Weighted EV: $-26 * (5.7/20.1) = -$7.37 representing the times he calls me
$65 * (1 - 5.7/20.1) = $46.57 representing the times he doesn’t call

So my net EV of making the play, at least in this theoretical vaccuum, is $39.20.

But there are also some other complications.   For one thing, some other player might be lurking with aces or kings.   Acutally I figured I’d tighten my reraising range considerably if we both were in early position for just that reason, but he wasn’t making as many raises UTG.   However, the AA or KK could still limp followed by a four-bet to my three-bet.   Then I’d be toast.

If that happens, I’m a 78-23 dog, losing $110 in equity.    So if this horrible eventuality happens 10% of the time I try this play, I’m now losing 11 bbucks flat and we’re down to $28.20.

The other bad thing that could happen is a raise from somebody else while I’m waiting for a limp/reraise.   There were a couple of raisers I had also pegged as pretty loose, and I would reraise them with a good part of my stated range here too, so the above analysis holds.   But if a tight or unknown player raised, I’d need to abandon ship with most of the above hands.  That would mean losing my $5 limp.   It didn’t happen on any of the occasions above, but let’s say it might happen 25% of the time.   That’s another $1.25 down the drain, so now my tricky play only nets me a little under $27 each time I try it.

One other benefit is breaking up the table image of me as a nut-grinder, only ever playing big hands preflop and betting my overpairs or sets postflop.   But that’s hard to quantify.

In any event, the real question here isn’t whether $27 in expectation is good; it’s whether $27 is better than some other strategy, say, smooth calling with AA-JJ and folding everything else when my neighbor raised.   That math is much harder because now I have to play well postflop, at least on the flop.    I’d imagine AA and KK have much better than $27, but I need them for cover.   QQ and JJ are probably about break even, and then I’m just mucking the rest of my range there.   So I think playing all these hands aggressively is much better than playing “normally”, which induces my opponent to play more-or-less perfectly after his original raise.   But I’m open to be convinced that another strategy would be more effective.

Food for thought

After I wrote up this post, it dawned on me that I might have been approaching it all wrong.   Instead of staying to the left of this guy, in order to get first crack at isolating him, perhaps it would have been better to be to his right, catching a lot of cold-callers in the middle.   Of  course everyone else at the table knew he was raising light, and (being deep-stacked) their usual approach was just to call him and hope to outplay him postflop.   Me being able to push for $200 over a couple of $50s puts them to a pretty distasteful decision, since they can’t outplay me postflop but would still like to outplay him.

Thoughts?

Never mind the fish; give me deep-stacked sharks!

Stack size and in particular short-stacking has become one of my pet issues largely because there are so many misconceptions about it.   A convergence of a few threads in the 2+2 Brick and Mortar forum has really driven that point home today:

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My “sick bluff” with AQ unimproved

Actually I don’t make many bold bluffs at live no-limit, because I don’t trust many opponents to fold.   (The ones I make tend to be too small to be that effective; then again, the problem is that making pot-sized river bluffs seems dangerous until you know your opponent well enough to know his calling range.)   I’m open to criticism on this hand, but at the time the play felt automatic given the stack and pot sizes.   It just looked like a bold play because it involved sticking in almost $100 with a no pair hand.   But it also tells you a lot about how weird a wild $1-3 game can be.

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My weekend to get pocket queens

This has very little with improving as a poker player, but I really enjoy tracking silly little patterns like this.   (For example, the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, I’m always tracking nice tidy patterns like that no 3-seeds but two 4-seeds and two 5-seeds lost so far.)

Anyway, last weekend I played about 12 hours of live poker.   The best hand I saw, unless you prefer my AK of clubs that flopped a nut flush draw to go with my overcards, was QQ.   I got queens on six occasions!

Actually I recall some of that first hand, and it bears a little bit of comment although I don’t recall the amounts.

My stack: $200

PFR - Raise to $12 or so from LMP; one caller, an Asian guy two seats to my right.

Flop is jack-high.   Check, I bet the pot, he calls.

Turn is blank.   Check, check.   This may be too conservative for live $1-2, even heads-up, but my thinking here is a bit of “pot control” or “streets of value.”   I have one pair and want to make money from other one-pair hands; unless I know that my opponent has AJ or KJ, it’s easier to get two streets of value from mediocre hands if I check here.  And in fact I induced a bluff.

River blanks (about $50 in the pot): He fires out $25, I call and ask, “What have you got?”   He turns over A6 of hearts unimproved for ace high.   I don’t think there were hearts on board — he was probably just drawing to pair the ace.

So yeah, that worked out great given his precise hand.   I lost some value from a decent top pair but I think I gained value from his range by inducing a bluff.

So back to my point about getting all those queens: on each of the six occasions they held up! Never flopped an overcard.   The scariest hand was I check-raised the flop big OOP and was convinced my opponent had a flush draw, which came in on the turn.   But he checked behind me two rounds when he could have bought the pot.   (This was the same orbit as that first hand; I wonder if showing QQ that first hand made him less inclined to bluff at me.)   The only other scary moment was when JJ reraised me all-in for $45 or so, but I couldn’t fold so I four-bet on top of that and ended up getting three-way action.

Noting silly patterns in random data is fun because it reminds me how much randomness there is in a card game.   Suppose you’d offered me the following prop bet: $100, even money, I win if I get AA or KK first, you win if I get QQ first.   I’d be silly not to keep taking that bet, with real odds 2:1 in my favor.   And yet, last weekend, such a series of bets would have left me stuck $600.

You certainly need to be ready to get the money in getting 2:1 in NLHE.   But thinking about all those queens is a good way to remind myself not to panic when I’m stuck 6 buy-ins!

Personal notes: After last week I decided it’s pretty silly not to play the Horseshoe $2-5 NLHE with a $200 min stack, even though my track record over 15 hours or such is pretty bad.   Leaving stuck $1000 in an evening is still daunting to me, though, so I think I’ll play a couple of buy-ins at that one and then move down.   Someone knowledgeable said in this thread that Harrah’s (formerly the Grand) has soft game, which kinda makes sense.   So I think I’ll try there tonight.

The predecessor thread is also interesting: Could you make $40K a year…? And this one: So when NLHE dies…. And as always, there’s a lot of hate toward Florida despite some apparently madly profitable games: Moving up to 2-5 with $100 max buy-in?

If I had flexibility to move anywhere for poker, even though LA and LV would probably still be the top two, Florida is right up there.   The games sound incredibly soft.   Who cares if 10 or 20BBL stacks are “real poker”?   I’d rather play fake poker and win big.

Learning NLHE via short stacks: The debate rages on….

…and goes absolutely nowhere other than where it’s been the last 3 years since I took up NLHE.   Sigh.

I don’t play that much online, but I suppose I should be delighted that conventional wisdom on 2+2 still leans so heavily to an utterly flawed pedagogy IMO.   The more time talented beginners spend trying to learn everything instead of doing a few things well, the better is is for me.   Or would be if I played more online.

Tempting +EV gas rebate from Southland Park

I’ll try to keep current on promotions in the Tunica and area casinos so that I can pass the good ones along to anyone who happens to be reading.   I heard that Southland Park in West Memphis is giving a 2x gas rebate in slot play <s>that (depending on which way I remember it) could have an EV as high as $90 or $180 dollars to you big Humvee drivers</s>.

UPDATE: Turns out the max in free slot play is $20.   Oh well.   I drive a little Neon so that’s maybe $50 in lost EV to me, but still might be worth pursuing.

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B&M Lesson #2

Lesson #1, of course, is protect your hand. I propose that lesson #2 be something like, “Don’t blurt out information about your hand, no matter how certain you are that it won’t affect the hand.”

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Mini-trip report: Southland Park, West Memphis, AR

I took a little excursion tonight to check out the PokerTek PokerPro tables at Southland Park just over the lovely De Soto (I-40) Bridge in not-so-lovely West Memphis. I was really eager to see what the PokerPros are like. In general I’d say the general atmosphere met my expectations: A lot like playing online poker against opponents seated at the same computer. But overall my impression was pretty positive.

Southland Park advertises all over town here, including numerous billboards on the way to Tunica, with their faux-50s “Be Lucky That Way” campaign. “Have you had your royal flush today?” asks one; “Try doggie style!” implores another.

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