My schedule today allowed me to play a lot (for me) of challenge hands. All told, I played about 700 hands across a few different disciplines: micro PLO, micro NLHE and one MTT. It was a crazy turbulent day. In the end, I closed up $3.40 or so (excluding rake back), but it was a jagged road.
First things first, it was a very satisfying day in that I didn't forget the rules of ANY of the games I played. So, that's progress.
PLO was a quick, painful experience. Bought it for $4 at $.02/$.04, and that lasted a displeasurable 18 hands. Managed to drop $1.20 off the bat pushing too hard with middle set (raise your hand if you are surprised). The remainder of the stack went as follows. I am in the BB with AAK8 double suited. Liking that. Villain 1 (UTG) raises to $.14, villain 2 raises pot, villain 3 calls and when it gets back to me I re-pot. Villains 1 and 2 fold and villain 3 raises the tiny bit that puts me all in.....with 5567 badugi. What?!? I felt great until the flop came 66K. Turn and river blanked, and I retired (again) from PLO. Bad start to the day.
NLHE was, again, the profit center. Up $7.63 in 415 hands. As expected, suffered a few bad beats, but hung in there without getting all tilty. Proud of this hand, although the opponent was clearly a moron. While he may've believed he had the best hand when the flop hit, my call on the flop and turn should've tipped him off, especially when the river brings an overcard AND I speed up all of a sudden. Thank you, EBO29.
In this hand, I won a big pot with quads, but I felt pretty frozen pre-flop when he put in the third raise in position. I flatted, but I'm not sure my reasoning was particularly sound. I flatted because I didn't really know what to do. Ah yes....paralysis, the genesis of all great decisions. My "plan" was as follows -- please comment. When this guy (who was new to the table) 4-bet min-raised, I was perplexed. Seemed too small to be a bluff. I decided to flat call (leaving myself $2.50 behind) to see if I could dodge an overcard on the flop -- but think about it, if I'm worried I'm beat, then how does that really help? I suppose it cuts out one of the two scary possibilities (AK, as opposed to QQ-AA). The flop was super kind. I let him keep the lead, and he obliged. The river was gravy. So, ignoring the result, what should I have done (knowing nada about the villain) when he 4-bet min-raises pre???
The MTT was entertaining, but financially a non-event. It was the $.10 R&A variety, and I like my approach to those in general. While people are flailing about trying to "double up or rebuy" with super mediocre, or worse, holdings, I play pretty tight and very aggressive when I do have a hand worth playing. 236 players in this one, and my play was pretty good early on. Took one super aggravating beat, but climbed back in thanks to the R&A.
The money bubble was at 50th, and I cruised into the money without great drama after the rebuy period ended. I sat in 10th or so with about 40k in chips when I was dealt KQo on the button. Blinds (if I recall correctly) were something like 2000-4000 with a big ante. I raised to 10k with KQ and the BB shipped (total 27k). I didn't love putting most of my stack at risk, but I felt like I had to call, getting over 2:1. Villain showed 66 and I never improved. I clawed for a while, but that hand crippled me. Ended up going out in 29th, earning me a $.21 loss for my three hours of effort. From a time element, obviously not the greatest plan ever. But, I more or less play MTTs in the background while playing a few ring game tables. Having some diversity in games going seems to help me concentrate on both for some reason. And, I need as much tournament experience as I can gather. Three hours of tournament experience for $.85 seems like a decent price. Worthwhile???
So, that's it for today. The Eeyore 'roll sits at $178.43, plus I should be earning some decent rakeback this week....just in time for the end of Sushi Book challenge portion. Now, if I can only convince Martin to play 50k tilty hands before April 1......
$100 swing...the wrong way
14 years ago
4 comments:
In PLO, villains come in with crap all the time taking way the worst of it. The rainbow nature is a little surprising but a low-mid run is better to take into battle against marked Aces than a high run including an Ace. Sucks to lose but you want those guys in there playing like that.
Flopping Nines full you might want to raise the turn to get more money in to make it easier to stack him on the end and also to get more chips out of him in case he is on a draw like QT since you won't get anything out of him later if he misses.
I don't like the JJ play personally. But you know what they say about every different way of playing Jacks being wrong. I wouldn't call his last raise a min since he took your .46 to $1.42. I think you have all the information you need there that against the average villain you are behind and/or coin flipping and you've reduced your call of .96 down to an investment in set mining and that is a very high price requiring basically perfect circumstances to get your money's worth. You ended up getting exactly that but if an Ace or King comes out on the flop along with your Jack you are almost certainly not getting paid in full.
Nice work at the MTT. As long as playing R&A tourneys doesn't turn you into a chip chasing donk then your strategy sounds like a plan especially if it can give you your fix of gamble and happen in the background. If you're having trouble finding enough tables of what you want to play then you might want to play multiple sequential SNGs so your time commitment isn't as long while still giving you something to do.
Ditto what Sushi said.
Curious about the PLO Aces hand — do you want to get it all-in pre? I know that AAK8ds is a great starting hand, but I also know that it’s far from a sure thing — much farther away than pocket Aces in NLHE. Granted 4 people going to the flop isn’t great, but you basically have a drawing hand anyway, right? You either hit or you don’t. Feels like avoiding being all-in pre is not the best solution, but Sushi would definitely be able to weigh in on the percentages. Say you call villain 2’s pot-bet. Then Villain 1 re-pots, and maybe now you’ve got Villain 2 and 3 calling rather than folding. Is that a bad thing? Call me crazy, please.
Lastly, you don’t get rakeback on tourneys, right?
I basically now avoid all AAxx raising fests unless I can get the following phenomenon to occur:
My AAxx is so good I don't care like AAxx ds and AAxx 9t or TJ.
I can get at least 50% of my stack in pre. There are too many donks including myself who will call you down with low runs and low ds runs. I do this all the time when I suspect villain has AAxx and I am deep enough.
I'll try to post some of these types of hands on my blog in the next couple days.
According to HEM I've made over 10,000 BBs from AAxx hands which averages out to about 4BBs every time I get the hand. Basic formula is to try to get it in pre-flop or at least get pot committed. If I don't think I can at least get 1/3 of my stack (preferably 1/2 or more) in then I'll just have to actually play poker instead of just spin the wheel of stack roulette. Since I'm buying in short and getting out when I build my stack enough it's relatively easy to get committed depending on position. Best case is to have a raiser to your immediate right so you can get a substantial amount of your stack in and isolate since it is harder for people to call two pots worth of raise in front of them.
Once you make the big raise you have marked your aces which is fine with me as long as I can make villain pay a bad enough price to crack them. For whatever reason people like to pay absurd amounts to take chips away from someone who has a substantial lead in the hand pre-flop. But that's cool since they are the people who fund all the winnings. Yes, you'll have ugly suckouts periodically but if that's what keeps them coming back so you have to feed the fish every so often. If you can isolate, Aces can stand up by themselves enough of the time to be profitable. And even when you can't isolate you are still almost always favored though not necessarily with a huge overlay. Still, you push that edge enough times and you will be profitable in the long run.
When I am able to get it all in pre-flop the profit goes up to six BBs per hand.
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