Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Sunday 6 September 2009

Big leak in game...

this is what happens... a loose - ish player reraises (3 - bets) my button raise as he has done a couple of times already. I have a hand in the top of my range, in this case AQo. So I four - bet back, where he then shoves over the top. Now... He would prob fold most of his bluffs here so the shove at the end is indicative of a range such as... {AK+, QQ+} or maybe even tighter. My hand has 24.4% equity against this range. I called getting slightly worse than 2/1 so I am spewing 9% every time I make this call which is horrible. I really need to tighten up in this situation; that has angered me. I talked myself into calling which is just bad play. Only a single buy - in but mistakes like this can make a huge difference to win rate. Out of interest what sort of range would make this call ok? {AQ+, TT+} gives me ok odds getting 2/1 to call. Loose fishy players, then, would be good candidates to call here. But my opponent looked solid - meaning his range for the shove is never this wide. Played another two hands for stacks today. One, against a player who was playing half his hands and also very aggressively I got it in with KK overpair against his KJ top pair. Against a tight player I'd have had a tough decision but here the money must go in. Decisions for stacks are SO player dependent and I really feel I'm leaking money by overcommitting against good players. The second hand is another example of this. I had three bet TT which is standard and got a call from the original raiser. This is usually a range like {AQ+, 22 - JJ}. The flop c-bet was called and we both checked the turn. Now I make my set on the river but it also made a four straight for the villain should he have a queen - def in his range. It's also a good board to bluff for my opponent if he rates to have little showdown equity. In other words his low pair will rarely ever be best so these hands might try and bet should I check. Also, it's such a dangerous board that I don't think I'm getting called should I bet since many of the two pair hands that would make this acceptable should have folded to my three bet. But I bet anyway when a check call line makes much more sense. When he then shoved I was getting tons of odds to call - I did, and low and behold saw the queen. So lessons for the day are:
1 Deciphering hand ranges is CRITICAL for profitability.
2 Hand ranges are entirely player dependent.

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