It is interesting.  I did a sweat yesterday with dodgyken and learned a lot.  Usually you have to get into a ton of tough spots to learn a good bit, but I got to make money AND learn.  I like that combination!  I almost quit the sweat at one point too, because I was kinda card dead and the first good bit of it was really kinda boring.  There were some good wins which were pretty standard like winning a 300+ BB pot with 1010 when I flopped a set against KK, so I will leave those out and focus on some spots where I learned a thing or two.  I apologize for those at work, as I had to use pokerhand this time, because weaktight was not working this morning.

This hand was interesting because our plan for the hand changed in the middle of the hand, based on some actions.  Standard preflop obviously.  BB paused for a bit before checking the flop to me, he is a standard TAG regular.  I don’t care too much about the button, as he only has 60 BBs and I will stack off to him, but the BB made me nervous when he just called the flop bet 3way.  We opted to check the turn here because we can control the pot size, but mostly because if the button bets out, we get a lot of information on the BB and can adjust accordingly.  Once the BB folds, we just wanna make the button do something silly, because we didn’t think he was folding here ever.  This was played slightly differently than I would have had I been by myself as I would have bet the turn.  I figured the main player that had me concerned would not checkraise the turn without a hand that could beat AA, so I get value from worse and can fold to better.  However, I can find this information out cheaper with the way we played the hand, so that was cool to think a bit more about the hand.

The river on this hand was interesting to me.  I was going to check it back, which I was told was criminal.  I did not want to get raised, because I thought it would be a gross spot, but I was told that no worse hands would be raising here, only better flushes and boats would checkraise the river, so I would lose value from this hand I checked the river.  Villain tanked and called and that netted me an extra $40 of profit.  Things like this is what is preventing me from taking the next step in my game.  This is not running bad or good, this would have been missing $40 of value for no reason.  A) my decision would be easy if raised and B) He hadn’t raised yet anyways!!

This is just simply letting a villain bluff to me.  The minraise on the flop can mean many more things than a minraise on the turn.  The bet size of our donk lead on the turn had me confused at first, but it is to take away odds.  By myself I would have bet smaller, hoping to get a shove.  In retrospect, I will get a shove with this size bet a lot of the time too, from villain’s range, but I must take away those implied odds, since we can’t fold based on stack sizes.

I had been squozing a lot here, and not lightly, I just had a good run of hands.  It never made the TAG flip out like we thought would happen, he never even once called the squoze.  But apparently it made the caller flip out, which is a good thing too.

Apparently, checking this river would have been criminal as well.  I felt my hand was very vulnerable, but this just goes to show me thin I can value bet.  This guy only folded to 20% of cbets and was a complete station.  In fact, we had a hand where we had 22 on a 663 F where we cbet and got called.  It was checked down and villain had 97o.  So against these types of players, we need to get as much value as we can as I doubt he ever folds a king on this board (think it was AKxxx, can’t read pokerhand at work and forgot).

Despite the awesome results, I actually did not run particularly well in all ins.  I still had my fair share of losses, such as these hands:

  • AKs AIPF against AA for 120 BBs and lost
  • TT call on 235K turn for 65 BBs, villain had 66, rivers a 4
  • KQ on Kxx flop all in against K10, rivers a 10
  • K2 v. K8 on KK2Q turn, rivers a Q for the split

The point of this comment is that I made some hands and got paid sure, but a lot of these profits were coming from hands where I just need to get more value.  I lost 3 BIs on these 4 hands and still ended the day up 6.5 BIs.  This tells me one very important thing.  Overall, my ideas of how to play poker are solid.  However, I need to get as much value as I possibly can from weaker players who will call much much lighter.  I need to let aggressive players be aggressive and bluff me more like the AQ hand above, where normally I would have raised to charge draws.  That would be bad, as he will get it in on the turn when he misses, my equity is better, and I don’t fold him out.  Basically my purpose of bringing those hands up is to say that many of my mediocre days can be much better if I get more value from my hands, which is really the reason for my less than stellar results. 

Once I finished sweating dodgyken, I noticed my bankroll was at $5,599.99 (damn, I need to stop withdrawing money, grrrrrrr).  So I played 3 hands of $0.10/$0.25 stud hi/lo and made 21 cents.  Now my BR is over $5,600!! 

I am going to start putting in vids with scenes I like a lot from movies in some of my posts.  This is a good scene from a movie I like a lot, called Boiler Room.  Thought it had a pretty good cast and really enjoyed this movie.