Daily Hand Quiz

Of course you bet.

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No-brainer bet.
Pot bet on flop was a little steep btw.

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Well, gotta bet I guess. Don’t want them to catch up for free. But if they go over the top all in we gotta call right? Priced in?…

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John Kugelman Reply:
October 8th, 2010 at 10:01 am

Yes, even before we bet the pot is already the size of the villain’s remaining stack. We’re certainly priced in to calling if we don’t simply shove outright ourselves.

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Bet for sure – most of the hands we’re concerned about are draws, so we need to price them out. Only hands we’re behind are sets, AQ, KK+ – that’s a pretty small part of V’s range and I would have expected some post-flop betting/raising with those hands.

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general johnson jameson Reply:
October 9th, 2010 at 10:48 am

Reading this makes me bite my lip. I totally agree with you that what we’re losing to is a very small range, but that is what makes me bite my lip: It is all about putting people on ranges and playing against them right? But there are some times where you can narrow them down so far to such a small group. Sometimes you are no longer playing ranges, but literally 3 different combos of cards. It is hard to accept it, but sometimes they are the only ones that make sense. Let me explain, This actually happened to me once, check it out:
You’re in BB with ATs. MP opens 3x. HJ,CO,BTN all call. SB folds. You flat. BTN has zero reason to be getting out of line. You flop sick:
A K T rainbow. You open just over 1/2. MP,HJ,CO all fold. BTN repops you about 2.5x. You flat. Turn is 4 rainbow. You fire again. He min-reraises. If you call, the pot is just larger than your stack now. So Now what? If you consider his range, you can rule almost everything out. He doesn’t have AA,KK,QQ,JJ,TT. None of these would have taken it 6 handed to the flop. AK would have button re-raised. He doesn’t have 44. So this means he has to have QJ. It is perfectly within the scope of what he is doing. But you have Top and 3rd pair, and you are losing to literally 1 combo of 2 cards. Are you going to fold? He has to have it. But this isn’t a range. It sucks, but how do you lay this down? Is it foolish to knowingly shove your chips in while basically knowing the exact 2 cards he has, just because it isn’t a range?

There are just sometimes where the story begins to narrow itself down, and sometimes does it so well we can forget ranges and just consider certain cards. I think this KQ hand is one of those times. Ranges don’t do what he is doing against us regarding the board, and our agg image. Certain hands do. This is why guys that are expert story tellers can pinpoint exact cards villains have. It sucks to slow down, but he isn’t doing all of this with a range, he can only be doing this with a pin point of hands. It sucks to accept, but we have to recognize it.

Loose doesn’t mean spew. And no one calls pot sized bets with draws and a short stack. And calling a pot size bet may be loose, but for him to be spewing, he needs to have AK at the worst. So unless he has AK here, we aren’t winning. Like I said it sucks to no longer consider ranges, but lets be real, even the loosest of players aren’t doing his story with KJ or AT. There’s no reason to have no hand, hand the keys over to the agg, and then start calling instead of betting. That doesn’t make sense.

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Major Dude Reply:
October 10th, 2010 at 4:31 pm

I agree that his flop play is baffling, but before we do the ultimate Sherlock Holmes on him, let’s consider one other possibility.

Suppose he’s multi-tabling . . . and all of a sudden he’s totally immersed in very nuanced action in another tourney. (Say it’s a final table; heads up; trying to read someone else’s push, whatever.) I’ve seen very shrewd online players sometimes go catatonic for a moment, and one of them owned up that it was all because of too many distractions from his other tables.

With this flop, there are lots of hands that sure aren’t a fold, but also require some brainpower to figure out an optimal line. If he’s got too many pots on the stove, he may retreat into check/call for a moment, even though that’s not the wisest line.

No guarantees — but it’s one more factor to put into the mix. If so, he’s got a wide range, we’re probably ahead, and we ought to bet.

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no pot control?

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Pirate21 Reply:
October 8th, 2010 at 11:16 am

If you’re suggesting checking behind – I think the value of playing pot control is easily outweighed by the value of not allowing a free card. H is ahead of all but 6 likely hands, meaning V is almost always drawing to beat us – if we don’t charge them for the card, we’re making a mistake far more often than if we bet. In addition, if we check, we’re all but begging V to shove any river card and we have a tough decision to make.

…to T’s point above, we gave up our chance for pot control when we made a pot sized bet on the flop with air. Now we’re pretty much committed and especially after we bet our TP, 2nd K…

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general johnson jameson Reply:
October 9th, 2010 at 11:20 am

I’m not picking on you, you just have good points I like to punctuate

I don’t understand why people think this guy is still drawing. Ignore the fact he check/called a full pot sized bet short stacked. What would he have to have to draw reasonably here: 79, or Axh, most likely A9+h.

This means he is drawing with just as many hands that are beating us, which means we shouldn’t place any more emphasis on one than the other. And I’m pretty positive he didn’t open with 79. And even A9 isn’t looking as hot. Even if he did have a draw, why would he not start betting it on the flop? Why would you let the agg villain set the price to see the next card? And then when he sets the absolute worst possible price there could be, (not to mention his zero implied odds), you still call. None of that makes sense. Open 3x. Check dry board to agg V. Call pot. Check again. This is not what people do with drawing hands at all. Unless he has insane discipline problems, but we can’t consider those in this.

I promise you, that regardless of whatever comes on the river, he is betting. And if that means all of his chips or not, I don’t know, but he is betting, and it is isn’t because his priced out draw chasing busted and he can’t fold.

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I’d lead for 3200. We are facing a player with loose tendencies. If they are drawing, betting big may tilt them AI. We are ahead most of the time, besides being committed due to stack size diffs. Happy to take down a nice pot now also.

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He is loose and we bet, that’s that.

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What I wonder is that how many of the people who voted check are actually thinking of folding to river bet?

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There’s something kind of alarming to me that no one has really mentioned. This guy raised pre, then received what is a pretty dry board for a raised pot HEADS UP, then he checks. THEN HE CALLS A POT SIZED BET. And then he checks again. The pot sized bet was 25% of his remaining stack. Being “a little loose” is one thing, but that certainly doesn’t mean dumping 25% of your stack on a pot sized flop bet chasing a draw, no one does that regardless of image, unless the stacks are super deep and there is massive implied odds, his stack is smaller than the pot now, so he has no implied odds.

So what would make someone raise pre, get only 1 other caller, get a dry flop, and then check. 1) flopping a monster, and then checking to an aggressive image opponent. 2) flopping a draw and not betting it? But then calling the most priced out bet you can get? 3)Has AA, KK, and checks to aggressive opponent that no doubt missed flop.

He isn’t on a draw. I can almost promise that. Unless he has 7h9h, and he doesn’t have that. His first check is interesting. If he had gotten like 5 callers, and he actually had a made hand, no doubt in my mind he would have bet that flop hard to protect. But since he got only 1 caller, and its an aggressive player on a board that surely didn’t help the agg player, he checks to him. This seems so deliberate it is scary. Look, no one takes initiative preflop, and immediately hands the keys to action over on the flop to someone else with a dry board. This makes zero sense. Unless he has a set or KK+, and he knows our aggressive nature is going to fire away. Now on the turn, a Q hits, which is very very likely to have hit us, so he checks again. He knows the easiest way to get an agg to put money in is to let them do it them self, because the second they get resistance that quiets them. The only problem is that check/calling a pot sized bet with a very short stack is resistant to me.

When he checks, he probably figures (and correctly) that we don’t have a 5 or a 7, or that once we bet the pot we don’t have a heart draw cuz we’d then be pricing ourselves out of it instead of betting on the come. The 2nd check is deliberate as well. If he flops a set, if we do not have some combination of 2 pair on the turn, we are drawing dead. I will guarantee that he will bet the river before us.

I really like our hand. I do. But this guy took some smoke filled actions that should slow us down. If he were to have played his hand straight forward against us, we may have folded on the flop, and that isn’t good. Ask yourself this: if you have the initiative preflop, and you get heads up against an agg, is there any single other scenario you you can conceive of where you would instantly hand the keys over to him, OTHER THAN wanting him to dig his own hole? If the turn would have been a 2, I have a feeling he’d bet here. But against an agg opponent that bet huge on flop most likely with just 2 high cards, and now a Q pops out, he knows that an agg with top pair is going to be putting more money in, so let him go ahead.

Call me nitty and flame on, but there is too much smoke here for me, and my spider sense is telling me to see through it. The story isn’t making sense, but with the reasons I said, it begins to. I don’t feel like losing half of my stack in 1 hand with KQ, against an opponent who is pulling this kind of move.

Check here. Call his 1/2 pot river bet, getting to see what he had and saving roughly ~2k in the process. His actions imply we don’t have the best hand here, in addition to our own actions, which suggest if we had any goods at all, we wouldn’t have played this way so far. He is playing this very well, but we see through it. I’ve been through this scenario a thousand times, and at the end you’re going to find he has top set or AA/KK here. People don’t call pot sized bets on the flop when the pot becomes larger than their own stack chasing a draw. Come on guys.

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samo Reply:
October 10th, 2010 at 5:06 am

“The only problem is that check/calling a pot sized bet with a very short stack is resistant to me.”

The V should recognize that Hero realizes this fact as well, so why risk another check on the turn. I agree that the Q could have hit the Hero range, but so could any other broadway card.

If the V has a monster, I think most of the time a weak c-bet is the best way to provoke action from an agg Hero, especially on a low flop.

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catcher Reply:
October 10th, 2010 at 8:28 am

People tend to remember the situations when they were shown monsters rather than when their bet got called and opponent mucked their hand .

I absolutely agree that AA/KK or top set are both in V’s range and consistent with his actions, but this doesn’t exhaust his range. As a loose player in MP with M=20, his opening range is wide open – all pairs, suited aces down to AT or A9, broadway cards and connectors down to 87.

This means that we are inclined to flat their PF raise with a wide range of our own, and he knows it too. Now, the flop comes dry, they check and we fire a pot-sized bet (which I dislike) that basically screams “go away”. There are number of hands that could quite conceivably call this bet. Aces or kings could certainly do it, as well as any flopped set. But what about JJ, TT, 99 or 77? Would those fold? I think not. Would they lead out or reraise? Perhaps, but not necessarily. What about two heart face cards?

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it was easy for him to call that much on the flop. he’s loose. he’s got something to beat your queen more often than you think. alarms should go off when he calls the big flop bet. could be slow playing.

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