09-23-2005, 04:24 AM
All right. I'm sitting on the button in a $200 buy in $5bb NL live game (at Commerce) and lo and behold two black aces come to me. I have about $380 at the time. 4 people limp ahead of me and I punch it up to $30 to thin the field even though I know I'm giving away more info about my hand than I'd like to. 2 of 4 call, both fairly clever lags that I've been playing against a lot in the past few weeks.
The flop comes Qc 5c 2 and I bet the pot. The first lag folds and the second, who has about $1200, pushes all in. Against a normal lag, this would be a fairly easy call as he could be pushing a straight draw, flush draw, or any queen (I've seen this player do that very thing many times). But this guy I'm pretty sure has put me on a big pair and it makes me hesitate - not for long enough as I decide that if he's hit a set he deserves my money and I call. The turn and river are two blanks so I flip over my aces. He nods his head and turns over Qh2h for the winning two pair.
As I'm pushing my chips to him I'm calling myself an idiot for calling the all-in check raise, but I'm also thinking he can't possibly have long term +EV on that play, can he?
Even if he knows for a fact that I have AA, his chances for 2-pair-or-better are less than 4% since he has no straight possibilites, so he's at least 25-1 to out-flop me. So he loses his 25 dollar call 25 times for negative $625 and he gets my ~$380 somewhat less than one time (since AA will suck out sometimes) for we'll say $340 for a negative $285 in the long run, right? Or am I [censored] up the math somewhere? I know there is a strong argument that I should have folded to the check-raise if I knew that he put me on AA/KK - I don't really care about that. I am looking for long term EV responses.
The flop comes Qc 5c 2 and I bet the pot. The first lag folds and the second, who has about $1200, pushes all in. Against a normal lag, this would be a fairly easy call as he could be pushing a straight draw, flush draw, or any queen (I've seen this player do that very thing many times). But this guy I'm pretty sure has put me on a big pair and it makes me hesitate - not for long enough as I decide that if he's hit a set he deserves my money and I call. The turn and river are two blanks so I flip over my aces. He nods his head and turns over Qh2h for the winning two pair.
As I'm pushing my chips to him I'm calling myself an idiot for calling the all-in check raise, but I'm also thinking he can't possibly have long term +EV on that play, can he?
Even if he knows for a fact that I have AA, his chances for 2-pair-or-better are less than 4% since he has no straight possibilites, so he's at least 25-1 to out-flop me. So he loses his 25 dollar call 25 times for negative $625 and he gets my ~$380 somewhat less than one time (since AA will suck out sometimes) for we'll say $340 for a negative $285 in the long run, right? Or am I [censored] up the math somewhere? I know there is a strong argument that I should have folded to the check-raise if I knew that he put me on AA/KK - I don't really care about that. I am looking for long term EV responses.