What did I do wrong? Please help!!!

[BuffaloSoldier]

Hi everybody. This is my first post on 2+2, so please be patient with me.

Last night, I was playing in a 800+ person Stars NL tourney. I had looked at only 6-8 hands, when I low and behold, I found: A /forums/images/icons/spade.gif A /forums/images/icons/club.gif in the big blind.

As you can imagine, I was pretty thrilled. To make things even more interesting, I had a very aggressive player to my immediate left, who had already gone all-in 2-3 times in that orbit. At one point earlier, I had AQo and when a king flopped, I mucked to his all in. He was bullying everyone from the get-go, and I was waiting to take him down. FYI, at this time, his chip stack was around 2400 (everyone started at 1500) and mine was 1280 (I saw 1 BB and made it 200 to go on my AQ). The blinds were 10-20.

So anyways, pre-flop I make it 100 to go and get 4 callers. The flop comes Q-10-4 rainbow. I am first to act and I check. He makes it 400 to go and the other two fold. I immediately raise him to 800, hoping to make him think that I am bluffing. He bites, puts me all in, and shows A-10o. Alas, a ten is turned and I am out of the tournament in less than 10 minutes.

People, please help me. I muse say that this is one of the most frustrating hands that I have ever played. I wanted him to throw all of his chips in, got the immediate result that I wanted but lost the battle. Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.

[Jimbo]

You did everything correctly. Even with that flop you win the hand 9 times out of 10. Go on to the next tournament and better luck then.

[punkass]

Before I flame you wrecklessly, I would like to say that your goal was to get him heads up with all his chips in with the best of it. And you did that. He had 3 outs with 2 cards coming. Very low percentage of that happening.

With that said....

You raised AQo to 200 UTG? 10x the BB?! You should lower this.

And you only raised to 100 with AA. You should really raise a fixed amount when you want to raise to disguise your hand. More and more people bet strong with a drawing hand like AQo, and bet weak to trap with AA and KK. I would raise to around 120 with the AA, but 100 isn't far off.

Flop is QT4. There's draws. One or two of the callers probably has a straight draw or a pair. I might do the checkraise like you did, but I wouldve done a check-allin. With the pot at 400, plus his 400 bet, I'd take that pot early on to add to my stack and try to win it there. Let him know the price up front, not a teaser minimum raise.

NOTE: I am not a fan of the minimum raise. I think if you want to raise, you should be raising more than the minimum amount, but that's me.

Another point is you started off with 1280 chips. After your 100 bet PF, you have 1180. Your raise will leave you with 380. There's no point in keeping that little in your stack. Push it all in.

But back to my first point. You wanted to get the idiot (called you with 2nd pair, huh) headsup with the best of it. Call it bad luck on the turn. The only thing you can do is control what you can. I think you could've done a little better. Just my opinion.

[Ignatius]

You played the hand just perfectly (including the 2xpot preflop overbet). You had a plan, stuck to it, managed to trap this guy and got your money in as a 10:1(!) favorite, what more can you want?

[Greg (FossilMan)]

Your problem is not in how you played the hand, but in your mindset.

You seem to assume that since you lost the hand, you made a mistake. That might be true in chess, but it is not true in poker. Many times you will play a hand perfectly and lose. Even just looking at the times when you went all-in for a big pot and lost, many of those will be times where you did NOT make a mistake.

There is simply a lot of luck in poker, bad as well as good.

Later, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)

[Philuva]

Don't let him catch his third T on you. You have to play better defense in situations like this, it looks like to me you had AA and you let up your guard thinking you would have a blow-out victory.

Just kidding, but all you can do is get your money when you are the favorite. If this really bothers you, don't play tournaments or don't go all-in, because you are going to take these beats all of the time. You were a 9 to one favorite. But you are still going to lose 1 out of 9 times, that is just the way it is with poker.