tell me i [censored] up...

[crackzone]

Hi!
Just came home from a 80$ tournament...
40 contestants from the beginning and this happens when we´re 12 left...

I get Q9 offsuit in SB, blinds 20/40.
I have about 200... BB is chip leader with app. 400.
I call, hoping to catch the flop and double up...
flop: Q 10 5 rainbow

I check, BB checks
turn: 2C

I bet 60
He reraises me all-in...

River 4S

I turn over my queens and he shows Q5 to take the pot...
I can't stop blaming myself for such a stupid call... but then... was it? Or was it just a bad beat? how would u have played?
Most of you wouldn't have called BB in the first place but i took the stupid chance to double up if i would hit...
Tell me I [censored] up if I did or if i did play this one right...

thx

[DougBrennan]

I don't have enough experience to tell anyone on this forum they screwed up, and I won't. I have made similar plays myself. But the one question I would ask is "what did you think the BB was raising with?"

Did you have enough info to put him on anything, or did you decide he was bluffing in order to justify your call?

[t_perkin]

It is certainly not a bad beat! he had a better hand than you!

I would not have called that allin bet. Unless of course you had strong reasons to think he might be bullying you.
I think with the number of chips you had you should probably not have been limping to the flop. If your hand is not good enough to try and steal the BB then you should probably not be playing the hand (because you end up in situations like the one above!). Obviously this is a massive over generalisation, but it is a general guideline which I often stick to (but I am no pro).

Tim

[SoCalPat]

Top pair, weak kicker is rarely, if ever, good enough to call someone else's all-in. Unless one of us is extremely short stacked (ie, one more trip through the blinds), there's simply too much out there that has you beaten.

I'm guessing from your post that it's folded to you PF. With your holdings, doubling up shouldn't be the first thing in your mind -- it's like trying to hit a 5-run homer in baseball. You gotta think first things first, ie, can I steal these blinds? Can I lay this down if the BB comes over the top?

You need more than to "catch the flop" to hope to double up here ... you need it to clobber you over the head and hope the BB has a legitimate 2nd best hand. That's just asking for too much to happen. Fold, and wait for a better situation.

[Bill Murphy]

I'd've gone all in preflop, *ITPS*.

[CrisBrown]

Hiya crackzone,

Yup, you misplayed the hand, from the moment you began to consider playing it.

Q9os is not a hand to double up on; it's one of those hands that will win a small pot, or lose a big one. That's not to say it might not be worth the occasional blind steal -- if the blinds and antes had been worth stealing, and at 20/40 they weren't! -- but that wasn't why you were playing it, and that's not how you played it.

Everything after that was the detritus of that first mistake: hoping to double up on Q9os. You saw that Q hit the flop and went in all guns ablaze, without stopping to think that your opponent might have you beat. It wasn't even all that unlikely that he would have you beat: AA, KK, AQ, KQ, QJ, QT, Q5 (which he had), Q2, T5, T2, 55, or 52 would have done it. That's a lot of raindrops to dodge when calling an all-in bet. Your read after his all-in reraise wasn't based on how he'd played the hand, but on what you wished he had so you could double up.

That having been said, relax. We've all done it at times, and most of us still do at times. We get impatient, or we remember some grandstand play we saw on the WPT or WSOP, or whatever ... and suddenly we find we're chasing moonbeams and betting dreams. Learn from the mistake and move on. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Cris