Attempted steal on button, flop top pair

In a 10-20 game, I have Q9 of hearts on the button. It is folded around to me, and I raise. SB folds, BB calls. At this point I don't have a good idea of how he plays.


The flop is Q73, with two spades and one heart. The BB checks, I bet, he raises, I three-bet, he calls.


The turn is another 7. He checks, I bet, he raises, I call.


The river is an airball.

Final board: Qs 7h 3s 7c 8d.

He bets out, I call. He shows J7 offsuit and takes the pot with triple 7.


Question #1: should I have checked the turn when the board paired? If I had played that way, I would have saved either two big bets (if he then bet out on the river and I called) or one big bet (if he then went for a check-raise on the river). Before I bet on the turn, it did occur to me that he might be holding a 7 and planning to check-raise, but I thought it was more likely that I still had the best hand and therefore should bet for value. Based on the information available to me at the time, was my judgment wrong?


Question #2: was my call on the river correct, or was it obvious that my Q9 was beat? I routinely call on the river in spots like this, for three reasons: (1) I want to let other players know I make loose calls on the river, so they don't attempt to bluff me out as much; (2) if I fold the river with even a tiny doubt in my mind, it affects my play on subsequent hands since I'm distracted by the thought of what my opponent might have held; and (3) occasionally I do catch my opponent bluffing.


Question #3: was it too aggressive to three-bet on the flop? I reasoned that my opponent could have check-raised with a wide variety of hands, since he would have been thinking that I was stealing pre-flop and that I would have bet the flop with almost anything. (This reasoning was, as it turned out, apparently correct, since when he check-raised all he held was middle pair with a jack kicker.) If he had four-bet me on the flop, then I would have had to assume his hand was better than mine, and would have called his raise and then probably folded on the turn if it did not help me.

Preflop, your steal raise with queen-nine suited is good poker. On the flop, your 3-bet is okay in these shorthanded, reraised pots between a steal-raiser and a blind. But when you get check-raised on the turn, you have to know after showing all that strength on previous betting rounds, that you are badly beaten. You are playing three outs at best and could even be drawing dead. I think you should fold when check-raised on the expensive street given this sequence. Once you mistakenly call, you are stuck making a crying call at the river but all this could have been avoided had you folded on fourth.

This sounds right to me.


But, out of curiosity, how should the BB have played?


1. Was he correct to call the pre-flop raise assuming that the button might be stealing?


2. Assuming he calls the pre-flop raise, what does he do after flopping 2nd highest pair?

Personally, I wouldn't call even a steal raise with J7o. But after the flop, I think the bb played Ok.

I would at least consider checking the turn here and calling (or betting) the river.

I started to routinely check the turn in situations like this because a good friend who happens to be a hopeless loser (only because he's mainly a no-limit player and sees too many flops at limit) said I should. So I tried it, months ago, and I really think it works best in the long run, especially with a bad kicker that can be mucked to a check-raise on the turn.


If the freecard tastes bad, consider the extra bets earned on the river when it goes bet-call and he's bluffing, or check-bet-call with a hand he would have folded to a turn bet.


Tommy

Preflop, I think the big blind should fold jack-seven offsuit despite facing a button steal-raise. It is not enough hand to get involved plus he is out of position. What he does once the flop comes depends upon what he knows about his opponent. Against most opponents, I would bet the flop. I think check-raising on a queen-high board is overplaying your hand.

Normally, I like betting the turn since I can win the pot outright. However, given the power sequence displayed by your opponent, checking may not be bad since you are so unlikely to win the pot by betting. You may even induce a worse hand to bluff-bet the river.

Preflop I will raise with this hand almost automatically. I actually prefer to call the checkraise and play accordingly.

If a blank comes on the turn I will raise and unless I improve I will check the river. If a threatening card comes on the turn I will probably just call the turn bet. In your case when the Seven hits I would just call the turn bet after calling the checkraise and probably also call the river bet. I will save three small bets this way. I prefer making it three bets on the flop when I have the type of hand your opponent had. If I improve when it is checked to me I bet and if I am lucky I will get checkraised and I can make another bet. In your hand I would

have checked the turn and called on the river. Once you are

checkraised I would fold. What can you beat? You can't beat

a Seven, a big Queen, or an overpair which was slowplayed. I think you lost the maximum on the hand. When I am playing against more observant opponents I will not always play in this

manner on the flop. I want to mix my play up and not be overly

predictable.


Bruce

Here's another blind-stealing play. I was playing at a casino (Lucky Chances) for the first time. The play is tighter than my usual club, where I rarely get to practice playing heads-up.


In one hand where I tried (unsuccessfully) to steal the blinds, I was on the button with Q2o. I didn't have a good read on the SB, but the BB was tight-passive. Anyway, everyone folds to me. I don't think I've ever seen this before, and I've read in this poker book to raise in this situation with any playing hand. I obviously don't normally play Q2o but given my read on the BB, I thought I might be able to win the blinds right there. BB calls.


Flop: Kxx (check-check)

Turn: Q (check-bet-call)

River: x (check-bet-call)


BB wins with Kx off-suit.


Was it a really bad play to raise pre-flop? And was it a really bad play for the BB to call my raise?

I haven't read the other posts but here are my answers.


1. No, I think that you should bet.


2. You shoulkd have folded after being check raised on the turn. You have played your had very strongly before and on the flop. Thus your opponent should be convinced that you have a very good hand and he should not check raise you unless you are surely beaten. So you should fold there. However, given that you called on the turn you should fold on the river.


3. The problem with three betting on the flop is if you do catch your opponent with a weak hand you are essentially telling him not to bluff anymore. Furthermore, he might have the best hand, especially since your kicker is only a nine. In either case, you don't want to put any more money in than you have to.

"On the flop, your 3-bet is okay in these shorthanded, reraised pots between a steal-raiser and a blind."


Jim:


See my post below. This is actually the same concept we discussed the other day and I believe you still have it backwards.

If you do check the turn, keep in mind that you are now encouraging your opponent to bluff, and you should call no matter what hits. Note: This is really a function of your opponent's tendencies. Against certain players you should probably check every time, but I don't believe that they are in the majority.

I don't have the energy to sort it out right now, but I think I got two recently posted hands mixed up in some of my recent replies. Sorry for the confusion.


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Tommy

I think that queen-deuce offsuit is too weak a hand to be attempting to steal the blinds even from the button. You would have to extremely confident that BOTH blinds will fold a very high percentage of the time to make this profitable. I endorse the big blind's call of your steal-raise. He is getting 3.5-to-1 on his call and he has a king which will pair about 20% of the time anyway. Given the kind of hands many players steal with, I think his play is correct.

We have a warning in HPFAP-21 about playing hands that contain a deuce or trey in short handed situations. You may want to look at that. (See the short-handed section.)

bruce,


I luv your analysis but hated reading it since I am the persnickety type. What's up with the formatting on yours and some others posts?


Regards,


Rick

Maybe he's writing in blank verse. /images/wink.gif

I confess, I am not exactly the most computer literate person in

the world, but I use two different computers when posting and I

get the same poor formatting on both. When entering a response

I type the entire length of the box and out comes the poor text

which everyone views. How do I get my responses to be better

formatted? Please help.


Bruce

bruce,


My computer knowledge is hit and miss. In some cases I am pretty savy (I'm most proud that I recently installed a new hard disk amd Windows XP without losing any data or other mishap). I'm using the old hard disk as a slave as I slowly fill it with MP3 files ripped from my CD collection. In other cases I'm an idiot, as I didn't even realize that the operating system would remember that I want to save my StatKing data under My Documents rather than the Statking program folder once I used "Save As" once to a poker folder under My Documents.


Anyway, this is a new paragraph. I noticed that your messages have a BR HTML command after the often misplaced carriage returns rather than P command's in messages like this one (you can see this using the right mouse and selecting "View Source". Maybe someone knows what this is.


Regards,


Rick

bruce,


I'm just screwing around here. I'm going to type this BS in and

then use the enter key at the end of each line of the message block rather than letting the software word wrap all by itself and see what happens to the message.

bruce,


Is there any chance that you are hitting the Enter key at the end of each line of the message block rather then letting the software word wrap automatically? When I did that above it looked like your text and the BR HTML tag/command was inserted (rather than the P command when I viewed the source code.


Regards,


Rick

Good show. Have fun.


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