[burningyen]

OK, thanks for the replies, guys. You're probably going to destroy me for this. Why the minraise on the turn and the minbet on the river? Again, I don't think I've ever made those moves before, and I won't really try to defend them. Instead, here's my attempt to reconstruct my muddled spur-of-the-moment reasoning and where I think I went wrong:

On the turn:

Here's my thinking on why a minraise: How many hands do I beat that flat call the minraise? A whole lot. How many hands that beat me (and that jive with the previous action) flat call the minraise? None, they have to reraise, I think. If I'm ahead, how many draws out there hurt me? Only a 2-pair draw to a boat, I thought. I completely missed that UTG could be on a club draw. Anyway, to continue with my thought process at the time, how many hands do I beat that reraise? None, I think. Do I jeopardize my chances of filling up? Yes. But assuming I just called on the turn, how much would I have to call on the river if it comes a blank? At the time I was more worried about shielding myself from the reverse implied odds than preserving my chances of filling up to what 2/3rds of the time wouldn't even be the winning boat (assuming he had AK, AQ, or KQ). If I raised bigger on the turn, I would truly hate a reraise all-in. It just seemed to me in the heat of the moment that once again a minraise accomplished just about everything I wanted a raise to accomplish. I see now that that wasn't the case, but I think it's close.

On the river:

When UTG flat called the turn minraise I was fairly certain he didn't have the straight. And how often will a typical opponent check AQ or KQ here? Almost never, I thought. I felt like I had to value bet small enough that AK could call. I definitely should have bet more than t150. t600 sounds right.

But having minbet, what about this check-raise?? Sadly, I folded. My read after the turn was that UTG could only have AK, AQ, or KQ. I had forgotten about/discounted the possible flush draw. Could he have been raising for value with a made flush given my weak betting? Maybe, but for some reason it just didn't seem likely a typical opponent in a $109 MTT would limp something like 9[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] 8[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] UTG. Instead, my mind was fixed on the idea that either UTG was getting way out of line with AK (highly unlikely) or being clever with a bigger boat (much more likely). But given that I completely forgot about the flush possibility, I now think I should have called the check-raise. I still think it's close, though.

As an aside, I ended up 35th out of 448 despite this fiasco.