[elysium]

hi everyone

thanks for the responses. the CO who likes to bluff a little more than usual, and who also calls down a lot, called the river raise and mucked when i turned over my Q high. he had TT or JJ. the EP had a Q high too....maybe. no, actually, she had a backdoor flush go up in flames or something, or she had the TT or JJ, and the CO had J high. the thing is, no one had an A or K, and i knew this. what i didn't consider was how strong my Q high was under this circumstance. interestingly, having the bluffer bet into me gave me the opportunity to win it and may have made the raise a technical value raise due to the circumstances involved. the thing is, at the time, none of this was at all clear to me. my raise on the river was not founded quite as solidly as might have liked it to be. the call by the CO came as surprise. i didn't really think he'd call even though that is what he does a lot. and, i also didn't factor in the possible confusion either one of my opponents may have had wioth a hand like TT or JJ, and neither did i factor in their unwillingness to let their hand go even though it had little or no pot value. if i had considered that, my raise may have skirted the threshold of having value. whether it was a value raise or not is still not abundantly clear, but it probably was not. at the time it certainly was not.

why did he call? he calls. this opponent calls....a lot. that in itself was a fascinating aspect of this hand. as i put in the raise, i was doing so against the very opponent who i would least likely want to bluff-raise at, especially on the river. but i couldn't bring myself to call. and that is yet one more tidbit making this a very unique kind of hand; calling is better than folding, and so is raising better. but folding is an option. so calling is almost as good as bluff-raising! and bluff-raising and calling are both better than folding.