Quad nightmare

Greetings,
This is my first post and I am very excited about joining. I have been coming here steadily increasing my intake for a few months and have found it full of intelligent people who generally are generous with advice and/or knowledge for the OP (and anyone else reading). I feel like I'm "figuring things out" about poker and have this forum and the 2+2 books to thank for accelerating my devlopment exponentially. I joined yesterday and and had nothing really to post..... until tonight/morning. Now time to vent..... there's a simple, but important lesson to learn and a couple of questions.

Here's the whining..... I had three boats beaten by quads tonight. That's right.... three different opponents.. two in omaha high and one in NLHE. I won't detail the omaha ones, but they were almost as bad..... almost. The Hold 'em hand had me UTG with AA. I minraised (this I think was my downfall). Couple people call and the BB calls. Flop 222. You know what happened obviously, but board finished up 2228A, with medium-large bets the whole way through ending with an all-in/call. He had 2 5 off. I'm guessing the raise was too small, but I was hoping for a raise to call, possibly reraise. How much should I have raised? I think maybe I just had to lose that money.... I do mix my game. I come away from that hand and figure I played it right except the raise preflop was too small. It's easy to say this after the hand.... what's the ratio of best plays for UTG with AA? Should you ever just call? I would've lost the same with that move. I only ended up down $5.15 after my quad nightmare, so I don't feel so bad, but it stings....oh does it sting.
One last question... does anyone have something similar happen to them in one session? All advice and recollections welcome.
Thank you

[MINETZ]

in low limit, i usually open for 4x BB with AA utg, min raising is definatley a mistake, just asking to get your AA cracked.
Noah

4xBB seems reasonable.

[NYCNative]

I always play Aces fast. It hurts less when they're cracked.

[Benholio]

Welcome to the boards. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I am going to offer some pointers on your first post:

1) It really comes off looking like a bad beat post. Bad beat posts are bad. I don't mean to sound harsh, but everyone here has lost in every improbable way, so nobody really wants to hear about it. If your post looks like a bad beat post, people are going to skim over it, ignore it completely, or post negative replies.

2) Long, unbroken paragraphs are bad. Break up the content of your post into easy to read nuggets. Make it easy to skim to the meat of the post for readers who are lazy.

3) Format your hand history. Even when quoting a hand from memory, if you format it similar to the common format used here, it is much easier to read and analyze, and will get more attention.

Now, on to the strategy content of your post:

[ QUOTE ]
I'm guessing the raise was too small, but I was hoping for a raise to call, possibly reraise. How much should I have raised? I think maybe I just had to lose that money.... I do mix my game. I come away from that hand and figure I played it right except the raise preflop was too small. It's easy to say this after the hand.... what's the ratio of best plays for UTG with AA? Should you ever just call?

[/ QUOTE ]


Yes, minraising pre-flop is pretty much always a bad idea. You can limp with AA UTG if you have reason to believe someone behind you will raise, but if you just always raise with it you won't be making much of a mistake.

Don't worry about mixing up your play at small stakes. It is perfectly fine to make the same raise with AA UTG every time you get it. Your opponents at this level aren't observant enough, and don't see you play enough to worry about stuff like that. Just concentrate on playing solid poker with basic strategy, and save the advanced stuff for later.

Good luck at the tables!

Thanks for the posting/AA UTG advice. My posts will be structured in a better way from now on. I can see how it seems like a bad beat story, which I did not intend. I don't enjoy bad beat stories either. I am not asking for sympathy or trying to tell you how much of a moron my opponents were.

I am ready to dig deeper into my game and get better with help from the posters here. Can't wait until I am able to help as well.

I am in the process of collecting enough hand histories in PT so that I can see where my other leaks are. Is about 25,000 hands at the same limit enough to give me any useful stats to hone in on?

Thanks again, Benholio and others

I agree with everyone else's advice that you, of course, have to play aces fast, especially at lower limit levels and especially when you're OOP. And I agree with Ben's advice that you don't have to worry so much about "mixing up your game." Ben mentioned that this is unnecessary at lower levels, and I would just add that it's especially unnecessary online. I think at the average table, within an hour of sitting down half the table has probably turned over. Most the people at the table aren't going to see you play enough hands to even figure out how you're playing. And furthermore, they're probably playing multiple tables, talking on the phone, watching the baseball game, etc. Don't worry about "mixing it up." At these levels and online, you want to play ABC poker, which means playing aces fast, especially from UTG. If you're playing live and with the same people for hours on end, I think it makes more sense to occasionally mix it up.

Thanks, Dale. Everything you mentioned makes perfect sense. Thanks again for the sound advice. [ QUOTE ]
I think at the average table, within an hour of sitting down half the table has probably turned over. Most the people at the table aren't going to see you play enough hands to even figure out how you're playing. And furthermore, they're probably playing multiple tables, talking on the phone, watching the baseball game, etc.

[/ QUOTE ] This really helped.