Coin flip middle of a tourney, do you take it?

nice play. only thing i'm not sure of is how you excluded QQ-AA from his range. But your going to have to gamble at some point in the tourney to accumulate chips and as you said you do have some FE. nice play.

did i know that he didnt have AA-QQ, no, but i pay a lot of attention and makes lots of notes on players during a MTT. I felt I had a good read on him. Sure I could have been wrong, i have been wrong many times before, but i felt I had a good read and I was right.

[GutPunch]

why not call and play a flop with position?

[ThrillFactor]

[ QUOTE ]
did i know that he didnt have AA-QQ, no, but i pay a lot of attention and makes lots of notes on players during a MTT. I felt I had a good read on him. Sure I could have been wrong, i have been wrong many times before, but i felt I had a good read and I was right.

[/ QUOTE ]

See my other post.

There's absolutely no way that you can have enough info on your opponent 2 hrs into an MTT to have this sort of read.

The fact that you were right this time has nothing to do that you made a flawed assumption. MOST of the time he WON'T have AA-QQ. But sometimes he will.

I'm really not trying to come down on you here. Just trying to be helpful and open your eyes to this flawed thinking.

Stop and consider what I'm saying.

[McMelchior]

[ QUOTE ]
There's absolutely no way that you can have enough info on your opponent 2 hrs into an MTT to have this sort of read.

The fact that you were right this time has nothing to do that you made a flawed assumption.


[/ QUOTE ]I have no idea why you write this, but it's bad.

If OP considers it unlikely the OR has AA thru QQ, then that's his read, and since he has been observant and played the OR for a while it should not be challenged.

What you in effect are saying is that we can't make and trust reads online. This is plain and simply wrong.

Most players are highly predictable, even the insanely LAGgy ones. This is a basic assumption for playing online.

To Dogger: Following your read - which I, have I not made myself clear, believe is pivotal - you're a small favorite:
Hand 1: 51.9621 % 42.88% 09.08% { AcKd }
Hand 2: 48.0379 % 38.96% 09.08% { JJ-77, AQs+, AQo+ }

As such you should play - and the fact that the cost of sitting one orbit approaching 10% of your stack (and probably soon to increase) certainly should remove any residual doubt.

Flat calling for 12% of your stack and a couple of players behind you to act is not something I'm fond of. Especially since I read your selfproclamed "very very thigh"ness to mean that you only have little confidence in your post-flop playing abilities. Playing AK after missing the flop is not for beginners.

I believe it's a clear push.

Don't let others discourage you from trusting your reads.

Best,

McMelchior (Johan)

[ThrillFactor]

Oh come on now.

Even if he's seen his opponent pick up 1 each AA,KK, and QQ in the first two hours and open-raise 3-4x each time, he can't discount that he may have one of those 3 hands this time and is mixing it up trying to get action.

I'm not seeing monsters here, and No, I'm not implying that you can't develop reads online. In fact, I understand completely when he says that he believed that it was unlikely that villians had AA-QQ. BUT YOU CAN'T DISCOUNT THEM COMPLETELY. They have to be considered, even if at a discounted probability.

In this particular hand it doesn't make a difference. Hero's a slight favorite without them in the range, a slight dog with them. It's an easy push either way with the dead money.

But to say that you can totally eliminate them as possibilities based on 2 hours of observation is foolish.

I agree with both of you. You can get read online but it is hard to be 100% sure Vilain doesn't have AA-QQ. However, how do you know he is not doing that with 66 or AJs, or KQs??? Nobody knows so you base your decision on what range you actually think he has. Of course, when you are called you won't see the times he had 55 or QJs, you will ojnly see the time you were wrong and he had AA. I think that he could have AA-QQ but I also think that if you strongly believe he doesn't have that, you can base your decision on this.

I wasn't playing but personnaly, I wouldn't discount the fact the AA-QQ could min-raise UTG or in EP.

For the hand: I push almost everytime. You are tight, so you must push the good hands you have. I think he did a bad play, calling with 99 (at best 45-55) but you can't control that.

[ThrillFactor]

Of course you are correct - there are many more hands that can be in the OR's range. But when figuring his range, I tend to err on the side of worse-case scenario. We're in a dead heat with my given range, making it a pretty easy push. If I gave villian too much credit, then that makes it even better for me.

The tragic mistake would be to not give the OR enough credit.

In my reasonably limited experience of online MTTs, the mini-raise utg with AA seems to be pretty common. The vast majority of people with AA utg seem to either flat call or mini-raise and then pray for the re-raise so I wouldn't discount it but most people seem to flat call or mini-raise low pps too.
However, if the table has been together a while and you are observant and feel that villain is too, then I think you can discount it based on that. He's only going to slow play AA utg or in ep if he's pretty damn sure he's getting re-raised. His nightmare in that scenario is that it gets called round and he's first to act in a family pot so if you feel that he feels that someone at the table is likely to reraise an utg mini-raise then you can't discount it. If, on the other hand, any ep raises are being folded round and you are pretty sure villain is aware of this, then i think you can more or less discount AA.

[McMelchior]

[ QUOTE ]
They have to be considered, even if at a discounted probability.
[..]
But to say that you can totally eliminate them as possibilities based on 2 hours of observation is foolish.

[/ QUOTE ]Sir, I respectfully disagree with your approach.
We are talking about reads. We are not talking about absolute knowledge. This is a very basic and important distinction.

Reads are an approximation to facts. A read can by nature never be made with 100% certainty. But: Reads are our one and only basis for adding information about our opponents holdings to our determination of what is the best play at any given time.

Saying that the OP can't discount certain of OR's possible holdings is correct, but it's also meaningless and therefore shouldn't be done. If we can't discount AA, KK or QQ, then we can't discount 72o, K3 or JTs (the latter being much more likely). Actually, we can't discount the min-raise as a plain and simple mis-click!

In a tournament situation the only practical MO must be to estimate likely holdings based on our observations and discount all other holdings, knowing that "of course he could have XY". Here the assumption must be that holdings our read discounts as unlikely stronger holdings are balanced out by the unlikely weaker holdings.

Any other approach is destructive to our game, by making the evalutation unwieldy and impossible within the time frame allowed.

And, much worse, claiming that the OR must include hands that based on his read are unlikely is detrimental to the development of good reading skills - and should not happen here.

Best,

McMelchior (Johan)