Ugly TT hand vs. only guy who covers me. 300+20

[LearnedfromTV]

Please comment on all streets. This hand was uncomfortable the whole way and I don't know what should have done. At the time I was about 20th out of 100, 20 pay. I thought preflop and flop plays were set up to extract the most from the hand but they ended up putting me in a bad spot on a bad turn.

No-limit Texas Hold'em $300+$20 (real money), hand #1,187,676,289
Weekly Big Deal Multi Table Tournament, 20 Aug 2005 04:17 PM
View Previous | Next hand for this table.
Seat 1: Button ($3,475 in chips)
Seat 2: SB ($3,240 in chips)
Seat 3: Villain BB ($7,470 in chips)
Seat 4: UTG ($1,565 in chips)
Seat 5: UTG+1 ($3,500 in chips)
Seat 6: UTG+2 ($4,765 in chips)
Seat 7: MP1 ($2,655 in chips)
Seat 8: Hero [10[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img],10[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]] ($5,815 in chips)
Seat 9: MP3 ($1,800 in chips)
Seat 10: CO ($3,680 in chips)
ANTES/BLINDS
SB posts blind ($75), Villain posts blind ($150).
PRE-FLOP
folded to Hero, Hero raises to 600, folded to Villain, reraises to 1100.

He could be reraising with a pretty wide range. Has restole a couple times, and reraises at this table were generally going uncalled. I hadn't been too active and was probably perceived as likely to fold to a reraise.
I figure I'm ahead of his range but if I push I'm only getting called by AA-JJ and coin flips. I have position. Only a 500 raise. Either he wants a call or wants to be able to get away from the hand if I come back over the top. I'd rather keep the worse hands around and let them fire at a flop I like.

I called. Good, bad?

FLOP (T2275) Q[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img],6[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img],6[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]
Villain bets $1,100, Hero raises to $2,500, Villain calls.

I like the flop, figure I'm ahead when he way underbets the pot. Should I have pushed here? Looking at the size of the pot, I'm pot committed at 2500, maybe pushing is best? It would be a pretty big overbet (4700 into 3300.. And I think 2500 has a chance of getting called by some worse hands. Diamond draw, overcards are still paying too much but might call and likely wouldn't call a push (except A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] or A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] J [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], which probably aren't going anywhere..

TURN (T7275) K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]

Terrible card. Villain bets $1,800, basically putting me allin. [censored]. But the pot is huge, now I have the third nut flush draw, hitting a ten is probably good too, and there's a small chance I have the best hand already. Hero???

[yid3655]

Interesting hand and I dont think you should be scared to re raise pre flop just to see exactly where your at.

"He could be reraising with a pretty wide range" If you have a good enough read id be tempted to play this confidently. How did he get to 7k, is he loose?

[LearnedfromTV]

[ QUOTE ]
Interesting hand and I dont think you should be scared to re raise pre flop just to see exactly where your at.

"He could be reraising with a pretty wide range" If you have a good enough read id be tempted to play this confidently. How did he get to 7k, is he loose?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not extremely loose. He won a couple big showdown pots with strong hands/strong flops. Since he got his stack he's used it some, not alot, but enough that he could be playing big stack with this reraise rather than his cards.

Range for him would be AA-66, AKs-AJs, KQs, AK-AQ, with some reasonable percentage (15-20%?) of SC/weak suited ace/any two. I guess my main reason to reraise is he could have a KJ type hand and fold it. i just don't see that kind of hand being too likely. Maybe I'm putting my thoughts in his head but I think it's 98s way more than KJ, etc. In other words, if it's a flip, I don't think he has the kind of overcards he'll lay down often enough for pushing to be worth more than i gain from getting to see the flop, getting extra from his crushed hands by letting him keep the initative and seeing the flop myself in position. I'm also not too fond of defining my hand as "Big Pair" to him when my pair ain't really that big. That said, reraising could easily be correct. I'm just explaining why i chose to call.

This looks like aces to me, but maybe I'm respecting this guy too much. It looks like he wants the re-raise when he sees the queen, hoping you hit it and then will push all in on the turn. But I could be completely off. A guy with a similiar bio played aces on the same exact flop against me when I had KQ suited.

[benkahuna]

Yikes. I would be very, very, very unhappy with this hand. His call on the flop tells me that he almost certainly has you beat on the turn. What doesn't beat you?
He wins with a 6, a queen, a king, any overpair above tt that's not 66, and any two flush cards.

Given the extreme risk and danger in going against the big stack, I think it would have been wise to define your hand when you had a chance on both the preflop and the flop. This situation is exactly what you don't want. Difficult decisions against an unpredictable and aggressive opponent that can bust you. You didn't reraise all in on the preflop and you didn't do so on the flop either. Why not? Can you read this guy well enough (online) and/or outplay him well enough to justify not defining your hand? My guess is no.

Now that you're stuck with it, the way the guy could easily be bullying you, you have to call. The pot is huge. Giving up here is giving up on the tournament. You have like 4:1 pot odds. If there is a just under 20 percent chance the guy is bluffing you have to call. You could have 2 outs with your ten.

I've gotten myself in trouble before like this, so please don't assume I think I'm above it, but I think basically this history is a great example of how not to play a tournament hand in this situation.

Given your relative stacks and the size of the betting, I think you have to decide if you're ahead and if you are, go all in. I understand your thinking on the preflop. If he's been restealing a lot, seeing a flop makes some sense. If you like the flop, you'd better push. You might as well get your money in with the best hand and maybe he'll fold when he could have sucked out on you. In some ways it really doesn't matter because you're pot committed regardless by your stack relative to the pot now. And it sort of looks like what you wanted assuming the guy was stealing.

I don't define the pot bet as weak necessarily. It could be a probe bet, a continuation bet, or a bet intended to look like one of those bets, but actually be a value bet.

[JC_Saves]

I think the call is the right play, after all you could be way behind right now. Why not get to the flop and see what happens at that point.

I think that I would just call the flop bet and see what he did on the turn. He could have been making a move with two overcards, but he could have made top pair, or even a set of QQ, and it is still possible that he has AA, KK . That is why I would just call and see what happens on the turn.

Has this player been wild and called down chasing? Is he a solid player? These would be important obviously in the decision making process.

I think when you reraise and get called you need to believe that you are behind and lay it down to a bet on the turn, unless he showed that he would keep firing at a pot with nothing. There are a lot of hands that you are losing too, AA, AQ, KK, KQ, QQ, JJ, QJ, QT, 66.

I don't know how you can call a turn bet with the K there. That is why I just call the flop so I can reevaluate my situation on the turn, which became very ugly with the 3rd flush card and a second overcard.

Fold. Doesn't matter how big the pot is if you are beat.

[adanthar]

PF is fine, I believe, except I'd have kept the raise down to 400. No point pushing and you're not gonna fold. However, keep in mind this is 20% of your stack at this point, which is why the 600 raise may be too much.

So you call and he leads for half the pot on this very overpair-friendly flop; any raise pot commits you. *If* you think you have the best hand, push. I would fold. Calling would be an option if you had 5K behind, but you don't.

[Stormwolf]

If you think your hand is good preflop you have to move in, cant give a cheap card for overs and you will likely to make a mistake on a lot of flops besides you might induce a fold from a hand that should be calling

[LearnedfromTV]

Thanks adanthar and everyone else for the replies. i want to post a few more of my thoughts on this hand, because I think this is an important hand for my development and I want to get as much feedback as possible. Replying to adanthar because his comments about bet size are relevant to what i have been thinking about.

Before I get into the main idea of my post, here's something about my philosophy in these situations. A few people based parts of their comments (usually when saying push or fold preflop or on the flop) on the idea that I shouldn't want to get caught in a tricky spot against another big stack. I understand this point of view and am not going to go looking for chances to tangle with a big stack, but I am not afraid of going bust in this kind of spot if I play the hand such that the times I'm ahead I double through him or extract the maximum. Play to win, in other words, even if the spot that gets you the chips is tough. What I don't want to do is play foolishly versus his range of hands and encourage him to put his chips in only when he is ahead. More on that idea a couple paragraphs down.

Ok, this is getting long already and it's going to get longer, so here goes. My first set of bet sizing thoughts relate to stack size, which is the area on which adanthar commented. First, the size of a preflop raise has a ripple effect on the rest of the hand. Had I raised to 400 instead of 600, his reraise would have been smaller, the pot would have been smaller. By the time we get to the flop and turn, where pot size relative to stack size becomes important, the die is already cast, determined by the preflop action. The key is to realize what kind of a pot you are creating with a given preflop raise. In this case, I made my raise to 600 because the big stack was in the BB. Thinking he would be more likely to defend and with TT vulnerable, I wanted to charge him more to play. I didn't think at all about what kind of stack size/pot size situation we would be in if he reraised and I should have. On the flop, I have 4700 behind and a T2275 pot. This ends up being an awkward spot when he underbets the pot and I want to make a medium size raise (more on why I think that is the best play in terms of the hand ranges in a minute). If we were deeper relative to the pot, this wouldn't be the case. Even calling, as adanthar pointed out, is awkward. The point is that these things have to be in the back of your mind when you choose the first raise. I do this all the time against medium or short stacks, making sure that a steal raise is small enough that if they push over the top I don't have odds to call, or if I have a hand I'm willing to go allin with, like an A6 or K9, but don't want to, raising enough so they know I'm committed.

My other main thought about bet sizing and choosing action has to do with maximizing my win versus the hands I beat and minimizing my loss versus the hands that beat me. I think it is obvious that both preflop and on the flop, I am ahead some of the time and behind some of the time against the range of hands I am facing. I think choosing action and bet size is more complicated than saying "on average I am ahead, so I play, or on average I am behind, so I fold." What you want to aim to do is choose bet sizes that encourage the hands that you beat to speed up and encourage the hands that beat you to slow down. Since the latter are better hands than the former, this is hard to do, but not necessarily impossible, especially in position when you get information before your opponent.

Two examples of what I am talking about from his hand. Preflop, I chose not to reraise because I just calling was much more likely to extract money from the worse hands I could be facing. As he was first to act and still had the initiative, I am sure he bets nearly any flop, and probably with a smallish (i.e readable) bet when he misses. I realize no one is this predictable but we're talking probabilities here. Anyway, with TT, I like this. What I don't like is someone calling my reraise with a range of hands like AA-99, Ak-AQ and then checking to me on a Q66 flop (or pushing allin preflop with a range that probably crushes me.)

The flop is the trickiest part of this hand, because it is probably almost even money whether I am beat. I think on average I'm ahead a bit more often than not on a one-overcard flop in this spot, but it is real close. Ideally, I would like a way to charge AK, AJ, 99-77, and diamond draws, while still giving myself a chance to find out if I am behind (and crushed by everything that beats me except A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] or A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] J [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]. This is possible if I have 10000 behind, because I can make this raise to 2500 (or 3000) after he bets 1100, and the pot is still small enough versus my stack where I can fold to a reraise (a reraise he is very unlikely to make without at least a Q, given my action thus far. Though folding to one of the big diamond draws reraising allin would be a mistake, I wouldn't be a horrible one since often this reraise allin would be a hand I have two outs against). Here, with a < 5000 stack the raise commits me. Had I raised less preflop, all of the bets would be smaller, and I may have been able to make this raise, although it still would have been a little awkward. For those who said I should push to fold out AK, I disagree. I WANT AK or diamonds to call this raise. I want to *almost* price them in. This is how I get value from the hand. I want it to be a raise that he shouldn't call with 6-9 outs and I want to be in a stack size situation where if he happens to hit his card I can get away. As I think about this now, I realize that there are something like 15-18 scare cards for the turn and if he bets all of them every time, I would be folding the turn too much, but my betting pattern could represent AK or diamonds often enough that he will be afraid to bet the scare cards he doesn't hit. This is where being in position helps.

As played preflop and with the stack sizes, I think I have to call the flop. A push is only called by the hands that beat me and I would like a chance of getting more out of the hands I beat. Had I just called the flop, I fold the turn. As it was, I called the turn. Of course I lost, but I'll wait a bit to say what he had.

I realize this is long, but any comments would be very appreciated. I think this is a good lesson hand for me and those of you who already understand the things I am trying to figure out could be a great help.

Thanks for reading.

[LearnedfromTV]

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