Aggression level on Aces

[rnmike17602]

Survey says: too cold.

I'm not going to argue with that. I've got to admit, from the PF cap and onward into the turn I was sure that I had this guy on KK or QQ and I was going to take down a massive pot at his expense.

What slows me down is this: yes, I've seen some wild tables there, but the vast majority of the Stars guys I have stats for are either loose-passive, loose-aggressive/passive, or tight-passive in that order. Many of these guys will hammer the pot pre-flop, but then back off to a raise or 3-bet post-flop unless they've got the nuts, especially on the turn. I don't have a good read on this guy, but he's just not slowing down for anything, and it's atypical. I'm imagining that the typical passive guy with KK is thinking, OMG he 3-bet PF, what if he has aces, and he backs off.

So I chicken out, and I call down. He shows 77 for trips, and I gag. Now I'm thinking, "am I spewing?" But I don't see any reason why I should have backed off of this any sooner, and there's a good case for taking it further.

Now this does highlight something I've been seeing pretty frequently with some of the more aggressive players on Stars. They have a habit of 3-betting or limp-reraising with any pocket pair. I think their rationale is that someone ahead of them is raising with AK, AQ, etc., and if they can get the pot heads-up, then they have a race and can steal from weaker players. Stars seems to be heavy on the tournaments, and I think maybe this is some misapplied no-limit tourney stuff leaking into the ring games.

I don't know if this is something that I have to factor into my evaluation. It doesn't happen a lot overall, but some of the most aggressive players do tend to do it frequently.

[shant]

Was this guy an unknown? The problem I see with pushing your hand too hard is while you may be playing seriously, some people may be joining a 0.02/0.04 table to just raise and re-raise liberally. I've done it before to blow off steam and mess around and talk [censored].

It seems like a fine line where an unknown could be spewing with nothing, or his preflop range is so wide that he may have outflopped you, or he could be playing straightforward and you have KK killed. I think I'd have to have more hands on a player before I started to make slim-value plays against them because of the unknown factor.

Am I making sense or is this nothing to worry about?

[rnmike17602]

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Am I making sense or is this nothing to worry about?

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What I'm getting is that the general consensus is that I did not appear to be overplaying the aces, and was in fact underplaying them somewhat, regardless of the outcome.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Am I making sense or is this nothing to worry about?

[/ QUOTE ]

What I'm getting is that the general consensus is that I did not appear to be overplaying the aces, and was in fact underplaying them somewhat, regardless of the outcome.

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IMHO, this is hugely dependant on having experience of how people play at this level and at least a tiny read on the villain.

As I remember from playing this level 5/6 months ago on my quest for a bankroll, I concluded that it is too akin to Play Money (Weighing the Odds, King Yao, P287) and decided to take my bankroll to 0.05/0.1, where the game bares a much stronger relationship to poker.

I suggest that you do the same - you are thinking about hands / posting here, so you will confortably be able to beat this level and I find it hard to believe that you are underolled as any Stars deposit would give you enough for a roll at this level considering that it's not raked.

[kiemo]

Cap every street at this level.

[Songwind]

I hope you made a note that this joker capped PF with 77.

[rnmike17602]

Thanks for the advice. I'll usually sit at either a .02/.04 or .05/.10, whichever seems like a softer table. I haven't seen much difference between the two really, but I'm currently doing better at .5/.10 after about 2000 hands (meaningless, I know). Neither one is raked at Stars, so they seem like a good way to tune up my "loose" game and build a bankroll on the cheap for the .10/.20 and .25/.50 games. So far it's going very well. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]