Saturday, May 12, 2007

Its All About the Big Pots

As most of you know, NLHE and especially my brand of NLHE is played for the big pots. I posted this hand on my email forum which was pretty much the only interesting hand of the session. I will reprint here.

So I was playing at the $500 unrestricted buyin at Hollywood Park and this nice hand comes up. The cutoff who is pretty steamy right now raises to $45 after 2 people limp in. The button folds and I am in the SB with QsJs. I think about reraising him but I notice that a good strong sophisticated player has limped in under the gun so I just call and prepare to fold if he reraises. The BB calls, UTG calls, and the other limper calls. So we see the 5 way flop with $220 in the middle. After calling the preflp bet I have $650 left, Steamy McSteam has about $350. The flop comes down Jh 10s 3s. I bet out $225 because i want to play this pot big with steamy. BB folds. Now the UTG limper raises $500 more to $725, the limper who was in the pot before steamy now goes all in for her last $350. Steamy folds and its back to me. The pot is $1425 and it would cost me $425. I know the BB is folding so I don't get any more equity there. Now, I know the $500+ UTG raiser has a strong made hand. At the absolute bare minimum he has QQ. With the more likely scenario that he has a set. I discount AA and KK as he would probably have tried to isolate preflop with two callers after steamy. The interesting part is what does the other limper have? She is a fairly straight forward readable player. During the hand though after she goes all in she keeps telling her neighbor, who she knows well, "its time to go home, its time to go home". I have played with her on at least 2-3 occasions and I have never seen her play a draw like this, but I am not at all positive she wouldn't have done this with spades. Something like AsKs would not be out of the question as well. If I had to break down her range it would be 33, J10, 10 10 (less likely as she most likely would raised preflop but possible), Not JJ as she plays those fast all the time, with maybe 15%-20% chance she has AsXs, although like i said I had never seen this from her. She would almost certainly not play a straight draw like KQ or 89 like this.
As far as the made hand goes I am almost drawing dead to running QQ or backdoor straight cards. If I am sharing spades with the limper then I am most likely drawing dead. But if not then I am getting 3.4:1 on my draw in an $1850 pot. After a long think I finally call. The hands turn over, My QsJs, the UTG's 10 10, and limper's J 10. Thankfully, she is drawing dead to the case J. And all my spades are live! Cardplayer has me as 34.55% equity which is more than enough. Turn and river come 5c 6c and I miss.
So I lost $1000 in that session. Boo. But I think I had +EV there so no biggie.

1 comment:

rick said...

Personally, I would've called there too. Reading it, I was guessing UTG had JT and the other limper had AJ, but so many things are possible. I don't see how you could rule out KQ or 98 for her though; that seems like revisionist history to me.