Good fold or huge error ?? (Live Tourney)

TheEdge949

Ok so its the final table 10 handed and the tourney pays top 8 blinds are 3000 / 6000 ante 600 I'm into the comp for £70 meaning I need to finish 7th or better to show ROI. effective stacks are 150,000

I'm on the button with Ac Ad and its folded round I raise it 3.5x my standard button raise and get called by the s.b. b.b folds.

Flop comes QsKcKh

s.b. checks and I bet 65,000 or just over pot and he insta shoves.

Now Ive been at the same table as the villain for over four hours and the only times hes made big moves hes shown up with the goods Hes regarded locally as a good winning player although I haven't played much with him as he tends to frequent DTD.

I don't think hes ever doing this with A Q, Q J or other holdings in fact I don't even think its QQ or KK as I feel that he would have re-raised pre. The only 2 hands I think this can be is KQ or AK.

In the end I tanked into a clock call and reluctantly released the hand whereupon the villain said quite softly "Your aces were behind" although as he didn't show that could just be part of his regular speech play.

I actually managed to recoup and finished 5th so the night wasn't a washout BUT and I know you guys will be honest was it a good fold or have I been mugged off.

Yours in poker

Mark

MattBates

What is the thought process with the raise size pre and that bet size on the flop?

TheEdge949

Hi Matt.
Pre flop I always raise 3.5 x from late pos if its been unopened regardless of my actual holding (yes id do the same with 910 off or 67s and yes I do sometimes get owned but its got to be good for balancing my range hasn't it?). TBH I used to bet 2.5 but noticed in the majority of comps I play it made no difference to the call frequency so lets get more value pre.

Same really post flop. I would make the slightly overpot bet with experience of these tourneys showing that this usually gets called by worse ie AQ QJ etc and then the turn usually ends with them making a crying call to my all in.

Reading this back I'm actually thinking that I sound like a Helmuthian type a55. But its based on what has proven to be effective in this comp against many of these regs for quite a while.

Yours in poker

Mark

Jac35

Your sizing pre creates this problem and then you make it worse by overbetting the pot on a flop where you're miles ahead or miles behind.
When he shoves you have to call. You've put in 86k and the call is for 64k into a 300k+ pot

Yours in befuddlement
Jac

hhyftrftdr

TheEdge949 said:

Hi Matt.
Pre flop I always raise 3.5 x from late pos if its been unopened regardless of my actual holding (yes id do the same with 910 off or 67s and yes I do sometimes get owned but its got to be good for balancing my range hasn't it?). TBH I used to bet 2.5 but noticed in the majority of comps I play it made no difference to the call frequency so lets get more value pre.

Same really post flop. I would make the slightly overpot bet with experience of these tourneys showing that this usually gets called by worse ie AQ QJ etc and then the turn usually ends with them making a crying call to my all in.

Reading this back I'm actually thinking that I sound like a Helmuthian type a55. But its based on what has proven to be effective in this comp against many of these regs for quite a while.

Yours in poker

Mark

When you 3.5x 9To on the button, what 'value' are you getting?

It's bloating the pot with a marginal hand, and makes your C bet more expensive, which in turn makes any barrelling more expensive.

You can have a balanced range by min-raising in later stages of comps.

MattBates

With that flop texture I cant see what betting so big achieves apart from fold out better hands. At times we want to protect our hands but on KKQ there are so few hands that will continue and we want to be betting smaller and getting some value from hands like smaller pairs. I would even say on that flop checking flop is best.

With the sizing pre and on the flop it seems like you don't want to play post flop. If you bet so big it means we are always in bigger than necessary pots and probably means our opening range is pretty narrow and this also means its a lot easier for our opponents to put us on a range. The implied odds you give opponents if you 3.5x pre and pot flops like that is massive as if we lose a pot it will be costing us a lot of our stack.

cowhead

I really dont mind the size of your raise pre ( its big but in certain games I understand where you’re coming from). The flop bet is awful though. You’ve put yourself in a situation where you just want to repeatedly smash your face into the table repeatedly. The guys above have said all there needs to be said of the sizing.

TheEdge949

Thanks guys, as usual I learn every time I post. Just for fun I got some guys at the local pub (Red tooth players) to re enact the hand and then stopped the action on the villains all in and asked them to read both our holdings. Of the 9 guys at the table 7 of them said I had Aces and the villain had hit a boat. The other 2 said they didn't necessarily think that the villain was ahead but Id given him the perfect opportunity to shove all in and totally mess with my head.

Even though Jac35 is correct to say that at this point I'm priced in to call, maybe on reflection the fold was, considering I managed to make 150% ROI, the only halfway decent aspect of my play here. Replaying and re enacting it makes me realise the rest was just ****.

Thanks to all for taking the time to respond

Yours in poker

Mark

hhyftrftdr

TheEdge949 said:

Thanks guys, as usual I learn every time I post. Just for fun I got some guys at the local pub (Red tooth players) to re enact the hand and then stopped the action on the villains all in and asked them to read both our holdings. Of the 9 guys at the table 7 of them said I had Aces and the villain had hit a boat. The other 2 said they didn't necessarily think that the villain was ahead but Id given him the perfect opportunity to shove all in and totally mess with my head.

Even though Jac35 is correct to say that at this point I'm priced in to call, maybe on reflection the fold was, considering I managed to make 150% ROI, the only halfway decent aspect of my play here. Replaying and re enacting it makes me realise the rest was just ****.

Thanks to all for taking the time to respond

Yours in poker

Mark

That's not really the way to look at it.

TheEdge949

True it could be that we want to play optimal poker all the time in which case I have to call.

Or maybe we can discount maths and theory and just go with our read ( I'm a huge fan of going with your reads ) and dump the hand, save the last 60,000 or so chips and regroup.

Yes we should try and play the best poker all the time but when you don't, and here I quite clearly didn't, getting out of the game with a profit isn't too bad a result. And whilst I know that we shouldn't be results orientated (although its never consistently losing players who say that, only winners) I cant help it. I play LIVE poker for money, not friendship, not fun (although both can be had) and certainly not to enrich others.

Yours in poker

Mark

Jac35

Poker players never lie about their hands. Looking at the hand from a slightly different view
You say he’s a good winning player. How many Ks or Qs does he have here?
You think he only ever has AK or KQ
there?
Let’s go with AK to start with. He starts the hand with 25 bigs and the button makes opens too big. He has a straightforward 3bet shove, so i rule that hand out.
Let’s then look at KQ. Again i think it’s probably a 3bet shove pre, but let’s say he flats. He flops the nuts.
He checks and you cbet huge. Why would he go all in?
He has to assume he’ll get the lot if he flats.

TheEdge949

Hi Jac35.

Those were some of the considerations running through my mind whilst in the tank, but at the end of the day I just couldn't get over the insta shove, he almost beat my bet into the middle.

Now he doesn't know me well enough to be able to say with any conviction that I'm ever laying down Aces here, simply because we haven't played together often enough, and we know that he knows or suspects that's what I had. So in my mind he has to have me beaten and as much as I don't want to admit it all I can do is release it, berate myself for getting into a situation that I lost control of and try to repair the damage.


At the end of the day if he puts me on Aces and can find the bluff with a possible draw its a great play and kudos to him, it'll certainly be an interesting dynamic next time we collide in a similar situation.


Yours in poker

Mark

F_Ivanovic

To me his hand looks like KJ/KT and maaybe AQ that's just shoving and praying you don't have a K (or aces ofc)...obviously we block some AQ holding 2 aces but 2 kings on board also makes it unlikely for him to have a K.

If your opponent can have a worse hand for value (particularly one that you crush) then generally you should be calling if you are getting good pot odds (which you definitely are)

Now you can make an exploitative fold if you have a genuine read on how that player plays (I don't mean live reads, I just mean you've watched how they've played hands and they're on the passive side unless they have the nuts) but by the sounds of it (you wouldn't ask about the hand otherwise) you don't have said reads and so I think you should have definitely been calling.

TheEdge949

A very sincere thanks to everybody whos taken the time to post on this thread and thanks for the constructive criticism and advice.

I think this is a classic example of how poker is a weird game, in that I do everything wrong (the pre flop should have been min raise, the post flop possibly just half pot or even a check behind and when he shoves I should call) and yet I somehow manage to get a positive result at the end of the day. And there are times when I do everything right and bust out and go home early.


I asked whether it was a good fold or a huge error and I'm now convinced it was a HUGE ERROR.


Yours in poker

Mark

MattBates

I don't think you should analyse things based on whether you made a profit in an individual night. In your op you said about needing a certain finish position to show a profit. I think when you start thinking like that you aren't making optimal plays.

You can play really well and lose over such a small sample as 1 live MTT and you can play bad and win. You want to be (and you seem to with your posts on here discussing hands) thinking about how you played hands irrespective of the results. It is easy to say I won the hand so played it great or I lost so played it bad.