Hand Analysis #4

It was especially yucky outside today, with a combination of rain and snow making an all-day poker session look very attractive. A few hours into the session an interesting spot came up.

As usual, the blinds are $1/$2 and the game is on PokerStars. The stacks looked like this to start the hand:

Me ($246.15)
Button ($323.05)
SB ($198)
BB ($421.40)
UTG ($276.90)
MP ($48)

The under the gun player limped, in which was odd as he plays a fairly tight/aggressive style. We hadn't really clashed in the past, but I had a note on him that said he was sticky, which means that he may overvalue top pair, or float flops with the intention of taking the pot away later. Either way, his stats indicated that he was a reasonable player. Usually good players don't limp in early position though, so I was somewhat confused about that, but figured he probably had a small pocket pair or something like QJs or JTs and just didn't understand that he would fare better by raising or folding those hands.

I was dealt K Q in third position and decided to isolate this early position limper with a raise to $10. Everyone folded back to him and he elected to call my raise. I want to pause my discussion of the hand for a minute to discuss isolating in general. I find most players don't make this play nearly often enough and it is extremely profitable with any reasonable holding as long as you don't have super aggressive players behind you that are going to reraise you light when they know what you're doing. Usually, the limper will just fold rather than play a heads up pot out of position, and when they call you can still pick up the pot with a continuation bet on most flops. All in all, limping in shorthanded games is extremely weak and you should punish those who do it by charging them to chase a hand down.

Anyway, where were we?

Ah yes, two players to the flop and $23 in the pot.

The flop came down J T 6 and my opponent checked to me.

With two overcards and an open-ended straight draw, this is an excellent spot for a continuation bet here as I will win the pot often enough and have a lot of outs when called. I bet out $16 and my opponent check-raised me the minimum a few seconds later. What now?

First of all, I'm at least calling in this spot, so let's try to narrow his range a bit and see if a reraise could be a good move. I'm not sure exactly what he's limping under the gun with and then calling a raise, but I'd assume he would raise JJ or TT to begin with, so we can pretty much rule those out. I'd also assume he'd raise QQ, KK, and AA most of the time, though some people like to trap with those hands. If he was trapping though, wouldn't he have reraised me preflop? I think any overpair type of hands are very unlikely to be honest, though anything is possible. 66 could certainly be in his range as well as hands like AJ, KJ, QJ suited or unsuited depending on just how poorly he was playing. There are also lots of drawing hands he could have like KQ, Q9, any number of flush draws.

One thing stuck out in my memory and that was that this particular opponent had check-raised the flop with a combination straight and flush draw, made a pretty big check-raise and then called an all in. In this particular spot he has only raised the minimum, so I thought it was very possible that he didn't have a flush draw here.

After all of that analysis, I still didn't have a very clear image of his range in this spot and decided that reraising wouldn't accomplish anything except to fold out all of his bluffs. I called the additional $16 and waited to see what developed on the turn.

The turn came the 4 and there was $87 in the pot.

My opponent fired out $55 and I went into the tank. The flush has just completed and like I said earlier I just felt like he wouldn't check/minraise the flop with a flush draw. Calling here seems like a bad proposition since I have no outs to the nuts and will have to fold if the river bricks off. I suppose the standard play in this spot is to just give the hand up, but I felt like I had plenty of outs and fold equity against his range so I went ahead and shoved all in for about $150 more.

My opponent time banked for about fifteen seconds before finally calling and the river was dealt the 9. I thought it was likely I'd won, but then he turned up A A for a very oddly played AA and scooped the 2.5 buy-in pot.

After analyzing this hand at the end of the session and sharing it with a few players whose opinions I respect, I stand by the play. Sure, it didn't work out this particular time and sure he could have 66 here or have turned a flush and have me drawing dead. I believe a lot of the time though he is just trying to see if I'm serious about the hand on the flop and then fires a second barrel on the turn to take it down. He could be doing this with draws, one pair hands, or even as complete bluffs. I think I pick up the pot here quite a bit and if not I have plenty of draws against his potential range.

At the end of the day, making close plays like this should help to improve your image and make you much trickier to play against. If you play against regulars on a daily basis, like I do on PokerStars, giving up one buy-in to create an image that will make you ten back is a very worthwhile thing that a lot of other online players don't understand. In this situation, the shove on the turn is only slightly -EV at worst and quite possibly +EV. In the grand scheme of things though it makes me tougher to play against and harder to read and that is a very important thing in the tougher online games today.

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