Hand Analysis #5

by Nick Eisel

I've been choosing some pretty "safe" hands for these analysis articles so far. They've definitely been interesting hands where I felt a lot could be learned, but they haven't really shown off the crazy side of my game.

A lot of the dynamic for the hand I'm about to discuss is due to the fact that this year, I've been 24 tabling full ring games on Stars. When you're 24 tabling, you need to make a bunch of adjustments and play a strategy that allows you to make lots of quick decisions. Essentially, a lot of thinking is done away from the tables about the tougher spots that can come up and how to approach them in the heat of the moment.

Within the first month of doing this, I had to drop down to 19 tables at a time. I was timing out too much and felt like I was losing a lot of money with the extra tables, because my strategy was not thought out well enough. Once I got the hang of it, I added the extra tables back and have been doing very well since. Incidentally, the reason I'm playing so many tables is because I'm going for Supernova Elite and I'd rather play NL than Limit, even though doing so means it takes longer to get points.

One of the annoying aspects that comes with playing so many tables at once is that you will be doing some misclicking. Since I'm always concerned with balancing my game, obviously this misclicking issue needed to be fixed and there had to be a way to turn some of the misclicks into profit (besides obviously just betting any flop in position etc). What I came up with was to start limp-reraising as a bluff with my misclick limps from early position. Since this was the most common type of misclick for me I decided to turn it into an advantageous situation, since a limp-reraise is usually given a lot of credit online these days. I make the same play with AA or sometimes KK, given the right table conditions.

Before I get deeper into this I do want to caution that you really shouldn't be implementing this into your game, unless you completely understand why you are doing it. The best spots to do it are against players who isolate limpers far too often and also are good hand readers and will likely fold anything, but possibly JJ+ and AK. A lot of the tighter players at full ring will even fold JJ, QQ, and AK and only continue with KK and AA. Make sure you pick the right opponents for a move like this as it is paramount to success.

For those of you who aren't playing as many tables (and likely not misclicking at all), you can also implement this strategy by limp-raising smaller pocket pairs that you were initially just trying to flop a set with. Again, be very careful as the situation has to be such that limp-raising as a bluff will generate more value than just calling the raise and trying to flop your set. This usually only happens when the opponent is both very aggressive and a very good player, because he will be less likely to pay you off postflop and you'll be out of position letting him pick up most pots when you miss.

For the hand I'm going to discuss, the blinds are $1/$2 on stars and the effective stack size is $200.

So I misclick limp under the gun with 9 3, which obviously sucks, because the hand is terrible and I really wouldn't play it from any position.

An aggressive regular raises it up to $9 from 3rd position and it folds back to me.

If this happens to you and you're unsure if it's a good spot to implement a big bluff here, I'd recommend just folding at this point as you only lose $2. I decided that this guy was isolating me light enough that he would fold most of his range preflop and if not, I might fire a continuation bet on the flop which should again fold out some stuff.

I decide to go ahead and reraise to $30 and my opponent thinks a few seconds before calling.

Obviously not what I wanted to happen. Honestly though, this play has such a high success rate if you are picky about when you implement it that I guess you just have to get called sometimes.

The flop came down K J 6 and there was around $62 in the pot after the rake was taken out.

This is quite the interesting flop for a few reasons. First of all, I've flopped a flush draw, which is much better than what I can usually hope for with a 93s. Second, this flop hits my opponent's calling range very hard and he likely has a very strong hand here, unless he has QQ or possibly TT. I don't think AQs is too likely, because he would have to worry about AK being very possible in my range.

As I think about my options quickly, I decide that checking is really bad in this spot so I can rule that out. Betting out and folding to a raise is also going to be terrible. Check-raising all in could be okay, but I can't think of many hands he would bet and then not get all in with on this board. In the end, I decide I am just going to the felt in this hand, since there is already so much in the pot and I want maximum fold equity. He could possibly fold AK in a spot like this, given that I've represented a huge hand preflop with my limp-reraise. The only way he would possibly fold AK though is if I bet the flop and shove basically any turn (and it's still quite unlikely that he folds).

I lead out $48 and my opponent quickly calls. I would probably shove most turn cards, but again, I'm not really sure how great this is. Checking and folding if the turn blanks off is probably alright as well, though there is the chance he could flat-call the flop with QQ planning to fold to any additional action.

The rest of the hand is fairly academic as the turn is the Ts giving me my flush and I shove all in and double up through my opponent, who had flopped a set of Jacks.

Now I can promise you that I didn't write about this hand just to toot my own horn, or show how creative I am or anything. There is really a lot to be learned here, even if I did get very lucky to win this pot.

First of all, a move like this that gets shown down has massive long-term implications. This person in all likelihood thinks I'm a maniac and will give me absolutely no credit in the future. Since he plays a good amount, this is a very good result for me. Everyone else at the table also saw this and if they were paying attention they likely made a note on me as well.

Second, I really don't like my opponent's preflop call, unless he is planning on stacking off with an overpair basically every time. Since I don't limp-reraise a ton it seems like planning to do that will cost him a lot of money. I'll usually have a bigger pair than Jacks if the money goes in. This is, of course, another reason that a move like this is so good if you use it sparingly, because it's just so hard to do anything about it, or exploit it, without having an actual monster.

Finally, it makes you much tougher to play against since it gives you the image that you could have almost any hand at any time.

If you do attempt something like this and you get called, don't automatically look to be stacking off as a bluff postflop. When someone calls a limp-raise they almost always have a very strong range of hands and it won't be easy to bluff them out. The majority of the value you gain from this play will be from your opponents folding preflop which will happen much more often than they will be able to play back at you.

Hopefully this hand was as interesting to read about as it was for me to play.