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Poker Quiz - Analyze This Poker Hand
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Author: Marc Weinberg
Yesterday was a low moment in my poker career. I had a great opportunity to snag a sneat at the World Series of Poker, a 1 in 16 chance actually (heck, I draw to slimmer odds than that in poker hands, which might also explain why I'm not going to the WSOP) - but flamed out on tilt after playing this hand badly.
So play along with this poker quiz asking yourself what would you do?
The Background
First of all, let me just say that this online qualifying tournament that I found is unquestionably the best value I've ever seen. The overlay was incredible. 32 of us clever fellows lined up at a total cost of $270 apiece to play for a $13,000 WSOP package for 1st and $8,000 cash for 2nd. That's $21,000 on the table for $8,640, and that is the biggest overlay I've seen.
The good news is that this will go on every Sunday. Go to Poker Share and you'll see what I'm talking about. They do alternate between $500 + $40 satellites and $250 + $20 ones every Sunday, and I expect this Sunday's $540 one to offer even more value.
More Background - This Time To The Hand Itself
Okay, so it's also a great tournament structure. Blinds go up very very slowly in tiny increments. After 1 hour the blinds were still only at 25/50 and we each started with 5000 chips!
This rewards good players and makes the luck factor a little smaller. This should be good for me, and yet...
I was in the cut-off seat (one from the button) at a table that was playing quite tight. I had 6100 chips in front of me. I was pretty active, but that was only due to the fact that I was getting genuinely good holdings to start with. We were near the end of the second hour of play and blinds were still only at 50/100.
The Hand
Everyone folds to me. I hold Ad 3d (not what I would consider a "good holding" by the way, but playable here I thought) and decide to raise it to 300 chips. Button folds and SB folds. The BB is a player I don't have a very good read on yet (I moved to this table 20 minutes earlier). He hasn't played in a lot of pots, however, and has a stack of 6500 chips. Our stack sizes of 6000+ are very decent - at this stage there are 24 players left in the tournament ranging from 11000 chips to 2000.
The BB calls the 300. Pot is now 650 chips total.
The flop comes Jd - 2d - 9s
The BB now bets out 350 chips.
Your first question, dear reader, is what do you do here?
1. I think it is fine to just call here, but you concede a lot by doing so. You led out the betting pre-flop and if you just call you are basically telling him that your hand is far from made. If you hit the flush on the turn that's groovy but if you don't you won't be able to stick around for the river, in all likelihood. If the turn is a brick he should try to bet you out of the hand, and you face a tough call if you missed the turn.
2. You ideally want to get information about the strength of his hand. Is he trying to steal? Does he have a drawing hand? Is he actually sitting on a very big hand? Did he only hit top pair? If you only call you will never be any closer to answering these questions.
3. If you're like me you hate to lose momentum in a hand, especially when you have the nut draw. You bet before the flop and suddenly he comes out firing - the impudence! Also, you should feel excited that there is interest from your opponent, because you could get a huge payoff if you hit your hand. And the nut flush is easy to fall in love with, right? Right. So, you should raise.
4. I now think you should raise enough to show him you mean business and also to find out what he has. That means a raise to 1000 chips at least. But I made a mistake here, a small one, and only raised to 700 chips.
The BB called that pitiful raise very quickly. Pot is now 2050 chips.
The turn is an 8h. Board now looks like this: Jd - 2d - 9s - 8h
That's a bad card for our flush draw. BB now checks to me, which is perfectly sensible since I have shown strength twice. What do we do here?
This one is so easy there are no options. We CHECK! I emphasise that because I didn't check, which was very stupid. I don't know what came over me but I felt that I could make him lay down the hand. Idiotic, really.
I bet 1100 chips, giving him great odds if he is still drawing. It's a really bad play.
One needs to take the free card here and hope for the best. Interestingly, however, he just called the 1100 chips. If he had a set or a made straight I think he would have come over the top here, but I suppose he could have Q-T at this stage.
He calls the 1100 chips and the pot is now 4250
The river is a Ts. If he wasn't there before he sure is now. He bets 2200 chips and I can finally fold. But the damage has been done. I'm furious with myself for playing the turn like a vegetable.
At this point I still had 3800 chips, but I wasn't thinking clearly and soon after that I called off all my chips to the same player, because it always works that way, when he held AA against my pocket pair (hey, I could beat the board, and he must have AK...that kind of horrible play).
In terms of poker strategy I feel that the only time it might have been possible to win this hand was on the flop when a big raise, say to 2000 chips might have prevented him from calling, if he did have a draw - but a lot of players would still call that bet because they don't care about pot odds. The actual small raise wasn't a terrible play, although it didn't clarify his hand at all.
In tournament play it is sometimes better to play these big draws passively, particularly if the overall context of the tourney is favorable to you - your stack is healthy both relative to the blinds and to the other players (look at the whole leaderboard as well as your own table).
There was no need for me to make a move there, and perhaps one could even discuss the merits of folding Ad-3d pre-flop and never getting involved in the first place...
Related Poker Articles And News Items:
> Machiavelli Plays Poker - Part 1
> You Should Qualify Online For The WSOP
> The Top Five New Online Poker Rooms
> Bad Beat Poker Stories - Stop Telling Them
> Poker Share - Justifying The Hype
> The Curse Of Partial Withdrawal
> Harrington On Hold'em, Help My Poker!
> Hollywood Poker - New Player Observations
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