In Depth Analysis Episode 45

To recap the hand discussed on the podcast this week.

Location: Jack Casino

Stakes: $2/$5

Hero (1000) limps KQo, loose fish (500) calls, hyper-laggy villain(1000) opens to 30, hero raises to 110, loose fish fold, villain calls

Flop (230) AQ7r Hero checks, Villain bets 260, Hero calls

Turn (750) Q Hero checks, Villain checks

River (750) 8 Hero bets 200, Villain calls

To recap some of the podcast discussion - normally at a 7 handed table with deep stacks I'm always raising KQo UTG. But I thought there would be a high chance that the player two to my left would limp and that the loose aggressive player who is the main villain in the hand or Jon would be raising these 2-3 limps fairly wide, and it would be more profitable to go for limp reraise than to open. For reasons discussed more in depth on the podcast, the best play here would have been to limp call - there's just so much value in keeping dominated hands in from the player to to my left who limp calls the majority of hands as well the loose aggressive player who would probably be raising these limps as wide as Q10o. Here is the range I gave the main villain in the hand when he raises my and the other player's limp:

Note: for this week and all future weeks instead of looking at the graphs of the different players' ranges with colors, there will now be numbers delineating how many combinations of each hand I'm giving them, so no more approximations where green just means between all and none.

Here is the range I gave this player when he called the limp reraise:

I thought that he would probably call most of his range given we're 200 BB deep and he's in position. So I left the top 2/3 of his hands in terms of playability, not absolute equity. I decided to not really give him a 4betting range as limp reraises in live poker are generally so nutted that even a LAG will likely be inclined to flat kings and queens. When he has aces, I think he'll be inclined to flat sometimes because when I don't have aces, it's more likely a bluff like KQo than a hand like kings or queens that I would call a 4bet with. In retrospect, he probably has a small amount of 4bet bluffs and maybe 3 or 4 combos of his aces.

When the flop of AQ7 rainbow comes I'm in a way ahead way behind situation. And given the text Jon sent me, I thought he would likely overbluff this flop when I check to him. So I chose to check.

But when he overbet the pot, in retrospect, I probably should have just folded then and there because I didn't have enough information to make the exploitative read that he would overbluff flop for this sizing and underbluff the turn. Even though he could have been bluffing with air there, I think without any more reads, even someone who has played fairly loose and aggressive thus far isn't balanced in their overbet sizing, and was pretty likely to have an ace here.

Here's what I think think his overbet range looks like after having the luxury to talk it through with Jon and Jack and think about it on my own. I gave him 8 combos of very low equity bluffs, and then said he would bet all his aces and sets this way, as well as all of his gutshots.

So on this flop, I'm not doing great against this range and should have folded.

But I didn't, and got lucky hitting another queen on the turn. Once it goes check check I think I can take most of his combos of full houses out of his range, but everything else in his range would have been reasonable for him to check back with.

So when the river comes out an 8, which effectively makes no difference for any of the hands that I put in his range, here is how my hand is doing against his range:

Some of the time, he played a full house in a tricky way and with an SPR of less than 1, I'm always going to lose my stack here happily. So we're more concerned with how to get max value from his range of ace-bluff catchers and missed draws/random flop bluffs. I think Jack put it nicely on the podcast that he'll likely value bet most aces when checked to, and we also allow him to bluff by taking such a passive line. By betting small like I did, I miss value from his aces and from the times he would have opted to bluff.

Thinking about this hand more, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that I really butchered it. It's one thing to make some mistakes, which does happen to everyone sometimes (it happens a lot more so to me in PLO, a game I have much less experience and study in). But it's another thing to make a big mistake that informs a bunch of moderate mistakes throughout a single hand: making a massive adjustment based a limited amount of information. This especially hurt because it's a mistake that I made fairly recently, and put some time in away from the tables to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Luckily Jack wrote an article last Thursday on how to best quantify a read which I know I'll personally be including into my poker warmup for the foreseeable future. Hopefully putting this out to the public will help better hold me accountable so this type of mistake rarely or never happens in the future.

#indepthanalysis #jackcasino #looseagressive #tablereads #limpreraise #bluffcatcher