Message Board : Am I a donkey?

Just my 2 cents:

Hand 1: raise more preflop (to $100 for example), because:

- You want to shut out drawing hands, since you are likely to end up with top pair top kicker. Don’t give suited connectors a chance to enter the pot cheaply.

- There’s already $90 in the pot before you act. A pot sized bet is not too big to chase away everybody. If at least 1 player calls there will be at least $270 in the pot with your stack size at $1370 (stack-to-pot relation: 5; just as you would like it to be).

FLOP: Perfect flop for you, because no completed draws possible PLUS you hit top pair. Even more perfect is that someone bets into you. Had you raised to $100 PF you would end up all-in right here most of the time. If you run into a flopped set or 2pair, that’s bad luck. I’d expect to see a worse ace here most of the time, so you’re likely to have the best hand now.

By keeping the pot small preflop you are facing a difficult situation as played.

Hand 2: You are NOT going all-in with top pair here! You don’t hold a pair, because there’s no flop yet when you go all-in. And your pair of 9s is NOT top pair, because there’s a jack (and someone might have a bigger pocket pair).

The move itself: it depends on the other players at the table, but that’s a move that one can make without being a donkey. But I regard it more as a blind steal with 2 weak fallback positions: flush (rarely comes in); top pair (kicker often too small if you get called).

First hand has a slight donkey odor to it…  Raising in that spot with AK is right, but your raise is pretty week.  What will that almost min-raise accomplish? Most often, it will invite multiple callers, but worse, you have gained little to no info about what you’re up against.  They could have any two suited or connected cards, any ace…  You’re probably not up against AA-JJ, or you would have probably seen a reraise, but other than that, you’re in the dark.  So when the flop hits, the ace is good, but you may welll be up against two pair or a straight draw.

Once villain calls your raiseon the flop, he’s announcing he has a hand, so when he checks on the turn, I think it’s fine to check it as well.  There’s that simple adage, "big pots are for big hands"… and all you have is top pair here. So don’t commit everything here on that one pair vs. an opponent who seems to be indicating strength.  Unless you have some great read that this guy is a fool who over-values weak aces, I think checking the turn would make more sense here.

On the second hand, you’re shortstacked at this point, and a suited ace may be as good as you get for a while.  I think a push here is fine, but you’re often going to be a coin-flip at best once someone calls….  This hand really isn’t a good example to measure your decision-making, since once you get to this shortstacked state in a tourney, your decisions are a lot more simple and less strategic.  The hands to analyze, I’d suggest, are the ones that got you to this point…