In that situation I would definitely put the older woman on having Aces or Kings like 99 percent of the time, with her having Aces probably the far majority of those times. I think that if you expect your call to take you to the flop heads-up or three-handed, folding to 4 bets cold would probably be best. However, being suited, if you expect the pot to be about 4-6 handed capped preflop, you’re probably picking up enough equity from the other players to make the call profitable. You are definitely getting good implied odds to hit a flush draw with your hand and you have good showdown value if you spike your ace. You also have good position to control the action after the flop. This is a pretty easy fold, given the read, if your AK isn’t suited. If your suited though you really got to think about your implied odds.

Saturday at my local B&M i was playing 3/6 limit hold’em. After about 20 minutes.. im involved in a hand with two college aged kids and one much older woman.

The two kids seem to think they’re the next Doyle Brunson and are VERY loose and pretty aggressive. The older woman i see as pretty much a calling station.

Early Limper
Kid1- Raise to 6
Kid2- Reraise to 9
Woman- Caps at 12

And im on the button with AKs. The first kid could have any pair and i figure as low as JTs to raise. The second i put on at least a pair of 10s, he seems slightly better and i dont think he’d reraise with anything id have dominated.

Now the real problem is the woman though. I dont think ive seen her raise yet.

So i threw it away. The flop comes an ace. Minor betting the rest of the way, and at the end she picked up pot with kings.

Should i have stayed with it up front?

So why did you check raise? I seems like a bad board for that. I think you’d have a hard time getting rid of any hand that has connected with that board when they are calling 8BB into a 21BB pot. I’m also sort of questioning the amount. If you were going to call either player if they moved in, it would seem like you want to move in yourself if you have any hope of pricing out top or middle pair + draw sorts of hands.

Getting 2-1 I think it’s hard to lay this down, but I would question what the button is raising now that he didn’t raise initially? I’m thinking more often than not the button is going to show you a very strong hand like 57 or T7 suited (not necessarily spades). He would have bet a set or 2 pair on the flop. He would have raised if he made Aces up on the turn. Is he moving in on the turn with a hand like As7s or AsXs? That smooth call/shove is a scary sort of line to me. He has to know that you’d have a very hard time getting away from any kind of A high hand and he’s putting you’re chips in the middle like he’s worried about you drawing to a flush. I don’t think this is a hand I’d expect to win very often and be drawing dead a lot, but I’d have a hard time laying it down getting 2-1. (I have a really hard time laying these hands down and I’ve been thinking that’s a big hole in my game, so I may be overly pessimistic).

With a bigger stack, I think you check/call the turn and check/call a small bet on the river or check/fold if the river is bad and 3 people are still interested in the pot. I don’t think you can overcall 3 people and think AJ is going to be good.

Todd

AJo in the BB. NL live -full ring

My stack 30bb’s. (just lost a big hand and hadn’t made it to cage). The table has been playing fairly tight, I have been seated about an hour.

One mp limper, CO limps, button limps, sb folds,and I check in bb with AJo.

The flop comes 689 with 2 spades. I check and everyone checks behind. The turn comes Ad. I check, mp checks, CO bets 3 bb’s, button calls. There are 10bb’s in pot, I check-raised to 11bb’s.

The pot is 21bb’s with 7 to call. Mp folds, CO folds, button puts me all in for my last 19bb’s .

CO player fairly loose. The button who set me in was fairly tight but I had seen him play Ax couple of times. I called.

How should I have played this different caught with a short stack. All in preflop?

If my stack had been a normal 100bb’s or so and action had been the same (RR to me of 20bb’s), dump this,right?

Ps. Is there software I can use for posting hands that aren’t from the internet so it is easier for everyone to read?

Of course there are other factors into making a decision whether or not to bluff. Like the number one rule of loose-passive games: don’t bluff.

I’m assuming you’re referring to a situation where you’re drawing and decide beforehand that if you don’t hit the draw AND the final card is in some arbitrarily picked, you decide to bluff? That is, you have an external decision mechanism on whether or not to bluff. In this case, say the rank of the final card, for example.

The idea here is that from the game theoretic point of view, there is a optimal bluffing ratio. This ratio is based on the pot size and the bet size. If you bluff just the certain amount of time, it makes your opponent indifferent to bluffing. He can’t make more value either by calling more or folding more. (By the way, this can’t be solved for more complex situations, but The Mathematics of Poker provides solutions to somewhat more simplified games.)

Now, if you know the optimal bluffing ratio, say one out of ten, there’s the problem of deciding when exactly to bluff. Ideally, you should just assign one of the ten identical situations a bluffing decision and rest of them not. Unfortunately, every hand is unique so you’ve got to decide some other way.

What Sklansky suggests (if I’m talking about the same thing), is to pick some arbitrary draw to decide whether or not to bluff. If the bluffing ratio is somewhere around 1:3, you could just decide that if you don’t hit your straight and the river card is a spade, you will bluff no matter what. This way you can easily have the right bluffing ratio.

It’s almost impossible to decide in one’s head that “this is the one time in four that I’m going to bluff” because there is no representation of the other three times. Picking an arbitrary lottery of the cards provides such a representation.

How about an article about HOW to bluff. In the Sklansy book, they talk about “picking a card” to bet randomally instead of trying to guess at when toy do so. What do they mean by that? Pick a card when within the flop? One of my hole cards? Both of my hole cards? I’ve always been confused at this.

Thanks Ed

Jimmo

LAG but TRICKY (NL)

The other night I am doing really well and have my stack up to 400 bb’s. I positioned myself to the immediate left of the loosest and worst player at the table. And just as you have said, the money wave was crashing into me.

Then a new player is seated to my immediate left. It was obvious that he usually played in a higher stakes game than mine. (overheard comments). Also he was Asian and had alot of chips with him. I immediately begin to look for a place to run. Nowhere for now. I knew this was bad but decided I would stick it out and get as much education as I could.

He raised every pot 5-7x the bb. I knew he was just raising the stakes. I won a few pots using the fact I knew it would be raised after me. I beat him heads-up out of 4 or 5 samll pots (even trying to avoid him). I then got taken to school and couple hours later was slowly manipulated into playing a big pot with him on which he had raised 93o UTG PreF and then board was non-paired.

Even though you’ve told us to be wary of the diffence between LAG and a very tricky Lag I was looking to get educated and did. My question, short of running, is how do you best take advantage in this situation?

I know I’m not good enough for that yet and I will take a break while waiting for another table next time. But is there a way a good player can exploit this or would even a good player just not have this guy on their left?

For my question I am giving him the label of tricky because I noticed if he lost a pot, it was always a small one. He put two players on complete tilt because of the hands he played. And no matte how sneaky you tried to be against him back, he always seemed to know what you had. So could say experienced and good too. And he was taking advantage of weaker players by playing any 2 cards, but I would still say lag and tricky.

2) how should i adjust strategy when moving to more agressive stakes(NL)