Hand Reading

It sometimes amazes me how bad the common player is at these stakes at hand reading opponents. This hand happened last Saturday night against a pretty loose aggressive, maybe slightly losing Romanian player named Gabriel.

It was your normal Saturday night 1-2 game, the entire table was EXTREMELY loose-passive. This particular hand is limped around 5-6 ways and I complete from the sb with Qs10s from the 9 seat. Not a particularly good hand to be completing with from the sb, as I look to be dominated a good majority of the time. But I really like playing suited connecting cards in spots like this for the stacking potential, and I'm pretty confident that I can outplay this group post flop. I had about $450 in front of me.

$12 in the pot

Flop:

Qc 8c 10d

That's a pretty good flop for me, the board is extremely wet though with both flush and straight draws. I lead out for $15 into the pot. At $1-2 overbets of this size go pretty un-noticed by the field. If they have a hand such as KJ, 97, AQ, KQ or any flush draw they aren't folding to that, which is exactly the behavior I'm looking for. It's spots like this that make $1-2 live so much easier to play then online poker, where the villians are a little more savvy.

Mike(with $~150 behind), an older guy from the 10 seat calls, and Gabriel(with about $500 behind) tanks for about 15 seconds and then raises it to $37. The first thing I did was quickly run thru the range of hands he would raise in this spot with. I quickly eliminated an overpair due to the passivity preflop. With the board that wet, I felt that he would've raised more with a set or a flopped straight. That left q10, q8, 810 or a flush draw. I also noticed that Mike(to my left) didn't like Gabriel raise, as he quickly looked down and started fingering out how many remaining chips he had...

It was $22 for me to call. IMO a call in this spot is horrid. If my read was wrong and Gabe had indeed flopped a set or a straight, I wanted him to play his hand face-up immediately. Everything else in his range I was ahead of, plus I didn't want Mike to get a great price on whatever draw he was one. I 3-bet to $95.

Mike then says "I'll gamble" and pushes in $115 all-in. Gabriel then goes in the tank again for 10-15 seconds and just calls, giving me the information I was looking for. He most likely had flopped 2 pair as well. The action came back to me having to call an additional $20 and at this point I did something that I rarely do, but I think is shows alot of strength when I do it. With only $20 to call, I knew the action was closed, but I looked at the dealer and said "All in". The look on Gabe's face was instant disappointment. The dealer informed me that I couldn't move all-in, I could only call. I grumbled disgustingly and called.

Turn:

8s

The board pairing on the turn didn't alarm me at all as I knew no one would play a set in this manner. I insta-shoved all-in for another $180 and Gabe went into the tank again. After a good minute he folded and I tabled my top two-pair. Mike showed 10c 2c for a flush draw and middle pair. He bricked and I scooped a decent sized pot. Gabe reached into the muck and showed Q10 as well and looked at me and said "nice play".

This got me thinking about hand reading. Did Gabe put me on a hand? What was it? How could he not call my shove with his hand?

With my action, the ONLY hand I could have is the exact same hand he did. If I had flopped a straight, I wouldn't have insta-shoved when the board paired. I flopped a set and turned a full house I wouldn't have insta-shoved either! I wanted to ask him what he thought I had, but that's just bad etiquette so I didn't say anything. I did however get up from the table and walk around for a bit, replaying the hand in my mind from his point of few and trying to figure out how he could possibly lay that down.

I came to the conclusion that hand reading just isn't a skill that's valued at this level. Level 1 thinking is what most play with and anything beyond that is only used when villians hold over pairs and are scared of flopped sets.

Very interesting...

End of January

Yeesh, January was painful. As alluded to in my last blog post I really did some analysis of my game this month.

Game analysis is something I really need to do more, in fact, I think all players should. It's so easy to not do self-analysis when you are constantly winning, it's easy to think that all the decisions you are making are the right ones and that you are finally not getting sucked out or cold decked. However, when things go bad, whether that's bad for a session, a week or a month; players tend to over-analysis their games and make radical changes to try to get back to winning. This in turn could lead to a further spiral down the tunnel of suck, since long streaks of losing sessions isn't uncommon for any player.

My analysis pin-pointed a few things that I needed to keep an eye on when it came to my play. Two of them I've listed below:

--The first being my image. Where online play table image is normally focused on things like LAG(Loose-Aggressive) & TAG(Tight-Aggressive), live play isn't as much. As Bart Hanson puts it, live play table images are generally categorized in 1 of 2 ways "Losing this session" & "Winning this session". Most low-limit players aren't sophisticated enough(or don't care enough) to really monitor how many hands you are playing out of 100, they just notice whether you are winning or losing. A losing table image will get you called down light more frequently, while a recent string of winning pots and a winning image will get you more respect.

--Open limping, I'm doing it way to much. Where there are many situations when over-limping may be the right play, I'm finding very few situations where open-limping is profitable.

The first picture is my running total so far and the second is a graph of just January. So as you can see January was another winning month, but it wasn't a great month, it was painful!

The roller-coaster downward slide that went on for the majority of the month had a very noticeable impact on my overall results this far. Although my standard deviation remained about the same, my hourly win-rate was halved and my average winning session was as well. I can't really complain about some of the bad beats/suckouts I took because everyone goes thru those, but let's just say they were numerous.

I'm still winning the VAST majority of my sessions(70.4%) but my winning sessions are trending to be smaller than my losing sessions. I attribute some of this to quitting too early when winning and/or playing too long when losing. I'll be more attentive to that moving forward. "Quitting well" is a skill, just like anything else and it's something I need to work on...obviously. I think I may have solved the other half of my quitting problem but just not posting individual session results to this blog, that was really weighing on my mind at the tables.

On the good side, I do believe I kept my cool during most of the month, even as I realized that something with my game was really, really off. The analysis I did towards the end of the month may have been my saving grace over the last 30 days.

Overall, I'm still pleased with the results thus far. Far be it from me to complain about winning!

Below is the graph of the challenge so far.

See you in February!