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huntmich said:
Ok, so I was playing in a real game last night and had just sat down. I always make it a rule not to get involved in big hands too soon after sitting down, but this hand damn near crippled me.

So I had around 80 dollars, table average was around 150-200. I get JJ in early position and raise it to 15 dollars ($1-2 Blinds). I get two callers. Flop comes 5-7-9 rainbow, and I'm in first position, so I put $20 out there. Guy right next to me goes all in, and he gets a caller. Now I have an overpair, but they are jacks. Maybe some loose player called me with 6-8, maybe someone spiked a set, maybe two pair. I have around 40 sitting in front of me, but I end up folding my overpair. Turns out the all in was bluffing with an Ace-rag, and the caller had top pair. If I would have called, I would have tripled up.

What would you do in my situation?
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I bet the pot or near the pot on the flop. 1/2 pot bets work in tournaments not in ring games. If the player still pushed over me in this situation I would likely fold. Your raise is pretty strange too. At 1/2 a 3.5x BB+1BB for every limper is a good raise amount. *edit* I did not see it was a live game, at my local casino 5x the BB is pretty standard for me. I might get a slightly abnormal number of callers at first but when they showdown against me it seems to scare them away. Never appear weak in a hand, here you did.
 
OK lets get this thread rolling again. I am thinking my new drug of choice is poker, lately it seems to be consuming a very large portion of my time.

Anyways here is a hypothetical situation. Blinds are 1/2 and effective stacks are 200. Someone raises to 8 from mid position and everyone folds to you on the button. You hold JJ and call the raise. Villain has been playing pretty tight aggressive poker lets say he is around 17/7. The flop comes 679 all clubs. You have the jack of clubs. Villain leads out with a 15 bet. Are you cold-calling? Folding? Raising?
 
i just started playing poker at the bowling alley out here. got bumped out kinda early holding KK by some ass holding AA :(
 
thizzSantaCruz said:
OK lets get this thread rolling again. I am thinking my new drug of choice is poker, lately it seems to be consuming a very large portion of my time.

Anyways here is a hypothetical situation. Blinds are 1/2 and effective stacks are 200. Someone raises to 8 from mid position and everyone folds to you on the button. You hold JJ and call the raise. Villain has been playing pretty tight aggressive poker lets say he is around 17/7. The flop comes 679 all clubs. You have the jack of clubs. Villain leads out with a 15 bet. Are you cold-calling? Folding? Raising?
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Honestly, in that situation, I would probably just try to call it down to the river as cheaply as possible, assuming some q, k ,or a doesn't come (unless its a club). Jacks are a dangerous hand, and I don't like acting too strong unless I have a set.
 
You are calling to the river even if a rag falls and villain leads out with another pot sized bet? I think this is a very tricky situation. By calling pot sized bets to the river you will be commiting your entire stack on a weak over pair on a draw heavy board. Arguably opponent could be semi-bluffing or all out bluffing but with the read as a TAG on this player it is not that likely. The chance of hitting another club is still there on the river but then again it is only a jack high flush.
 
i'm getting very close to simply giving up on online poker. the amount of crazy play i see is insane and i seem to finish in the bubble every time i play. add to that the incredibly shitty attitude of what seems to be most people playing online these days, and you have a recipe for something i used to enjoy which seems a lot less enjoyable these days.

contrast that to my last 4 live games - 3 casino tournaments and a kitchen-table tournament.

i finished 2nd, 2nd and 1st in the casino and i won the kitchen table tournament. in the kitchen tourney, i scraped to the final table in last place with 6 chips. 2nd last had 12 and the chip leader had me outchipped 45 chips to 6. i played some great poker - a combination of bluffing hands to win and making winning hands pay.

i think i need to set myself up for success by quitting the online game entirely.

what are your experiences of play online versus play in real life?

alasdair
 
Alasdair, I'm right there with you, as are most of my friends who play online. It's a crapshoot online, with bad play being rewarded left and right. I don't know for certain if I can say that it's rigged, but I do know that I always get my money in with the best of it, and I rarely come out in the money.

I am sticking to live money cash games from now on, with an occasional live tourney here and there.
 
My experience is the opposite, because the kitchen games I play in are very low quality (games of chance more than skill, lots of wild cards and variants). (And there are no casinos near here - only two in the country). So although I see some weird plays online, it's still better quality. I do get annoyed when people call me down with 3rd pair and suckout on the river, or call on a flush draw with massively wrong odds, but I'm trying to learn to deal with it. And there's always the bonus that in online tourneys some idiot will go all-in with you with nothing, and double you up early on.

From reading poker boards it seems as though good offline players can struggle online, and vice versa. I wouldn't presume to venture why, though.
 
Suck outs a part of poker and they blow but at the same time these are the plays that you make money from. If someone hits their 4 outer to stack you it does not bother me much because I know it is the same player like this that is paying me off huge. You have to have a mindset to ignore these beats. At times it can be brutal and I do take breaks from playing to get my mind right. Playing while on tilt is the worst thing that I can ever do. Talk about donking off chips when I am on tilt I am a fucking maniac. Basically a broken ATM machine that spits out money.

There is no way I think online poker is rigged. It seems pretty legit to me and the same bad beats occur to me at the casino as they do online. One thing that people forget is you play hands much quicker online than at a casino, so it may seem that bad beats happen more often, but in reality you are just getting more oppurtunities to get them.

The level of play online compared to a casino is vastly different. Online at the limits I mostly play at (50NL) the play is halfway decent. A lot of people are attempting to play ABC poker and be tight-aggressive. Most of them are failing to do some and are very tight-passive. You find the occasional maniac and the occasional fish.

Jump to a casino and their lowest limit game 100NL most likely plays like 25NL online. Everyone wants to see cards at a casino and people are there to gamble. If you want to talk bad beats I have been hit with the most sickening beats at my local casino by some retard that does not know how to play. The variance seems to be much greater at a casino but the payoff can be much better.

If you are receiving a lot of bad beats online the only thing I can think to say is it might be your play. Do not slow play anything except a full house or better (unless you have a read on your opponent). In cash games the whole point of betting near the pot when you hit a hand is to get your opponent to fold. I do not want them seeing that extra card and maybe hitting a 2 pair or better. If they do hit that 2 pair and I think my top pair top kicker is good I am going to lose a lot of money. You have to protect your hands and realize that when you only make a small pot off of top pair top kick that it is okay. Play for stacks when you have a hidden set or straight. Top pair hands should win you small pots. Anytime I am playing for stacks with top pair top kicker I am going to be scared because most of the time you will not be the winner.

The main thing is you need to protect your hand. Most people receive bad beats too much because they are failing to do this.
 
thizzSantaCruz said:
If you are receiving a lot of bad beats online the only thing I can think to say is it might be your play.
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i know nobody wants to hear bad beat stories but i'm always interested in the different perspectives on various hands.

i just got done with a 'mini' tournament. $5 buy-in and 100 players max. i'm playing great and after one hour in i'm in first place.

i'm the big blind and i get dealt pocket jacks. the guy under the gun raises - but not by much - and there are about 5 callers. gets to me and i make a big raise. everybody folds except one guy who moves all-in. he's got about half my chips and i call. he has a Q4 offsuit and catches a queen. pretty deflating to say the least. i asked him what possessed him to call a decent raise with a Q4 and he says "i don't know". i was expecting a cocky answer or some cliched crap about "i was gambling". sigh.

next hand, i move all in to try to steal blinds with AQ suited. get called by JJ and the guy makes quad jacks.

all over in two hands. the second one? fair enough. the first one. wtf?

my conclusion? it's like soldiers in war say - if the bullet has your name on it, there's nothing you can do...

alasdair
 
Yea the first one is definantly a bad beat. I am not very experienced in MTT's at all, I have played one online my whole poker career. From what I have heard though the low limit ones are basically a crap shoot with people moving all-in with junk all the time. I am not sure what strategy you can use to counteract their willingness to play nothing.

Check out flopturnriver.com and make a post in the MTT section about low limit tourneys. I am sure someone will have some advice for you.

The bad beats I was talking about are when you spike top pair top kick and don't bet large enough to push someone off their hand, and they wind up hitting a 2 pair. Beats like that are avoidable but if you are getting it all in with the best hand.......I guess you have to hope that the poker gods are smiling upon you.
 
Wow. This thread really takes me back to my days of poker ignorance. I started playing no limit when I was fifteen years old in Pryor, Oklahoma. I cut my teeth with guys like -- I won't mention names. Tough players, all. So by nineteen I thought I had the shit down. I started playing at Commerce casino in California at nineteen, and played there for years. I won several large tourneys and decided I should think about playing professionaly. My friends were all for it. Hell, I was a good enough player, right? By legal age I already had six years of intensive no-limit real world experience. I had already won over twenty grand in one sitting once, and over ten grand several times (I failed to factor in that I had lost every single dollar of those wins -- the twenty grand night I lost it all that same night at Asian games!)

Anyway. I get on the circuit and run a thousand dollar bankroll into over fifty in just under a year. I'm the shit with my friends -- I'm the shit according to me.

And then I lose it all in two weeks. Nothing changed, either. The game caught up with me is all.

Why do I tell you this? Because I hear language in this post that reminds me of me when I was younger and dumber. I still play poker now and again. I play limit and no limit, stud, hold 'em and (my favorite) Omaha. I keep books, pay taxes, etc. I win about one out of six sessions, but when I win I tend to multiply my bankroll by an average factor of eleven. So I'm in the black this year.

If you don't count the tens of thousands I've lost over the previous years, well...I'm winner, eh?
 
Here's a pretty bad beat that happened to me today at the casino:

So I came with $100, and after doubling up with KK and stealing a couple pots, I was up to maybe 180. I am dealt AK of hearts, so I make a fairly standard raise to $12; it folds half way around the table, until someone else raises to $25. I call, figuring at worst I was facing a race situation. So it was heads up going to the flop, and it comes AQQ, no hearts. So my flush possibility is dead, but I have top pair top kicker. So after he checks, I figure I would try to figure out if he has a Queen. I bet into it with a fairly strong $45, and the other guy calls. Turn comes a dead card, a 2; he checks again. Now by this point I think he might be slow playing trip queens, so I decide to check and see a free river, which comes out a third queen. So now I have a boat, queens over aces, which I figure HAS to be good at this point. He bets $50, and I (thank god) decide to just call him down.

He had pocket aces. I was dead after the flop.
 
synchrojet said:
I win about one out of six sessions, but when I win I tend to multiply my bankroll by an average factor of eleven. So I'm in the black this year.
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If you don't mind me asking how do you exactly do this? That is a terrible win rate...and why is that when you win you are always winning big? I donn't understand how this logically fits into the game of NLHE. I do not have nearly as much experience playing as you do so maybe you can explain how you can do this.

My poker tracker stats tell me over the last 59000 hands I have won money in52% of my sessions and turn 5.39BB/100 hands. Decent stats, nothing to brag about. I do not rally know how you can win 1/6 sessions but come up huge when you do. Are you trying to force action? Your variance also seems out of control. If you can blow a good portion of your bankroll in one sitting you have bankroll management problems or tilt management problems.

Or maybe you should just quit playing those asian games.

If you are properly rolled for poker and are playing at a level of play you can beat there is no reason you should ever go broke. When I first started playing(I was a terrible player), sure I lost tons of money and had to redeposit. Since then I have not pumped money into my roll since switching to stars. If you are properly rolled for NLHE (at least 20x maximum buy in) then if you drop 10 buyins you drop down to the next limit. Grind your way back up until you are properly rolled and there you go.
 
poker aphorisms:

- online, no matter how badly a hand of poker is played, somebody will comment "nh" or "nice hand"

- online, no matter how badly your game of poker is played, somebody will tell you "gg" or "good game"

:)

alasdair
 
all right so here's a home game situation it's a 50 dollar buy-in 10 person game all starting off with 5000 chips... blinds are 250/500 the button has around 4 k chips small blind is chip leader with around 36 k i'm big blind w/ around 12 k.... blinds are going up next hand to 500/1000.

hand starts of with the button going all-in, small blind thinks about it for awhile then finally calls. i look down with pocket 4's... i have a good read on both of them button scares me because he's going all-in on an ace/anything, two face cards or a pair. the way the small blind acted i put him on a weak ace... a pair or a strong ace would have been a quick call

so i look down what do i do? dump the 4's even though i'm almost positive their the best hand at the time? well i push all in the sb calls and sure enough the button shows a/7 and the small blind shows a/10 .. did i make the right move
 
^ did they catch?

tough one - without knowing all the folds, we don't know how many out there were but you have to avoid aces, sevens and tens (or catch a 4) to win. i would have dumped it i think. against one player heads up, i would like my chances.

that said, perhaps it's just the number of hands i see which skews my memory but, playing online a pocket pair almost never manages to stand up against two over cards when it's a classic coin toss...

alasdair
 
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