Did I play bad tonight?

[Aurora]

I'm just back from some cash games and I load €160. Obviously gutted, but am trying to figure out weither I played bad, and can only think of one mistake all night.

Ok, so I played for about 3 hours and was involved in around 4 memorable hands. I do play tight but I was also getting rubbish. There are two hands I want your opinion on.

In the SB, with €150 I pick up As 7h. 5 limpers to me, so I throw in the extra 50c and the BB checks.
Flop comes Ac 7d Kc.
I think my two pair is good here, and have no intention of slow playing due to the flush possibilities. So I bet €5 into a pot of €7. I get two callers and they both have position on me.
I know now that one of them has Ax, and the other is probably drawing, so his call was a mistake. (reads iv gotten).
Turn is Jc.
I bet €15, next player folds (ace x) and after some thought the other raises to €30, and has €7 left. This screamed 'I don't have a flush' to me, especially with his body language, so I push him all in. This is where I think I made a mistake, as there was flush and straight possibilites, but it was just matimatically difficult to put him on either.
Turns out he had a straight.

The next hand I think I played perfectly, just one of those hands.
I pick up kh 10h on the button. 5 limpers again, so I raise it to €6.
Everyone calls and pot stands around €35 and I'm playing around €60.
Flop comes kc 2c 3d.
checked to me and I bet €15 and get one caller.
Turn is 8d and it gets checked to me again, where I push my €45 into the pot.
Opp is thinking long and hard, running through pot (Around €65) and doing the math. Obv he's on the flush draw.
Eventually calls and turns over Qc 9c, leaving him with only a club to hit.
Which he does, busting me in the process.

Now, I thought I played well tonight, but perhaps there are flaws that I'm not seeing. The call with two pair was obv a mistake, with flush and straights out there, but should i be happy I forced an error from him first ? And surely I out played my opponents in the last hand ?

Any thoughts and critisims welcome.

[Mellor]

I'm just back from some cash games and I load €160. Obviously gutted, but am trying to figure out weither I played bad, and can only think of one mistake all night.

Ok, so I played for about 3 hours and was involved in around 4 memorable hands. I do play tight but I was also getting rubbish. There are two hands I want your opinion on.

In the SB, with €150 I pick up As 7h. 5 limpers to me, so I throw in the extra 50c and the BB checks.
Flop comes Ac 7d Kc.
I think my two pair is good here, and have no intention of slow playing due to the flush possibilities. So I bet €5 into a pot of €7. I get two callers and they both have position on me.
I know now that one of them has Ax, and the other is probably drawing, so his call was a mistake. (reads iv gotten).
Turn is Jc.
I bet €15, next player folds (ace x) and after some thought the other raises to €30, and has €7 left. This screamed 'I don't have a flush' to me, especially with his body language, so I push him all in. This is where I think I made a mistake as there was flush and straight possibilites, but it was just matimatically difficult to put him on either.
Turns out he had a straight.

Hand one first,
first of all some of your analysis is nonsense. And mostly clearly applied afterwards.
PF limp is fine
Flop bet is poor, if you are going to open from the SB with this many it's stupid not full pot bet
Regardless, a check raise would be far better. There is no need to comment on other players calls, especially when you are using knowledge you gained at showdown
as for calling the call with a draw wrong, you bet small so he had to call 5 into 17, those odds are pretty good, great when you consider the fact that you still donked off a bet when the flush hit
calling a decent draw there was right, you made it right, the fact that he drew a straight on a flush board is irrelevant

As for his bet screaming no flush, after the fact IMO, all you "reads" are based on info you got later
the fact that you were left with such a small raise to call shows you weren't paying attention to stack size, you never gave any in the op

C/R would of gotten a lot more money in, prob even won the hand

[sligoboi]

I'm just back from some cash games and I load €160. Obviously gutted, but am trying to figure out weither I played bad, and can only think of one mistake all night.

Ok, so I played for about 3 hours and was involved in around 4 memorable hands. I do play tight but I was also getting rubbish. There are two hands I want your opinion on.

In the SB, with €150 I pick up As 7h. 5 limpers to me, so I throw in the extra 50c and the BB checks.
Flop comes Ac 7d Kc.
I think my two pair is good here, and have no intention of slow playing due to the flush possibilities. So I bet €5 into a pot of €7. I get two callers and they both have position on me.
I know now that one of them has Ax, and the other is probably drawing, so his call was a mistake. (reads iv gotten).
Turn is Jc.
I bet €15, next player folds (ace x) and after some thought the other raises to €30, and has €7 left. This screamed 'I don't have a flush' to me, especially with his body language, so I push him all in. This is where I think I made a mistake, as there was flush and straight possibilites, but it was just matimatically difficult to put him on either.
Turns out he had a straight.

The next hand I think I played perfectly, just one of those hands.
I pick up kh 10h on the button. 5 limpers again, so I raise it to €6.
Everyone calls and pot stands around €35 and I'm playing around €60.
Flop comes kc 2c 3d.
checked to me and I bet €15 and get one caller.
Turn is 8d and it gets checked to me again, where I push my €45 into the pot.
Opp is thinking long and hard, running through pot (Around €65) and doing the math. Obv he's on the flush draw.
Eventually calls and turns over Qc 9c, leaving him with only a club to hit.
Which he does, busting me in the process.

Now, I thought I played well tonight, but perhaps there are flaws that I'm not seeing. The call with two pair was obv a mistake, with flush and straights out there, but should i be happy I forced an error from him first ? And surely I out played my opponents in the last hand ?

Any thoughts and critisims welcome.

Small few observations as I'm too tired to go into detail.

Usually when you bet the flop from the sb and get callers they'll have position on you

min re raise on the turn with €7 behind actually does scream a made hand better than 2 pair but with it practically being €22 into a pot of €59 it's just meh get it in.

Having said that if you are so certain that they are drawing then why bet when the Jc peels on the turns. It hits all draws. I mean we don't have to have a plan going to every street but we should have an idea of what we're going to do on certain cards.


With regards to the 2nd hand you didn't play it perfectly. Limpers in live games don't fold easily and by making a 3x raise with 5 limpers you're asking for them all to call. Our raise should not be influenced by our hand strength but should definitely be influenced by the number of people in the pot.

That's my limited tired analysis done..oh and where did this happen btw?

[Mellor]

I had read hand two when I posted last, but most comments still stand

I think raising there is bad, ESP into 7 players, table is obv v loose
I imagine this is PL, they might not of folded to a PSB either

also. You either have mistakes in your post or struggle to count pots, you made it 6, if all limpers and blinds call the pot is 48, maybe blinds folded for 36
eitherway, you bet of 15 is too small, I'd be betting 25-30, the turn pot wasn't 65 btw, it was 110-120 depending on how many call pf

once again you put him obviously on a flush draw, after the fact again and irrelevant since your action is over

[Aurora]

Thanks for your comments. Obv il need to look at my bet sizes as pretty much all my bets tonight were standard for the way I play. Not a very experienced cash game player though.

Not sure what you mean about the 'read' happening later, because I wrote pretty much what I was thinking during the hand, I was just right most of the time.

As for the C/R, I literally had my hand on the way to check, with e dry intention of a C/R, untill I stopped and thought a bet would be better since the flush possibilities, as I'd seen many hands checked down to turn or river.

Oh, sorry about the pot math, was very tired posting so some of it's more than likely off.

[Alfie]

The first thing I want to say, that I meant to say in your other thread re: finding a game like this in Dublin was that it's really not a great idea to be playing live cash games unless you can afford to drop a few buy-ins, because variance kicks in and can last last a pretty long amount of time live because it doesn't have the pace of online poker or the ability to multi-table, playing 1,000 hands an hour and letting statistical variance run it's course much quicker.

20 buy-ins being sufficient was something that applies to me because the standard live is awful and that's about the most liquid cash you would need to stay in the games, but it gets replenished if it dips, and it's a live poker bankroll , not my life savings, my lifestyle wouldn't change drastically if I lost a lot of this money.

Obviously, none of this is really important if you're content to be a recreational player, that's absolutely fine. But from your post here it seems you do think about the game, albeit not really correctly, so you obviously have some interest in becoming a long-term winner at poker. Playing scared money at the poker table is a pretty sure-fire way to lose, players who do this are some of my absolute favourite to play live as their range is so easily defined (because winning the hands they play is more important than playing optimally and each session carries significant emotional and financial weight, for most). So, unless you can detach yourself from the value of money at the table, you will be at a disadvantage before you ever sit down. I suggest you put a few $100s on a site like PokerStars, Full Tilt or an iPoker skin like Boyles or PaddyPower and devote some time to learning the game and grinding up a bankroll. You'll be 1000x the player you are now if you do this and read this forum but particularly 2p2 (www.twoplustwo.com).

Anyway, on to the hands:

Hand 1: Leading out on the flop is not bad, in my opinion. With 7 (?) players going to the flop in a limped pot, your hand is of course very strong but you do want to charge draws and set yourself up to get 3 streets of value on the right board. However, the Jc falls, just about the worst card in the deck (also any club, a K would be quite terrible and to a lesser extent a Q), oop I am check/folding now. In a 3-way pot where you lead out and got 2 callers on that flop, it is very likely you are drawing to 4 outs (often 3, since you're often called by Ax and a draw, as you pointed out correctly). So, yeah, give up on the turn, flop is fine.

NOTES:
1) you don't "know" one of them has Ax, it is likely that Ax is a big part of the first callers range, but it's not 100% the hand they have in this spot, so it's not something you "know" for sure.
2) Calling with a flush-draw on this flop is far from incorrect, he's getting a good price and can put you to a difficult decision if he hits and possibly get another bet out of a strong holding. Calling with a gutter is a bit on the brain-dead side since a turn card like this is hard to play for maximum value, as well as being a long-shot draw in the first place.
3) "Mathematically difficult to put him on"? I don't know what you mean here and I doubt you do, either. This isn't a real point of analysis, it's just words you wrote to justify what happened. Mathematically, it does make sense since you bet €5 into a pot of €7 (pot=€12), player A called (pot = €17) and player B (villain) over-called getting over 3-1 on his money. A draw makes perfect sense here.

Hand 2: I'm tired from all the writing I've done so I'm just going to say it's ok. Probably just over-limp preflop since you're getting like 7-1 with a strong speculative hand that plays well multi-way. Raising doesn't serve to isolate (since you want a multi-way pot with a hand like this, so you can stack people in flush over flush scenarios, for instance, and your hand does not play as well heads up) nor for value (since your hand is relatively weak). Also, as a general rule, top pair is not the nuts, so don't overvalue it, especially in big multi-way pots.

I hope this has helped in some way and I hope it's not all sh*te! I don't know why I spent 20 minutes writing this out but I did so enjoy.

[Aurora]

The first thing I want to say, that I meant to say in your other thread re: finding a game like this in Dublin was that it's really not a great idea to be playing live cash games unless you can afford to drop a few buy-ins, because variance kicks in and can last last a pretty long amount of time live because it doesn't have the pace of online poker or the ability to multi-table, playing 1,000 hands an hour and letting statistical variance run it's course much quicker.

20 buy-ins being sufficient was something that applies to me because the standard live is awful and that's about the most liquid cash you would need to stay in the games, but it gets replenished if it dips, and it's a live poker bankroll , not my life savings, my lifestyle wouldn't change drastically if I lost a lot of this money.

Obviously, none of this is really important if you're content to be a recreational player, that's absolutely fine. But from your post here it seems you do think about the game, albeit not really correctly, so you obviously have some interest in becoming a long-term winner at poker. Playing scared money at the poker table is a pretty sure-fire way to lose, players who do this are some of my absolute favourite to play live as their range is so easily defined (because winning the hands they play is more important than playing optimally and each session carries significant emotional and financial weight, for most). So, unless you can detach yourself from the value of money at the table, you will be at a disadvantage before you ever sit down. I suggest you put a few $100s on a site like PokerStars, Full Tilt or an iPoker skin like Boyles or PaddyPower and devote some time to learning the game and grinding up a bankroll. You'll be 1000x the player you are now if you do this and read this forum but particularly 2p2 (www.twoplustwo.com).

Anyway, on to the hands:

Hand 1: Leading out on the flop is not bad, in my opinion. With 7 (?) players going to the flop in a limped pot, your hand is of course very strong but you do want to charge draws and set yourself up to get 3 streets of value on the right board. However, the Jc falls, just about the worst card in the deck (also any club, a K would be quite terrible and to a lesser extent a Q), oop I am check/folding now. In a 3-way pot where you lead out and got 2 callers on that flop, it is very likely you are drawing to 4 outs (often 3, since you're often called by Ax and a draw, as you pointed out correctly). So, yeah, give up on the turn, flop is fine.

NOTES:
1) you don't "know" one of them has Ax, it is likely that Ax is a big part of the first callers range, but it's not 100% the hand they have in this spot, so it's not something you "know" for sure.
2) Calling with a flush-draw on this flop is far from incorrect, he's getting a good price and can put you to a difficult decision if he hits and possibly get another bet out of a strong holding. Calling with a gutter is a bit on the brain-dead side since a turn card like this is hard to play for maximum value, as well as being a long-shot draw in the first place.
3) "Mathematically difficult to put him on"? I don't know what you mean here and I doubt you do, either. This isn't a real point of analysis, it's just words you wrote to justify what happened. Mathematically, it does make sense since you bet €5 into a pot of €7 (pot=€12), player A called (pot = €17) and player B (villain) over-called getting over 3-1 on his money. A draw makes perfect sense here.

Hand 2: I'm tired from all the writing I've done so I'm just going to say it's ok. Probably just over-limp preflop since you're getting like 7-1 with a strong speculative hand that plays well multi-way. Raising doesn't serve to isolate (since you want a multi-way pot with a hand like this, so you can stack people in flush over flush scenarios, for instance, and your hand does not play as well heads up) nor for value (since your hand is relatively weak). Also, as a general rule, top pair is not the nuts, so don't overvalue it, especially in big multi-way pots.

I hope this has helped in some way and I hope it's not all sh*te! I don't know why I spent 20 minutes writing this out but I did so enjoy.

Appreciate the time and effort you went to, thanks. I will be taking all this on board, and your advice won't be ignored .

As you can tell I am not a very experienced player, but am willing to get better, so self analysis is key.

My bet sizes weren't as good as i thought at the time, not taking into account the possiblity of other callers to give the villain the right price, when I really wanted to bet an amount that wouldn't give the right odds for draws.

As for your bankroll management advice, i agree completely, this game was just a rare treat as I usually would play online cash or rush poker, and live tournements. But i came into some money so said id give live cash a go. I doubt I will becoming a reg live cash game player. That said, whenever Im at a table, on or offline, i do disconcern myself with the value of the chips, and focus on solid poker.

Thanks for your advice though, il be re - reading it a few times any taking note.

[AndyFatBastard]

If you're just gonna be a casual player don't bother making a bankroll, just have a game when you feel like it and have some spare cash you don't mind losing.

1. Your flop lead out was definitely the best way to play it, but betting the turn was madness. Every draw has made it. Why did you do that? To find out where you were?

2. I don't like your raise pre if you're not comfortable stacking off light. Your opponent had a draw in the end, but his range for stacking off here contains a lot of better kings and those bullshit two-pair combinations that live players love so much.

[Bubbleking]

hand 1 - i prefer c/r to leading for so many reasons. don't bet the turn as played.

Hand 2 - No need to pump the sh!t out of the pot with a marginal hand. call because you have position otherwise just fold. this is a live game in dublin you are going to get looked up with all kinds of junk and TP marginal kicker really isnt that strong here