Monday, December 22, 2008
Onwards And Sideways
More angst last night as I reached the last 4 tables in the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl and the iPoker $300K before being doomswitched into 27th and 33rd respectively. Hyachachachacha. People on 2+2 and so on are asking if the games are getting tougher ; in the tournaments I play, they seem to be getting even softer, with more and more bad players making more and more bad plays. And hooray for that ! Definitely not complaining.
Sometimes this gives you an opportunity to release a hand that you miss through "auto-playing". I picked up AK in first position in the Warm Up last night, playing about 40 BBs, and made a standard raise. A random player in late position made it about 2.5 times my raise, about 7 BBs. So all I can do here, I thought, is shove. There's no point calling or raising less than all in. So I shoved and lost to AA. But why couldn't I just fold ?
A random player in the Sunday Warm-Up just isn't going to make a move against an UTG raiser in that spot. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that he has [AK, JJ+] and that he isn't going to fold any of it to the re-jam. In addition, the smaller reraise weights his range even more towards big pairs and away from AK. Even without this extra weighting, I'm about 40% against his range, and I need to be 45% given the size of pot and stacks. And frankly JJ might even be a bit of a stretch. 30 BB stacks would have been OK, or if I was in a later position, but here, maybe "I has AK and we're not deep" isn't good enough. One to think about.
While I'm here, I will be playing in the "Marty Smyth celebration tournament" on BoylePoker tomorrow at 8pm (GMT), which should be fun, there are lots of bounties planned. I will also have my own cash table (now that's fame) opening up which I'll have a spin on, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Considering the blinds will be .25/.50 though, that's not really very hard ...
Sometimes this gives you an opportunity to release a hand that you miss through "auto-playing". I picked up AK in first position in the Warm Up last night, playing about 40 BBs, and made a standard raise. A random player in late position made it about 2.5 times my raise, about 7 BBs. So all I can do here, I thought, is shove. There's no point calling or raising less than all in. So I shoved and lost to AA. But why couldn't I just fold ?
A random player in the Sunday Warm-Up just isn't going to make a move against an UTG raiser in that spot. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that he has [AK, JJ+] and that he isn't going to fold any of it to the re-jam. In addition, the smaller reraise weights his range even more towards big pairs and away from AK. Even without this extra weighting, I'm about 40% against his range, and I need to be 45% given the size of pot and stacks. And frankly JJ might even be a bit of a stretch. 30 BB stacks would have been OK, or if I was in a later position, but here, maybe "I has AK and we're not deep" isn't good enough. One to think about.
While I'm here, I will be playing in the "Marty Smyth celebration tournament" on BoylePoker tomorrow at 8pm (GMT), which should be fun, there are lots of bounties planned. I will also have my own cash table (now that's fame) opening up which I'll have a spin on, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Considering the blinds will be .25/.50 though, that's not really very hard ...
# posted by Andy_Ward @ 5:01 PM 
