While playing the 50 SBD Sunday Freeroll at lucksacks.com I made 3 mistakes in row to exit the tourney early.
Mistake #1 above - If ever there was a clear time to re-raise (3bet) this was one. Villain2 is a very active player raising most of the time. He can do this with a very wide range of cards. With that information I can feel pretty good about having a better starting hand with AQ suited. I should re-raise here to isolate villian2. So why didn't I? These are excuses I tell myself. #1 I'm trapping (really self-trapping) #2 This is a team tourney and the big blind player is on my team. (Team play is a great contest that lucksacks.com administers. It's an 8 week contest with nice reward for the winning team at the finish). I don't want to attack his big blind more the the 3x it has already been raised. #3 Villain2 has expressed frustration about me always bullying him. Somehow I let his emotions effect me from correctly playing this spot. Got to keep emotions (tilt) out of the game except for using them as tells in a live game.
The one play I made correctly but it was not enough. Villain1 puts out a small blocking bet (small bet to see next card as cheap as possible). Villian2 called this small bet. I raise it with my 2 pair to try and get some value from the hand. Villian1 calls this bet and it is good for me. Villian2 folds which is also good. Now the hand is isolated and there is only a small chance that villian1 would have a better hand like AA or QQ because I hold 1 of each of those cards. Better chance of him having 66 but odds of that are small. Don't take my word on it. Used a range analysis tool to run the stats below.
As you can see I am a good favorite to be ahead based on what kind of cards I think he would be holding when calling a 3x raise from the little blind during pre-flop action.
Mistake #2 Villian1 again makes a blocking bet. This time instead of raising the bet I just call allowing him to see a card on the river for cheap. What is the excuse I tell myself. #1 Fear ... that 10 is kind of scary. It completes the draw for a KJ to make a straight. Its easy for me to imagine he would call a pre-flop raise with KJ. Or maybe he has been betting small with cards like 1010 and made a set now. Still there are only 16 combinations of KJ and 6 combinations of 1010 so chances are small that he has either of those exact hands. Its kind of like being afraid of ghosts in the closet. At this point I would of needed to commit to the hand and run my chips all-in to the pot and try to claim what should be mine. To Pluck the Pot! Lets see if the range analyzer agrees.
It does, the turn card did help villian1 5% based on the range he is likely to have. I am still a big favorite and should of played my cards and went all-in for value. I have a small chip stack remaining about (2.34K) compared to the size of the pot (3.88k) no sense just doing a small raise because the chips I have behind are not enough to effect the action on the river. Might as well get them in now.
Mistake #3 I called villain1 when he bet me all-in. It would of been better to get the chips all-in on the turn with my action. But to donk off all my chips with a call here is just stupid. He might have called bets light because of a large stack but I had not seen him do any big bluffing up to this point in the tourney. I believe he plays a solid game so should have put him on a better hand then mine. What chances here is my top 2 pair going to be good? Range analyzer says about 61%. Still not good enough to call off my tournament life. It should of been a clear fold. Still would of had 2.34k chips (about 20 big blinds) to try to make a comeback.
http://mysmp.me/h_iLs
The above link should take you to the hand above at ShareMyPair.com. You can see an animated view as it played out.
Thanks for reading the post. Please do comment if you think I might have done something different or if you agree. I am no poker pro, never had a big win. I do study the game trying to get better. My current goals for the game are to final table a seniors World Series of Poker Circuit event and to win a +10K prize. This is a great place for me to do the work that could help realize those goals.
Best of luck to you in all you do.
