Reason for betting flop is to get HU with the fish, when reg checks this flop it's lots less likely he has overpair, and the fish is gonna check call whatever he has as you saw from the showdown. The reg played his TT very passive here, but that doesn't make your flop bet bad.

It's not that I think my flop bet was bad necessarily. I just think checking the flop would have prevented stacking off in this hand. Based on how passively the SB played his hand, I'd say he's a fish too. A lot of fish love to "slow play" overpairs, so I'm not surprised he had TT here.

So I got sick again with another sinus infection and have been miserable all week. I haven't been able to play much at all, unfortunately. I feel like I'm almost better now though, and I plan to get 1,000 hands in today.

Had another really good session today (up 6.5 BI's). I've now booked winners in 8 out of my last 9 sessions which is certainly a confidence booster. Being sick, I didn't get in nearly as many hands this week as I wanted to. My goal was to get in 4k hands this week. I finished with 2700 hands for the week, so I'm going to aim for 4,000 hands again next week. I had a 20.56 BB/100 win rate for the week though, which is nice to see.

I'm doing a hand review of my last few sessions, and came across this interesting hand:


iPoker - $0.05 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

CO: 85.2 BB (VPIP: 54.05, PFR: 8.33, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 38)
BTN: 93.2 BB (VPIP: 16.22, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 38)
SB: 57.6 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 7)
Hero (BB): 218 BB
UTG: 86.2 BB (VPIP: 33.33, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 12)
MP: 109.4 BB (VPIP: 42.11, PFR: 2.63, 3Bet Preflop: 6.25, Hands: 38)

SB posts SB 0.4 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.4 BB) Hero has Q J

fold, fold, fold, fold, SB raises to 3 BB, Hero calls 2 BB

Flop: (6 BB, 2 players) Q 7 3
SB bets 6 BB, Hero calls 6 BB

Turn: (18 BB, 2 players) 3
SB bets 18 BB, Hero calls 18 BB

River: (54 BB, 2 players) J
SB bets 30.6 BB, Hero calls 30.6 BB


Would you have played this hand any differently? If so, how and why?

If the river is anything other than a Q or J, I'm folding if he makes the same bet. With no stats on him, we can't put him on a range. Sure, he could possibly have a hand like AQ or A3 here, but do we automatically give him credit for being that strong on the flop/turn? I don't think so because he'd presumably play pretty much any Q the same way. I wouldn't put him on QQ or 77, simply because pretty much everyone at 5nl slows plays every monster hand. If he'd flopped a set and turned a boat, I think he would've checked and given me a chance to bet it. I like the way I played this hand. I'm not sure I'd play it any differently if I could play it again.


I'll post the results after receiving some feedback.

I think I probably would have raised. No flush, no straight, the 7 hands he's played I wouldn't put a 3 in his range. I MO only thing that beats you here is aa/kk

He shipped it on the river, so I didn't have the option to raise.

Yeah meant call. I always look at 2+2 onmy cell phone after a long day and when I'm brain dead. Anyways definite call and take his money

Here's how it turned out:

I played 4333 hands this week, so I made and surpassed my goal of 4k. Next weak's goal is 4500.

It's been a rough week. I had a rough day the other day where I lost 4 BI's. I still finished in the green, but not by much. Here's what the week looked like:

The above graph includes some 4NL. Here's what the week looked like at 5NL exclusively - a bit better:




Here's what my 5NL graph looks like overall:



You can see the 3-4 week downswing I had in there at the same time I was sick and couldn't get as many hands in.

Damn, that beard! Insta-Subscribe.

GL with the crushing!

Keep up the good work man. Just stay focused and continue to grind. The pennies will be benjamins soon enough

Thanks all!

Grinding away. Had a break even day today. It would have been profitable if not for a ~40bb miss click :/

This has been the story of my day...

Lol what is that guy thinking with 84s? Anyways bet bigger OTT. 3/4 pot. You have a full house, he's in the sb, doubtful he has anything better. I'd consider doing 16-18bbs or even pot it depending on the guy

Also with the AJ hand I would have done the same expecting a split pot.

Sadly, I expected a split pot to be the worst case scenario. I figured he could easily have a smaller full house with a small-medium pocket pair there, and some fish at this level would even play AcKc/AcQc that way.


Right? That's what I was wondering. I think my logic on the turn was hoping to appear on the weak side with the 1/2 pot bet in order to get value from Ax. That obviously backfired with that ultra rare river. Looking back on the hand though, I guess if he calls 1/2 pot with Ax there, he probably calls a bigger bet there with it too.

It's been a busy day. My girlfriend and I are moving across town this month. It was a short notice thing, so we had to scramble to find a place. We started looking online I think Wednesday of last week. We went and looked at a place on Friday, and another over the weekend. There were a couple more that we wanted to see but didn't get responses to emails regarding such. I ruled out several more based on online reviews and/or crime statistics.

She and I really like the place we saw Friday, so we decided to say the heck with the search and just dive in. We went yesterday and filled out the application and got the approval today, so we went back today and signed the lease. We got the keys, did the walkthrough, and went ahead and started moving things in that she'd already packed during the last several days. When we got back home, we did a lot more packing.

I haven't played 1 hand of poker today, and lately, if I go a day without playing a hand, I feel guilty (like I'm never supposed to have a day off from it!). I thought about playing now, but I'm too tired. We got a lot done today though, so it was definitely worth it. We're excited about the new place too and looking forward to getting moved in. It's going to be tough to get volume in while doing so, but I'm going to do my best to make it happen.

Well, the power supply unit in my computer died near the end of last week. I unplugged my computer and moved it to the new place, and the next day when I plugged it all up again, it wouldn't turn on. I figured it was the power supply (luckily I was right and it wasn't worse than that). I ordered a new one and installed it, but in the meantime I went 8 days without being able to access my computer which obviously means no poker...

On the plus side, I'm all moved into the new apartment, so that's out of the way. There probably couldn't have been a better time for me to lose access to my computer for a week, since we had to move and unpack and all, so the timing of it worked out well.

Now it's back to the tables!

Just finished a rough session...



Note another large dip (full buy in) at the far right, just at the end of the session. I guess I should've known when 5 minutes into the session, I had 2 back to back hands on the same table where I had AK and lost to QQ AIPF (to short stacks).

The rest of my session pretty much went like this...










Coincidence that just yesterday, Bovada approved a withdrawal request of mine? .....


In other news, I spent close to 2 hours last night digging around in pt4 looking for leaks to plug, and the most obvious one that I found that I wasn't already aware of was a little obscure. I'm not utilizing probing bets on the turn (betting the turn when the flop was checked around) with anywhere near the frequency that I should be. So i'm going to work on correcting that.


I've been trying to get regular exercise since this involves being so sedentary. There's a nice rec center right down the road from my new apartment where I signed up and went to played basketball at a few days ago. I went last night to try to play again, but apparently they close early on Friday nights for events, and they were closed to the public all day today for some kind of tournament. Aaaaand they're closed on Sundays. I was hoping to play ball over there about 3 days a week to stay active, but their hours are making it challenging to do so.

I played basketball (typically as a point guard) throughout most of school, but I haven't even picked up a basketball more than a handful of times since my early twenties. I've also discovered that my 33 year old body doesn't recover from playing basketball nearly as fast as my teenage body did when I was in school. I now experience soreness and aching for a good 24-36 hours afterward, which I'm finding hard to accept. Hopefully it dissipates some as I begin playing more!

Last night after discovering the rec center was closed, I went over to the fitness center in my complex, which is a nice, 2 floor facility, and I did some weight lifting and cardio. I think I'm going to head over there again now for some needed exercise. I'm achy from sitting in my chair for the last several hours.

Trust Your Instincts (hero call)

If there's one thing I've learned over the years from poker, it's to trust your instincts. I've learned to trust my instincts so much more both at the tables and just in life in general. They are right so much more often than not. Today I was caught in a hand I shouldn't have even been in, but I trusted my instincts and got a double up out of it. Here's the hand:



I don't recommend making this kind of hero call often, but my gut was strongly telling me that this villain had AK. I tanked hard after his river bet, and ultimately decided I had to trust my instincts. I held my breath and made the call and BAM! My instincts were right once again.


Best Day Ever

I'm pretty sure that, in terms of big blinds gained, today was the best day I have ever had in an online hold'em cash game. I ran good all day, spread over 2 sessions, and I brought my A game on top of that. Check out these results:



I'm trying not to focus on it too much though. Again, just trying to play well for now, grind it out, and continue building my bankroll in order to move up to NL10. It felt good though, as it's been a stagnant month, and I have been slightly down all month long. What's more is that it gave my win rate a nice little boost up to nearly 10bb/100. After 30k hands, here's where I'm at overall now:



Is it just me or is it a little eerie how similar my graph looks from 1 to around 17k hands, and then from 17k to now, just with a somewhat smaller downswing? The first downswing was around 9 buy-ins more (1900 BBs vs 1000), so progress appears evident. But the similarity is strange. I just took a few minutes to cut the graph from the last ~13k or so hands, color change the line to red, overlay it over the first ~17k-ish hands and stretch the 13k line out to the length of the 17k to make up for the difference of ~4k hands. Here it is:



The first downswing lasted around 10k hands, and the second one lasted roughly 9k hands, which I find quite interesting, considering roughly 85% of the hands played have been on Bovada (and I'm playing on Bovada almost exclusively now). I wonder if I can expect that to be an average range of how long my downswings are going to last. That would certainly make it easier to mentally prepare for.

Congrats on the day, but gotta be said that J5s hand looks terrible misplayed. Preflop 4b is just bad and sizing is way way too big, river call is really optimistic.

Thanks for your input, PandaLife. Feedback is always welcomed. This villain had been repeatedly 3 betting me when I tried to steal the blinds from the button. His 3b stat was 25... So I 4 bet him light a couple of times to re-steal. The 4 bet was exactly 3x his 3 bet. Perhaps I could go with 2.7x I suppose, but at 5NL, I risk getting snap called light if I go with only a 2-2.5x re-raise there. This isn't how I would've played this hand against a solid player, mind you, but this was a V46/PFR30 fish. He'd previously folded a couple of times to the same 4 bet. Preflop, I was just looking for fold equity.

As for the river bet, to be clear, I do not/would not make this kind of a call often by any means. I realize that I'm pretty much only beating a bluff here. Based on the history with the villain and the way the hand played out though, I felt so strongly that he was straight up bluffing here, that I had to go with my instincts and made the call.

------

I just finished a session where I was down about 1.5 BIs for most of the session (just short of 1,000 hands). I caught a nice little heater at the end though and finished up 3 BIs and change. It looks like the upswing is continuing, so I hope to ride it as far as I can.

Run good ran right out the door tonight. I was the victim of several bad beats, including this gem, which will get me $5 back for hitting the bad beat bonus:

iPoker - $0.05 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

CO: 100 BB (VPIP: 100.00, PFR: 33.33, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 3)
BTN: 98.6 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 2)
SB: 39.2 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 3)
Hero (BB): 100 BB
UTG: 148.2 BB (VPIP: 66.67, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 3)
MP: 42 BB (VPIP: 66.67, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 3)

SB posts SB 0.4 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.4 BB) Hero has K A

UTG calls 1 BB, fold, CO raises to 3 BB, fold, SB raises to 5 BB, Hero calls 4 BB, UTG calls 4 BB, CO calls 2 BB

Flop: (20 BB, 4 players) 2 A A
SB checks, Hero checks, UTG checks, CO bets 22 BB, fold, Hero calls 22 BB, UTG calls 22 BB

Turn: (86 BB, 3 players) K
Hero checks, UTG checks, CO bets 73 BB, Hero calls 73 BB, UTG calls 73 BB

River: (305 BB, 3 players) 2

Hero mucks K A (Full House, Aces full of Kings)

UTG shows 4 A (Full House, Aces full of Twos)

CO shows 2 2 (Four of a Kind, Twos)

CO wins 289.8 BB

It's been a rough day/night, and I've barely slept since moving into the new apartment a week and a half ago or whenever. I think it's the fact that there's a window right beside my face when I'm in the bed, so the sunlight punches me in the eyes first thing in the morning. We don't have our curtains up yet, and I can't sleep with the slightest bit of light in the room. I'm going to call it an early night (for me). Until next time...