Weirdest hand of the day - Lawdude 20/40 live hand 1CDNF on board with 3SF

[antneye]

Originally Posted by A_Schupick

I honestley think you are making a huge mistake by discounting kxsx

I think you are talking to Lawdude....if so I agree.

[lawdude]

Originally Posted by antneye

I think you are talking to Lawdude....if so I agree.

Wishful thinking is a costly disease in poker-- even in limit poker. You can't keep betting based on the hand you would like them to have, rather than what they actually have.

As I said, there aren't a lot of kings in his range to begin with-- he's RAISING his bigger kings pre-flop and probably isn't raising the flop with the ones that don't contain a pair or a flush. (Remember, there's several players to act behind him and the ace of spades is never folding.)

Plus, for reasons I stated, I have to almost always have the ace of spades when I bet-call the flop and check-raise the turn. So nobody with a brain (and this guy had one) is 3-betting the king of spades.

Even if we allow for some stupidity and put a king in his range some of the time, again, since he has a brain, he may be able to fold the king to a 4-bet anyway, which further reduces the value of a 4-bet. Mathematically, we need to be ahead AND CALLED TWO THIRDS OF THE TIME for the 4-bet to be correct, unless we are willing to muck the ace to a 5-bet or a river raise.

I will state quite flatly-- if you 4-bet here, it means you have a leak in overvaluing your absolute hand strength and paying insufficient attention to your hand's strength against your opponent's range as revealed by the way the hand played out.

(And I will remind you-- to be results oriented, he did not bet the river, as he would have had he had a king and thought he was ahead. He checked the river, which shows you he knew I had an ace and was making a free showdown raise. Now, that DOES mean you can criticize my play for not recognizing a FSDR and punishing him. But it ALSO means that he understood that he was repping a straight flush, NOT a king, with his line. He was engaging in hand-reading-- "He has an ace, but I know that he knows that I can't have a king if I 3-bet. Therefore he will put me on a straight flush and I will get my free showdown." This was a fight between me thinking on level 2 and him thinking on level 3, and the analysis here is stuck on level 1-- "but, but, I have an ace!!!!!")

[antneye]

Are you saying you expected villain to fold to your 4! with everything in his range except for exactly a SF?

Of course, you have reads on villain so who am i to argue

[DougL]

A giant wall of text to cover up a refusal to count combos? That's what it seems to me. Sprinkle in some GTO, a strawman on Level 1 thinking, and some fuzzy talk about balance. This could all be saved by just working out combos and saying that not enough non-SF combos exist to re-raise for value. IMO, skip the fancy math terms b/c they're butchered and aren't the heart of it.

[Aaron W.]

Originally Posted by lawdude

(And I will remind you-- to be results oriented, he did not bet the river, as he would have had he had a king and thought he was ahead. He checked the river, which shows you he knew I had an ace and was making a free showdown raise. Now, that DOES mean you can criticize my play for not recognizing a FSDR and punishing him. But it ALSO means that he understood that he was repping a straight flush, NOT a king, with his line. He was engaging in hand-reading-- "He has an ace, but I know that he knows that I can't have a king if I 3-bet. Therefore he will put me on a straight flush and I will get my free showdown." This was a fight between me thinking on level 2 and him thinking on level 3, and the analysis here is stuck on level 1-- "but, but, I have an ace!!!!!")

I think the odds are quite good that if villain was making a FSDR, he'd end up making the mistake of calling down anyway. Not many live players are disciplined to actually fold their made hands when they FSDR the turn. Also, live players are very rarely on level 3.

[lawdude]

Originally Posted by antneye

Are you saying you expected villain to fold to your 4! with everything in his range except for exactly a SF?

Of course, you have reads on villain so who am i to argue

I'm not saying I'm EXPECTING it. I AM, however, saying that you shouldn't expect a king of spades to call down a 4-bet 100 percent of the time. It's a second assumption piled on top of the assumption that the king of spades is even in his range.

[A_Schupick]

Ksxx has 13 combos. We will take out KsAx-KsJx thus giving us 13-4 = 9 combos of k-high flush.

Let's say he only raises flop with a pair or overcard: KsTx/Ks9x/Ks7x/Ks4x which is 4 combos.

He is also capable of have Ks8s which is 1 more combo as well as K5ss/K6ss/K3ss/K2ss/KTss which is 5 more combos. So 6 total combos of made flush on flop.

This gives him a possible 10 combos going to the turn.

So we only need him to 3! with 50% of those combos to make it break even. Further, if by your approximation he folds all of those combos to a 4! then i think it would be profitable, but i don't think that's true anyway.

You keep talking about this like it should be treated as a HU thing (at least what i was able to gather) so considering that your range is really wide and Jsxx and Qsxx should be in your SB complete range. Remember also, you don't have the full compliment of Asxx hands, because you would raise some, so really, your range i think is much more diluted than you think it is.

Now, if you want to talk about this and stop pretending like you are so much better than everyone else, then awesome, but if you are hell-bent on being "holier than thou" with this conversation i suppose I will sotp with this post. Your choice.

[lawdude]

Originally Posted by DougL

A giant wall of text to cover up a refusal to count combos? That's what it seems to me. Sprinkle in some GTO, a strawman on Level 1 thinking, and some fuzzy talk about balance. This could all be saved by just working out combos and saying that not enough non-SF combos exist to re-raise for value. IMO, skip the fancy math terms b/c they're butchered and aren't the heart of it.

I actually did some mental combo counting of possible kings when I decided to call the 3-bet.

But your criticism is fundamentally wrong, because I don't think that's really what the hand, or this discussion is about:

1. "I have an ace!" is no strawman-- that's EXACTLY why I am being criticized. Re-read the posts. "You are discounting a king" is the entirety of the objection. That's not combo counting, that's not math, and that's not good poker strategy. That's level 1 thinking.

2. I haven't butchered the math terms. I explained why my range is not balanced here and why I basically have to either have an ace or a bluff. And I explained why I basically can't approach any sort of optimal heads-up play in this situation. That's the substance here. Understanding this hand conceptually is very important. Using jargon in the precise way that a tenured mathematics professor would approve of is not important at all. Words are tools anyway-- I can use them any way I want to as long as people understand my point.

3. I DON'T fundamentally think this is a combo-counting exercise because I actually don't believe he ever has a king. That's the point. If you DO think he has a king, then you have to eliminate stronger kings and kings that don't make a flush or pair on the flop and thus don't raise, discount the remaining kings both because sometimes he may be able to fold to another raise and because he may be smart enough not to ever 3-bet a king, and count the remaining, discounted combos. So at that point, I would argue you end up in the same place (Ks9x, Ks7x, Ks4x, Ks6s, Ks5s, Ks3s, Ks2s = 13 combos, discounted 75 percent gets you to 3.25 combos, versus 3 straight flush combos (one JTs discounted 50 percent because he might raise it preflop) = 2.5 combos, and you aren't getting the 2 to 1 on your call that you need to put in another raise). But I don't think you need to count a single combo to figure out what's going on here. He is repping a straight flush, not a king. He never has a king here at all. The real issue is whether we think at least 2/3's of his range is FSDR's, which is basically unknowable as a combo counting exercise because we don't know WHAT he would FSDR with here. Sets? Straight flush draws? 2 pair? (Indeed, I didn't know before this hand played out that he even HAD a FSDR range in this situation. As I said, if you want to criticize my play, THAT'S the place to go.)

[DougL]

sorry, this is wrong

[lawdude]

Originally Posted by A_Schupick

Ksxx has 13 combos. We will take out KsAx-KsJx thus giving us 13-4 = 9 combos of k-high flush.

Let's say he only raises flop with a pair or overcard: KsTx/Ks9x/Ks7x/Ks4x which is 4 combos.

He is also capable of have Ks8s which is 1 more combo as well as K5ss/K6ss/K3ss/K2ss/KTss which is 5 more combos. So 6 total combos of made flush on flop.

This gives him a possible 10 combos going to the turn.

So we only need him to 3! with 50% of those combos to make it break even. Further, if by your approximation he folds all of those combos to a 4! then i think it would be profitable, but i don't think that's true anyway.

You keep talking about this like it should be treated as a HU thing (at least what i was able to gather) so considering that your range is really wide and Jsxx and Qsxx should be in your SB complete range. Remember also, you don't have the full compliment of Asxx hands, because you would raise some, so really, your range i think is much more diluted than you think it is.

Now, if you want to talk about this and stop pretending like you are so much better than everyone else, then awesome, but if you are hell-bent on being "holier than thou" with this conversation i suppose I will sotp with this post. Your choice.

Schupick, he's a very good player. He's raising KsTs pre-flop, and he's also not raising KsTc on this flop even if he doesn't raise it pre-flop (and he may be).

I don't bet the flop in the small blind into 6 players with a bare jack high or queen high flush draw in a limped pot. If you wanted to give me a flush that isn't ace high that I would x/r on this turn and that a king of spades beats, MAYBE I would do it with Qs9x. That's the only one. Really, I always have an ace or a pair-turned bluff here. I think there's a huge "worse hands fold better hands call" problem here with x/r'ing a weaker flush.

I am not being holier than thou. I appreciate you trying to bring some actual analysis that is slightly better than "he might have a king". He doesn't have one, but at least this post is an improvement.

You still, however, are making a big mistake. You are not discounting the kings. You are assuming that:

1. He is 100 percent likely to 3-bet a king.

And:

2. He is 0 or close to 0 percent likely to fold a king if we represent an ace.

This is what I mean by wishful thinking. You are stuck on the idea that he must have a king, even though he's not representing one. Because that's the hand you WANT him to have.

Discount the possibility of a king realistically-- 50 percent for the fact that he should realize I have an ace a lot of the time and he is at best WA/WB, and another 50 percent for the fact that he may fold the king to another raise, and you have 3.5 combinations of kings, which is not enough for another value bet.

(And as I said, I'm quite a bit more certain of this. He doesn't have a king at all.)

[lawdude]

By the way, to move this in a more productive direction, THIS is where the combo counting could have been more interesting:

The real issue is whether we think at least 2/3's of his range is FSDR's, which is basically unknowable as a combo counting exercise because we don't know WHAT he would FSDR with here. Sets? Straight flush draws? 2 pair? (Indeed, I didn't know before this hand played out that he even HAD a FSDR range in this situation. As I said, if you want to criticize my play, THAT'S the place to go.)

If I had some idea of what he might make a FSDR with, I could have definitely 4-bet, as those combinations quickly add up if we include the sets and all the potential SF draws. If you want to argue this was a combo counting exercise, that's where the combo counting action actually was, and that's where my error was in the hand.

[Munga30]

Well at least you're coming around to the idea of checking the flop. So you got that going for you...

[Nick C]

IMO the turn checkraise combined with the flop action represents the ace-high flush pretty strongly, and, as a result, 4-betting the turn would be reckless.

I'm not sure what Villain hoped to accomplish with the turn 3-bet. Was he really hoping to fold out the ace of spades? If so, that seems very optimistic on his part. Does anyone ever actually fold the ace of spades in a HU limit hold'em pot here?

Possibly the turn 3-bet was a bit of over-exuberance and Villain changed his mind about his hand strength by the time the river action was taking place?

[lawdude]

Originally Posted by Nick C

IMO the turn checkraise combined with the flop action represents the ace-high flush pretty strongly, and, as a result, 4-betting the turn would be reckless.

I'm not sure what Villain hoped to accomplish with the turn 3-bet. Was he really hoping to fold out the ace of spades? If so, that seems very optimistic on his part. Does anyone ever actually fold the ace of spades in a HU limit hold'em pot here?

Possibly the turn 3-bet was a bit of over-exuberance and Villain changed his mind about his hand strength by the time the river action was taking place?

I still think it has to be a FSDR, but if it isn't one, this is the most plausible alternative possibility.

[nyrugby]

If the player to your left was the only tough spot at the table and capable of out playing you, did you consider requesting a seat/table change?