6/12 Oaks

Folds to me in HJ. CO telegraphs a fold. I am running terrible. (Folding orbit after orbit, raising big hands that are whiffing multiway and forced to c/c-c/f.)

I open Q4, BTN flats, blinds call.

Reads on BTN: tighter than average; woman. Don't really remember much else (pays off too much like everyone else imo). Raises on big streets mean business. She does bluff occassionally when she has the betting lead, and does do things vaguely in my memory that I'd consider to be a little tricky/nonstandard. I think her opinion of me is that I'm aggressive.

Flop: QJ5 Pot~7sb
I bet, BTN calls, blinds fold.

Turn: 8
I bet, BTN calls.

River: 3
I bet, BTN raises, I 3!, BTN 4!'s and gives speech (if I lose I go home), I fold.

1. Rate: b/c, b/3b/f, b/3b/c
2. How bad is pre?
3. Kind of trivial but wanted to check; we still call with KcTc?

My thoughts:

Mods, please move to small stakes limit. My bad.

fyp

I'm pretty sure just the single combo of 56 means you can't fold getting 12:1.

I am not a limit player obviously, but I did fling poo once. I would rate b/3b/c > b/c > b/3b/f. PF is probably bad, but I don't really know. Is Q4s an open in the CO with a tightish button? Maybe it is. What range are you putting your opponent on where KT is a call but this hand is a fold? I don't know if you can create a reasonable one where this is true.

I'm pretty sure limit poker is just about getting as much money in as possible with strong hands, not making any kind of heroic laydowns since you're always going to be getting sick odds after serious action. You need to learn about the Fur Coat Dilemma.

I'm very much familiar with the fur coat dilemma.

This concept is somewhat misunderstood at times, IMO. Mathematically, I'm getting 13.5:1, which means I need to be good 7% of the time. Lets assume, for argument's sake, that I actually AM good 10% of the time. I'm not actually losing a "fur coat"; it's more like the right pocket at most.

If I 3bet, planning to call a 4!, I'm going to be wasting a lot of bets to her K-hi and A-hi flushes. I think that leans me towards a bet/call.

Think the 3-bet isn't great on river - you clearly know that in hindsight (and it's MUCH easier in hindsight isn't it!!); she is never 3-betting you with a hand you beat.

Call the 3-bet (you have no choice really)... - I play rest of the hand the same way; don't think pre is that spewy but probably not optimal...once you hit top pair rest is find I would say..

Fold pre- AINEC. Indeed, the cold call demonstrates this. Your preflop strategy is costing you moooooooooo-ney. And NEVER open up your range because of card death. Card death is a discipline issue. You HAVE to just sit there and fold, for hours if necessary.

Just call the river cap. In limit, we pay off our coolers heads up.

pre, the reads you have are favorable but the missing bb read dominates your decision. fold.

You are effectively sitting in the CO with a tight BTN and a foldy BB? Of course you raise. If you see an accurate folding tell from the CO, this is an easy spot to pick up the pot. No idea why anyone would say fold this, other than the fact that your steal failed.

River is nuts. You have the 2nd nut hand here, and this is a LHE table. 3 betting to fold to a cap seems bad.

OK, you've corrected all of us on the fur coat thing. Stop building huge pots in a limit game to fold for one bet on the river. The raise you made was good and for value and then you fold in a huge pot for one more? That can't be right.

@Dougl & lawdude:

I know online, Q4s would be near the bottom of opening range from CO with tightish BTN. To clarify, I'm not raising this because I'm card dead, but because I thought (unsuredly) that it would be profitable. I think the biggest problem is that the rake may make it a fold preflop.

Dougl - we have the third nuts. Second nuts might be a trivial call. 3rd nuts....maybe also a call? I bet, she raised, I 3bet, she capped and gave me a speech...

I mean, I get the principle that I need to be calling 1 bet to win 13 or 14 quite liberally because of the math, but how often do you think I'm good here with the 3rd nuts and this situation?

Let's say that she only doesn't have you beaten 4% of the time, how big a mistake is calling? People just go nuts too often to 3 bet intending to fold w/o more of a read that you can reasonably communicate in a hand in a thread. People misread their hands sometimes. Maybe she put you on a set and waited for the river with a straight. Maybe she binked trip 3's and though you had AA. You just see people proudly table hands that aren't the nuts sometimes. That sometimes isn't very often to make this call profitable. No doubt you folded and she courtesy showed A5 or KT.

The problem I have is that she could be capping for value with a hand worse than yours. She doesn't think you have a Q high flush. She's so likely a horrible hand reader. She thinks her hand is best. That just isn't always a better hand than yours.

I suppose that we should take the reads at face value, but reading between the lines I see a frustrated card dead OP who decided that he wanted to raise Q4 suited rather than keep folding. Maybe I am wrong, but why even mention his card death if this was just exploiting tight players (who weren't so tight here)?

I'd have probably just called the raise.

fold pre, rake aside. from what i see in your posts you are consistently too laggy/spewy.

either bet/call or bet/3bet/call are better lines on the river than bet/3bet/fold

IMO the 3bet/fold line doesn't have much of a place at 6/12. If you are thinking about taking that line, why not just call the raise? In any case, like you said, she doesn't put you on a bd flush, so who knows what flush she also backed into, but it's quite possibly lower than yours. If she can ever do this with a rivered set or anything less than a huge flush, folding seems pretty bad.

If btn has Kt wouldn't you expect a raise on the turn, in position with a monstrous draw..?

Still not convinced I would have 3 bet river - but certainly wouldn't fold

this

Fold pre if you're going to bet/3-bet/fold to a woman you describe as tight and whose big street raises mean business.

IMR.

Raising has merit if you can limit your RIO and maximize your IO, both in terms of immediate value and metagame value. (Because most people don't understand position, if you show up with Q4s after opening in LP, people assume you open Q4s UTG.)

But it's probably EV- if you're going to spew.

PRE: Given how you are running at the time, not sure that getting frisky with Q4s is advisable. Your image just isn't going to encourage people to fold. Just the opposite, it might encourage them to see a flop against the guy who never has a hand.

RIVER: Don't 3 if you cannot call a 4. You said that she's tighter than your typical villain. which should weed a lot of the crappy ATS out of her range. Probably leaving her with a higher % of Axs/Kxs. I don't think a Q-hi flush is strong enough to 3-bet. K-hi, sure. Q-hi, no.

One of my new hobbies is telegraphing folds before I look at my cards when people to my right change their play accordingly.

And even if your read is reliable, you should probably fold in cutoff anyways

For the majority of villains who play small stakes, the given off folding tell would be the #1 most reliable tell you can find. If you knew know other tell to look for, you'd still be a tell-reading genius and get most of the value.

Even though I think OP should have folded this (and suspect that this raise had more to do with his card death / impatience than with any reads at the table), I do agree with DougL that you should basically always check to your left pre-flop in a live game. Bored villains let you know they are folding or raising all the time.

If you find someone who does the reverse tell, fine, don't get fooled. But most of the time the tell is reliable.

I agree with you that you should pay attention, and if people are holding their cards over the muck when it's your turn, you should definetly be use this information.

But lately I've seen lots of players that take extra time to act when it's their turn so people behind them telegraph their actions. This is wrong and super annoying

Agree that it is super bad, and they're costing themselves money in lost hands.

Yeah, I've seen that too.

More generally, maybe it's just a perception, but I think that limit games are playing a little bit slower than when I started playing. More Hollywooding, more staredowns to get meaningless "reads", more insisting on the order of showdown (I understand that sometimes players have reasons why they do this, but I am talking about people who absolutely know their hands are good and wait for people to show or muck hands that obviously aren't good and which aren't going to convey additional information), more actual slowrolling, more silliness with betting motions such as splashing the pot or making confusing motions that the rest of the table has to figure out, etc. I think some of the bad stuff from no limit has started to leak back over into our game.

At any rate, yeah, check quickly to your left and then act.