I would like to point out a super obvious observation concerning the J9 preflop call debate.

If you are part.of the crowd arguing that the river is NOT a super obvious snap fold and/or arguing that the river is a call and rationalizing that V can actually show up here with AA or a bluff enough times to justify a call...

Then you are not good enough to play/call J9 preflop given the pf action...

If your argument for calling preflop w crap is "well sometimes you can flop the nuts..." Then you aren't good enough to call preflop w crap.

Of course I'm sure you think you are.

P.s. I apologize for coming off as a condescending prick, but some of the responses in this thread are so terribad that I feel I have to slap you out of your stupor ala Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmares style...

Regarding preflop ranges, let me throw this out there for those calling others "weak nits":

I play a VERY loose style, and I am ABSOLUTELY NEVER calling a raise from UTG with J9s, much less J9o from the HJ. Hell, I am probably folding KQo, and AJo for that matter. ESPECIALLY when its an 11 dollar raise. Calling a 16 dollar raise would be more justified, because at least it will probably leave you in a HU pot.

"I call here from the HiJack expecting that no one will overcall, leaving me with position" WTF? Where do you play 1/2, the retirement home?

I expect 90% of the time you will be playing this hand 4+ handed, and will completely airball the flop and throw away 11 dollars pretty regularly.


here is a lesson in LAG preflop poker. Position. Initiative. Dead money. more often than not he has none of the above, he lucked into one of the three. If this is how you play LAG poker, go back to being a nit.

Agree with this.

I think players being delusional about skill level is more of a justification for calling poor holdings pre-flop than being deep.

Position is another one

Example:

nitty abc okay player raises in MP folds to hero on the button.

Sample hero thought process:
"Okay, his range is top 5% and I've got 100BBs." "I'm sure I can outplay him post-flop because I'm awesome, and I've got position!! ..so I'll call the 7x raise with 98s".

What really happens is you get a SPR of 6.5-7 in a heads up or 3-way pot with 28-29% equity. When you hit top pair your way behind 50% of the time. When you hit a flush draw your likely sticking it with little FE and ~45-50% equity.

+1 raise or fold is the strategy.

If there's a reason river is a call, it's because you tanked turn for two minutes and probably seemed weak. If my opponent in your spot tanked turn and called, I'd probably shove most all of my range in his spot, but I'm a monkey. If he's a capable player, he should be capable of shoving river there without the most nutty hands.

But then again, it's 1/2, he's in his 50s, and he's overshoving, and we don't have that great of a hand relative value-wise, so ignoring the live 'tell', it's a fold. /run-on sentence

You're good enough to hand read him for specificailly 88.

You're good enough to analyze a range and eliminate a bunch of other big holdings which experienced posters are arguing to be perfectly plausible here.

You thus knew he could have only one hand, and that he did in fact have it, and that it beat you.

You then proceeded to call anyway, for a total of 225xBB on one street, with a hand that you knew to be losing based on the above.

Please explain further. Seems like this might be a bit off. Then again, it could just be me.

Seems like a fold unless v is capable of spazzing like this with an overpair

This post encapsulates exactly what separates good winning players from donks.

Donks always know what you have yet play their hands without adjusting.

Donks always know what the correct plays are yet they consciously choose to not do them.

Donks always know exactly when they are beat and yet they still call.

And despite all that, donks are unable to see that they are donks.

In poker, I can think of no greater sin then knowing with near absolutely certainty that you are beat, crushed, dead... and yet you still call an offensive overbet...

That is unforgivable.

if they arent going to stack off lightly that means we can bluff in these spots alot easier no? if you are 350bb deep and you have AA are you going to stack without a huge 3b preflop? probably not. so if im in position i can probably blow you off your hand right? this is still lagging it up in a bigger pot

Grunch

The next time I see any one over 40 at 1/1 or 1/2 over-bet the pot after flopping a set will be the first. If he has 77 he's a might fine player indeed. When I see older players overbet the pot it's almost always because they have a big overpair and want to 'protect' their hand and don't want to be sucked out on.

I just don't see older villains playing draws that aggressively so can't really give him credit for J10 or god forbid 56.

I cant recall seeing many good TAGs overbet the pot on the flop.

If villain is an older TAG (which I actually suspect means he's just a bit of a nit) I don't expect to see 9x here, except - maybe- 9s. But the older players I see loooove to slow play trips. They'd check-raise this all day. I just don't think he has a nine here.

But the shove is bizarre. What is he putting hero on? Any straight draw got there. A back door flush draw missed and isn't calling anyway. Since Hero just called maybe he also puts hero on a high-ish pocket pair?

I don't like the shove and im a bankroll nit, so I cant say with confidence that I'd be able to call at the table - $450 is a HUGE bet at 1/2 - but I still think villain had AA KK a good portion of the time.

He doesn't have AA or KK a "good portion of the time" when the top card on the flop pairs, and the bet size is $450. He has an overpair a very minimal amount of the time at best.

Stereotyping players as "older", "recreational", a "car salesman", or even talking about how the guy is TAG is almost irrelevant here. The bottom line is really simply, people do not send in $450 on one street in 1/2 NL live without having an enormous hand. Period. All the people claiming that he can have an overpair, or a bluff, or some other hand that J9 beats, think to yourself for a second - how often in your entire life have you seen this big a 1/2 NL shove on the river with something that isn't enormous? You guys are making it sound like this is a common scenario.

As far as Villain's shove being strange because he would have to put Hero on a huge hand to make it worthwhile, well, maybe that's exactly what he's doing, he thinks Hero has a 9 or 22. Or, the opposite end of the spectrum - maybe he's giving little thought to what Hero has and he's thrilled to death about making 8's full and thinks that shoving is the best move when he hits his dream card.

Yeah it sounds odd I guess.

When he shoved, I quickly told everyone that I couldn't believe that he had filled up on me on the river. I was fairly sure that I was ahead on the turn. I've been running rediculously bad lately and that was the second time someone had rivered a big hand on me that night. I folded the first one. I probably wouldn't call had I not been completely pissed. I mean come on, the guy makes a big preflop bet, overbets the flop, and bets big on the turn. He's basically setting fire to his money and then bam, ****ing hits a two outter.

I knew that 88 was the only hand he could have that beat me out of the possible hands that beat me.

When I went in the tank and went over his line, JJ+ is what I came out with. I chose to call based on the way he played the hand, and to ignore my read. As I said earlier I'm getting better at trusting my reads, but at the time, I just believed he played the hand like he had an overpair.

I have no intention of posting to this thread again. This was a good thread until I posted the results. I've got the balls to put a hand on here that I played terribly so that others can benefit and now I have some assclown getting on here just to call me a donk? Not to sound uppity, but I'm better than that and have other things to do. Thanks for the help guys.

Lack of discipline is a pretty common problem for LLSNL people, myself included. For some it can be tough to overcome that human instinct to not get pushed around and to see what the opponent has. I think that's a separate issue for a separate thread.

Poker is usually learned through a lot of expensive lessons like these. I've had my fair share. The important thing is that I believe the OP has learned where he went wrong, and is less likely to make the mistake in the future.

lol...this reminds me of a Lee Trevino story....

He's playing a fun round of golf with a weekend duffer who hits his drive int the treeline. When they get to the duffer's ball, he decides he's going to try and hit the ball through a very narrow opening towards the green, instead of hitting safely back into the fairway.

Trevino just shakes his head and says, "If you could hit that kind of shot you wouldn't be in the woods in the first place."

grunching here.

V didn't make this river bet without a mega hand that beats yours. A9, 77, 88 or something like that.

This is 1/2...guys betting $450 into $200 have the nuts 99.99% of the time. Even drunk guys have the nuts 99.98% of the time here.

Spew on river makes 88 feel most likely. Otherwise he'd have hit you harder earlier.

You have zero idea what a good TAG is if you seriously think V has AA KK a good portion of the time here. Similarly, no casual or recreational player with half a brain is shoving this river with AA or KK.

Your assessement has zero basis in anything resembling reality.

THere only two types of players who shove river in this spot with a hand J9 beats.

#1 A super drooler aggro drunk mega idiot who just finished a line of cocaine
#2 A super aggro ego-maniac bent on pulling off a sick bluff so he can impress the table because you showed him an awesome bluff and he wants to get you back...

FFS, so many in this thread just are clueless about the psychology of fish and recreational players.

The vast majority of these players don't really care what you have, they only care what they have.

When they shove like this, they aren't thinking "How can I extract max value from Hero who I think has a nine???"

No.

When they shove like this on the river they are thinking "OMGZ I haz a big F---ing hand and a boner that is threatening to burst out of my pants and knock the table over if I don't shove all my chips in right F---ing now!!!!!"

I lol'ed in a coffee shop

Lol, It's funny because it's true.

He's definitely on level one here and I'm somewhere lost in logic land where fish take lines that make sense.

I'm over 40.
I regularly play 1/2.
I overbet after turning trips if I believe that bet will get called.

I have been known to play big draws like they flopped the nuts. Making these kinds of assumptions without evidence is a big mistake.

Kind of a silly thing to say. When we are up against unknowns and are in a vacuum assumptions based on age etc are all we have and are usually better than nothing. We tweak our reads as we play more hands. It's worked just fine for me, thank you.

He really didn't know for certain he was crushed or he obviously wouldn't have called. his logic told him that he was beat, but he didn't trust his logic. Some other logic told him he had trips that were underrepped, and he chose to hopefully listen to the wrong logic. That's far different from the donk how has no idea what he is doing and just blindly calling with the worst of it.

The REAL difference between a donk and a winning player is that the donk goes "man, that guy hit a two outer against my trips- friggen cooler. Nothing I could have done about that" whereas the winning player looks back and says "was that a cooler, or could I have avoided that? If the latter, what about is situation did I get wrong, and how can I avoid this kind of bad decision in the future?"

We are ALL learning and we all make bad calls and bluffs. Hope is the bankroll killer in poker, and sometimes we all just make that terrible call because we want to win the pot and our hand looks so good to us. A lot of good folds only get made when we're playing our A game, and no one is always playing an A game.

We shouldn't chastise a player trying to figure out what he did wrong and call him a donk for a bad play when he is genuinely learning and trying to better himself. We've all been there and will likely be there again.

First off, I agree with the overall point you are trying to make. I DO want to point out that deeper stacks matter because the deeper the stacks, the more position and skill are going to come into play.

But you don't call with connectors deep for the sole reason to flop big and get it in vs AA unimproved. You call because in the right circumstances you can get them to fold a better hand by applying pressure. The value comes not just from making big hands, but also being able to wield the threat of a big stack against hands that won't be able to withstand the pressure.

But it takes skill and knowing your opponents to be able to take advantage of deep stacks and position with these kinds of hands. If you are calling for implied odds when you flop gin, you are making optimistic calls without odds. If you are prepared to make moves on some boards and have good control over your opponents, the these calls are ok and +ev.

Hero did not play this in a way that convinces me his skill makes the pre flop call +ev. However, sometimes making -ev calls pre is the price of admission to learning how to play the spots well enough to make future calls +ev, so I don't hate it, as long as hero is willing to learn.

Well put, Jeff76, a much needed comment. This thread has gotten a little of hand, IMO. By reading between the lines, you've added a bit of sanity.

Yes, DjTJO, Jeff has posted a well thought out response, and you're thinking it's pushed your logic in the right direction. Now it's time for you to post that other hand where you called an UTG raise with 8,2o and you flopped a boat and stacked him, so you can justify calling behind with that hand because "Sometimes it's a good play and you can win".

"The next time I see any one over 40 at 1/1 or 1/2 over-bet the pot after flopping a set will be the first"

"When I see older players overbet the pot it's almost always because they have a big overpair and want to 'protect' their hand and don't want to be sucked out on".

"I just don't see older villains playing draws that aggressively..."

Your words there, Dragon. I don't see word one in that previous post that mentioned anything about "unknowns". These are absolute statements, and I seriously question if you're bothering to pay attention.

It's a serious mistake, and I suspect that a lot of these early-to-mid twenties Internet smart-@5535 make it. I'm sure you know the type: hoodies, ear buds, sunglasses, throwing around all the latest buzzwords as liberally as they throw off chips, share your opinion. I've known about it for quite awhile now, and sometimes play the "old nit". Then I over bet the pot to "protect" that "over pair", and felt 'em when I show 'em that nut straight or flush I couldn't possibly have because old nits don't push big draws aggressively.

Now, do you see me posting about how stupid and gullible these young whippersnappers are? Even if I have yet to meet one wearing The Uniform who didn't talk much better poker than he ever played, and it's been months since I saw one leave with more chips than he had upon arrival. I don't because I don't make assumptions based on appearance.

But that's just me being silly. Please ignore.