One hand from today's session worth posting...
Hero image: particularly tight, not calling a lot of open raises at all, mainly opening around once an orbit, maybe even less, just due to the large amount of preflop openings and no real room to get any hands in, as far as being able to be the first to open. For a 1-2 game at 10 a.m., there was a lot of action, and found myself staying tighter with my preflop selection, and just waiting it out...since the post flop play was atrocious as far as hand strength vs pot size. Overall, my image was seen as tight.
I moved seats into a position where I could get the aggressive players on my right, but one of them moved two seats to my left and a newer player took the seat four seats behind me. So, before the hand, the dynamic I wanted to create back fired, but not for the hand I am about to explain.
I had 4h4s out of the small blind and the player UTG was the most aggressive player at the table, constantly opening to $15 since he sat down, but after noticing he only got a little bit of action, and sometimes none, he started to just do $10, but no one was really folding to him either.
UTG raises to $10, CO, button, SB (Hero) and BB all call. The effective stack was the BB with $145 behind to the flop, but UTG and I had the most with about $450 each at this point.
FLOP: J94 rain
I knew the UTG player would Cbet here and the BB was definitely a call station, but much to my surprise when I checked, the BB looked at his cards, went to bet, just the smallest flinch, and then just motioned to check. The UTG player made it $18, the button called, and I felt the BB might re-raise here so I just flatted the $18. I had already witnessed the BB player call off $115 on a board of 853 all diamonds with Jd3h, into a pot of only $45, so I knew he definitely had some gamble in him. Also, while I do know a lot of the morning players at my local casino, I did not know him, but a lot of the other players were all happy when he showed up, saying things like they hope he gets in for a thousand, and crap like that. So far, he was not letting them or me down: he re-raised to $40 and both players ahead of me just flatted.
I considered flatting, knowing the BB would likely just jam the turn for around $100 at this point, and the others might put some money in bad with hands like TPTK or even just any KJ or QJ hand. There would not be a lot of draws hitting after the turn based on the board, except maybe QT or T8 (atrocious, but possible in 1-2, especially this session after only an hour), and I felt that I needed to get value from my hand right then and there. So, I raised another $115 on top, the BB immediately went all-in for his $100ish stack and the UTG player tanked for two minutes, said he had AJ and folded, and the button quickly folded...board was clean and I scopped versus J8os, lol.
My thoughts on this hand are pretty simple: I could have made a flat here after it went to $40, then had the BB bet something like $45 on the turn, and made more from the other two players. I probably made a fast decision rather than thinking about hands I could have extracted more value from by just flatting and waiting. Some will argue I actually did the right thing, some won't, but it was a spot where I think I could have extracted more chips, at least from the UTG player, because he did have a strong enough holding to continue against smaller bets, and while I did put him on a hand like that, possibly, I also knew with the frequency of his opening, in any position, his range was pretty wide and it was hard to just narrow him down to TPTK or a jack with any decent kicker in this spot. Sure, seems elementary, and maybe I just need to keep the types of lines I did in this hand, but it posed something to think about.
Thoughts are appreciated, but this PC&G is not me really asking for it either...
B