My hunch is the way i played the hand was pretty awful but i'd like to know if it was awful in all spots or if i was correct in places and wrong in others. Hand went down like this:

i'm the effective stack with 7.88

blinds are .1 .2 cut off limps, i limp on the button with j8off.

sb completes bb raises to .90

i know nothing about the table other than sb is pretty sticky. cuttoff folds and i call (cringe) and sb calls

flop comes 822 rainbow and is 2.90

bb cbets 1.55

i jam over the top with 7.88 stack

sb folds

bb calls and turns over 99


of course I rivered the 8 which set him off into super mega monkey tilt but the only thing i can justify my jam with is that i was thinking he's gotta be showing up with or folding ak here at least a third of the time surely.

Roast my play my fellow poker enthusiasts because i need to hear this.

Thanks in advance for the replies

Hey, first off, why no top off? If you were down to like $4 or less, this would be okay (you could play jam or fold), but 39 bb is an awkward stack. You might as well top off. If you aren't comfortable topping off, I'd suggest playing lower.

Secondly, limping J8o is a poor play. If you do the simulations out (you can for free at http://propokertools.com/simulations), you'd see that J8o is a very bad hand preflop. If you're going to play this hand, you'd be best off raising it and playing like you have a good hand.

As played, you don't want to be calling a raise with this. Even in position. You could easily flop a dominated hand and lose a lot of money, and there's not a lot of upside.

As played, going all in on the flop is also a bad play. This is a spaz, as Lex Veldhuis may say, because what hands are you making money against on this board? AK, AQ, AJ, AT, KQ, KJ, QJ, that sort of thing. What happens when you make this shove? They all fold. So you get all in with hands crushing you.

yeah i was down to my last bb's. i usually keep my stack at around 100bb

the point of the jam was to get the folds though so i can scoop the dead money in the middle when he has the hands you mentioned

Your opponent shouldn't be furious with you. He is right to be upset that he lost, but he should be happy that he got you to stack off with only 5 outs. That is what winning poker is about - it is about making good decisions and getting it in as a major favorite.

Your play throughout the hand was the opposite. You continually shoveled money in with a hand that was way behind. Sometimes you win when you do that. That is what keeps people playing, and often keeps them playing badly. The reason you shoved on the flop was because you thought you were ahead. But you also know that if you were ahead you weren't getting called, so you were not betting a leading hand for value, you were betting it hoping that worse hands would fold, and knowing that better hands would call.

You got what you would expect - a better hand called. Then you got lucky. You know your play was bad, and you know you got lucky. That is fine. I'm pretty sure everybody here has made a bad play and gotten lucky. Just don't try to call it a good play just because you got lucky. I'm sure that if you hadn't hit the 8 you wouldn't be coming on here to ask if you made a good play, because you would know that you didn't.

That's the wrong way to think about it.

You're trying to feign weakness with a call, so that if, say, he has A3 and the turn is a 4, he goes "well I have a gutter now" and rams the rest in, and you get to call off with 84% equity.

If you're trying to get folds, why would you choose this hand? Why not raise him here w/ T9? Then you actually win when you don't have the best hand.

I repeat this many, many times (and there's going to be exceptions), but in general, there's two reasons to be aggressive: Get a better hand to fold and get a worse hand to call. As a beginner, if your bet or raise doesn't serve either of these purposes, then you shouldn't bet or raise.

+1. A lot of the times when people make these spazzes, they just end up winning the pot and never questioning their play. Or they don't make these spazzes and the dude with AQ hits a queen and wins the pot, and they feel like a fish.

But this hand shows exactly what happens when you have a worst case scenario for the spaz. We shove it in against a hand we're in awful shape against (and have no fold equity against, nor should we have fold equity against it). We ensure that we can never get turn value out of hands like AK or 66 that may actually be compelled to check call on a turn 5. And we ensure that when JT turns a 7, it doesn't decide to run a bluff that we can call off fading just 7 cards.

So yeah, this raise is horrible. You'll make more against his weak hands by keeping them in and risking that they get there (but continue to bluff otherwise) and lose less against his value by keeping the pot small.

And this is bad for 40 bb poker. Imagine what a catastrophic mistake you could make at 100 bb poker playing like this.

I respect your answers and point of view but I honestly think you’re possibly wrong but specifically only on the shove part.

Against his 2bet range on a flop like this I’m probably about at worst a 2-1 chance. My jam was close enough to a pot sized bet so it’s pretty break evenish on the super conservative side of things. Any player with half a brain knows you apply a range of hands to gather equity info and never a specific hand. Thoughts?

What I’m implying is I know I’ve crashed my car into a tree with the preflop decision but given the choice of completely abandoning it (folding) I have an opportunity to repair some of the damage. The latter is more optimal given the unfortunate circumstances.

With the 40BB stack you probably have to go with it postflop, but on a board where you are either way ahead or way behind most of the time, raising is usually worse than calling.

That doesn’t mean that shoving isn’t +EV but you don’t want to just make a +EV play but the play that maximizes your EV.

Fold pre.

As played, after your overlimp the BB raise was way too small so you can call. As suggested though, play 100bb deep. Not sure what your plan is putting in 4.5bb at 40 bb deep.

Postflop I would be in call mode with the intent to fold a second barrel on the turn that would effectively commit me. Perhaps that is too conservative but I do not think I am ahead often enough here.

Paying another 3.5 big blinds that represent almost 10% of your stack, without even closing the action is arguably a significantly bigger mistake than committing 1 big blind in the first place.

Fold pre (or raise, I guess...would be better than limping), fold to iso, post is fine unless bb is passive. Most of the replies burning you for the postflop play don't understand shallow poker well, and while calling post is a consideration just sticking it in is going to be fine too if bb isn't a nit.

If bb is a nit, probably call flop fold turn.

Actually doing the math out (assuming a 100% cbet range that's overcard heavy), shoving isn't that much worse than calling. Of course, shoving deprives us of turn and river play (both good for us as the IP player who will have more strongish hands in our range after calling flop than the OOP player betting it). Shoving may actually be the play if we were like 25 bb deep.

HOWEVER, at 40 bb deep, shoving can only be good if our opponent has like JTs in their range and cbets this flop at this sizing 100%. Both strong assumptions. If suddenly he's only bluffing the bottom of his range (many of these hands containing a jack) and value betting every hand that beats us, then our shove is total spew.

Just because a play "makes us money" doesn't make it the best play. You know what's for sure a +EV play? Open shoving AA 100 bb deep.

Fold pre, jam is bad.

LOL @ 'dude was furious'. Fk him. People being annoyed about you making bad decisions is utterly unimportant.