Quote:
Originally Posted by HaoYunPoker
I played 15/30 and 20/40 for several months and am new to this forum.
Here is a hand I played yesterday and I am wondering how you guys would play this hand:
Hero in SB with AA.
UTG + 2 calls
UTG + 3 calls
CO raises
Hero reraises
BB, UTG+2, UTG+3 cold calls, CO calls.
Flop: J102
Hero bets, BB folds, UTG+2 calls, UTG+3 calls, CO calls.
Turn: 6
Hero bets, UTG+2 calls, others fold
River: 10
Hero checks, UTG+2 tanks for 3 seconds and bets, Hero calls
UTG+2 had 10Q
I am wondering if you guys will play this differently. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.
First, welcome to the forum. I hope you get at least as much out of reading and posting here as I have.
Secondly, as other people pointed out, don't include the results when you post a hand. Why not? Because it will affect the character of the responses you get. People will (consciously or otherwise) respond in a way to be more right in the context of the actual result, rather than what might have been best in the situation.
Up through the turn you played the hand in a standard manner. It is only at the river where things get really interesting.
Should you check or bet? If you bet, should you call a raise or fold to it? If you check, are you folding to a bet, calling, or raising?
I lean towards betting in this spot, and then folding. Why bet? Because in the games in which I play my opponents have a tendency to freeze up on the river, to bet only their very best hands, or to sometimes bluff. (We say that when a bet represents the very strongest hands or the very weakest that that bettor's
range [the set of hands they might be playing given the action of the hand from its start to the present point] is
polarized.) At the same time, players are likely to call our with hands with at least some showdown value. They will be calling with worse hands than our AA a lot more often than they will be betting them if checked to, and so we get an additional bet out of them when our hand is good that we otherwise wouldn't have. Why fold to a raise? Because most (not all, but most) of the people I play against only raise for value, because they expect that raise to get called, just as I generally expect my river raises to get called by the typical players in my game. So we save a bet by folding when a better hand than ours raises.
The decision to bet/fold is very dependent on your understanding of your opponent and the general game culture in which you are playing. When people are liable to bet a hand like AJ here when you check or are liable to have a lot of bluffs in their range, then by all means check and call. If this villain is capable of bluff-raising on the river, then you probably ought to bet/call.
I hope this is helpful, and illuminates some of the other responses you have gotten.