Monday, March 16, 2009

fewer tournies lately, still cranking away though...

Illness (a yucky cold) and some other stuff have kept me off the tables consistently this past weekend, but I've been able to squeeze a few in here and there. I've played one per day the last three days - with 2 second place finishes to show for it. I had to get lucky tonight and hit the old dominated suckout (AT him, A3 me) to continue. Hell, I was there just yesterday (see previous post), so I don't feel too bad for the guy.

I also had the unique distinction of folding AK twice in this tourney. Ok, the first was an accident - I meant to click on the window above the
tourney window to move it out of the way, and just as I was clicking the fold button appeared under my mouse. That hurts.

The second time was intentional, and I'm not sure at all that it was a good play. There was a maniac-type at the table, playing about half the hands, raising with half of those. He limped in and a fairly decent player at the table raised to 5x right after him. This was the second time he had done this, and I had trouble putting him on a range. His stats were reasonable - 20/8, so I had him on some type of hand. My first guess was that he either had a monster or a decent pair and I folded AKo.

Afterward, however, I thought some more about how I sometimes raise to isolate limpers, and my range opens up wider since the goal is to get into t
he pot vs. the limper with a better hand than he has. I might raise with KQ, for example, or AT, where I might call with those same hands in an unopened pot (in earlier positions, and not often, hopefully). The 5x bothered me a bit - did that mean "strong means strong", or did it mean "strong means weak"?

The last factor was my stack size - I had 1205, and the isolater's raise was 250. I basically had to shove or fold, I felt, and I didn't feel like I had to "guess" if he had a monster or not with 24 BB remaining in my stack. So I folded. The limper folded and I never got to see what he had.

Last note - I mention Sharkscope very often in my posts - I use it to select tables that appear to hold weak players, and of course to avoid joining tables with strong players. Then, after the tourney starts, I record each player's important sharkscope stats so that they appear in my HUD, and I also use the notes coloring feature of Full Tilt to color each player based on their skill level. I have two colors for bad (medium bad or real bad), two for good, and one for "small sample size, not sure". The criteria I use is fairly consistent but not set in stone - I might mark a player as "real bad" even if he only has a 100 tourneys played, if his average ROI is utterly abysmal.

Anyway, I saw something tonight I've never seen before - check out the table rating in the $20 tourney in the screenshot below. The 5 sharks mean that this table has lots and lots of good players on it. I've seen a few "triple icon" ratings (fishy for bad, shark for good), but 5 is my own record.

I didn't join this table.

1 comment:

Memphis MOJO said...

if folding AK to a 5X raise is a mistake,it;s only a small one, and if it;s a mistake, it could be a huge one. I agree with fold 4 what it;s worth. /sorry about ; for apostrophe, I;m on a cell phone/