Monday, September 13, 2010

Bluffing with showdown value

I was reading a thread tonight about turning top 2 pair into a bluff on a 4 flush board on the river. Interesting stuff.

I almost never bluff on the river, so I was trying to come up with some situations where it might be useful. Then tonight, one came up.

Cows play poker with cow chips
HEM/Full Tilt NL Hold'em $0.05/$0.10 - 9 players

Button: $4.00
SB: $19.57
BB: $12.72 (Hero)
UTG: $6.98
UTG+1: $22.24
MP: $3.71
MP2: $7.90
HJ: $12.07 3 hands on HJ. 67/0.
CO: $20.66

Preflop: ($0.15) Hero is BB with (9 players)
4 folds, HJ calls $0.10, CO calls $0.10, Button folds, SB calls $0.05, Hero checks

Flop: ($0.40) (4 players)
SB checks, Hero checks, HJ bets $0.10, 2 folds, Hero calls $0.10
5:1 odds with second pair? Yes please. Why so weak? Did he flop the straight?

Turn: ($0.60) (2 players)
Hero checks, HJ checks
Could have lead out here, thinking villain weak with his pansy-ass bet.

River: ($0.60) (2 players)
Hero checks, HJ bets $0.10,
Another pansy-ass bet. This guy's afraid of queens, afraid of this king, and now he's afraid of a jack, too. Hey, guess what? Now I have a jack.

Hero raises to $0.60, HJ folds

Hero won $0.75

No big whoop - I won 7.5 blinds with my river bluff, and there was a chance I might have won it anyway. But I was able to try something new out in my game in a cheap, unraised pot.

In other news, more success in the full ring game. My biggest pot won was a set over set, standard stack won.

Big Hand #2 was queens again, isolating a limper. I raised, he shoved. This smelled fishy, but the raiser had less than half a stack - 40 big blinds. I'm not folding pocket queens preflop for 40 big blinds. He had aces, and I hit a queen on the turn to send him outta here. Huzzah!

Hand #3 was interesting - a raise under the gun, then two callers. I had pocket queens. I squeezed, then the original raiser shoved for 60 total big blinds. The callers folded and I wondered if he had aces also. I didn't have enough hands on him to decide. I was flying kind of blind, but decided there was dead money in the pot, so if he had AK I had to fight for it. I called. He had ace-jack suited. (bleah). My queens held up.

That's why it's hard to fold queens preflop at NL10. Because people get their stacks in with ace-jack suited.

1 comment:

The Poker Meister said...

Gotta agree with you. 10NL was the hardest level. 25NL starts to normalize out in terms of relative PF hand strength. People start respecting the amount of money at stake.