Fascinating hand

I posted this one at 2+2 and feel the need to post it here. Played a crazy hand at a deep-stacked NL200 table.

Villain is a good regular player, a pro, who I have at about 14/11 and who is capable of impressive aggression at times, although his overall AF isn't that ridiculous.

Effective stacks are $400.

I raise from MP2 with Ad Kd, making it $7 to go, and villain cold-calls me from the button. Everyone else folds.

Flop comes Qc 9c 5s.

That's a good enough board for a cbet, so I fire out $13 into the $17 pot, pretty standard. Villain raises me to $46.

Ordinarily that would be the end of the hand, except that I had a read that this villain was feeling exceptionally frisky today, based on some of his play. He's going to be capable of raising any draws, of course, but also I felt, pretty much any pocket pair and quite a few weak queens to "figure out where he's at".

So I reraise him up to $105. Probably pretty spewy in hindsight but with the 200bb stacks to play with, I felt like I had a lot of wiggle room as far as how hard I could push. The bluff felt justified because any drawing hand would have to feel the pressure of the implied turn bet to go along with it.

Villain calls. Well, crap, that didn't work.

Turn is the 2s, putting the 2nd flush draw out there. I check. Villain checks back.

Well isn't that interesting. I began to wrack my brain for the range of hands that villain would be checking behind on the turn, and it was very narrow - pretty much limited to draws and MAYBE the occasional weak Queen, on a hand like QKs, that just flat out didn't believe me on the flop and was now praying for a cheap showdown.

The turn paired the 9 on the board, the 9s. It felt pretty safe, even though it put the backdoor flush out there it felt like he would have bet Ts Js, which is the only spade flush hand I could have seen him having.

Now I've got a bit of a predicament. My turn check belied my weakness, but so did his; there's NO WAY he's checking back that turn with a strong made hand like a set. Too many draws - he knows that TJs is in my own opening range from MP2 and knows that I'm not the sort of FPS player that would go for a suicidal turn C/R. At the same time, I know the same of him. Each of us knows that each other's range is pretty weak, and yet, there's $227 in the pot up for grabs.

I considered a $105 or so bet, working it as a blocking bluff, which should generally be enough to push him off TJs. Yes I know I'm ahead of TJs, but the purpose is still to push him off of it because I'm in a bit of a pickle: I can't call a shove. I'm not that good; I'd adjust my read and second-guess the information from his turn-check if he came over the top of me. At the same time this player is perfectly capable of coming over the top of a weakish river bet with air, given the weakness I've shown myself. Maybe a master could bet/call, but if I bet, I'm folding to a raise.

So instead I chose to shove, an overbet of $288 into the $227 pot. I like this play best, I'm convinced, because:

- It's no worse against drawing hands that villain has decided not to put another cent into the pot with - it wins me what is in the pot without having to show down my flop bluff

- It has the benefit of pushing him off of almost any single pair hand; this particular player doesn't really have the balls to call off 140bb with a hand like TP2K or a pair below TP. His read on me isn't going to be THAT strong despite the flop bet

- It absolutely prevents him from bluffing me off the hand himself.

It felt like a 90% valuebet 10% bluff, maybe getting him off a weakish queen but certainly getting him off of 100% of what he could realistically be holding.

In this case it worked. Villain folded, and later confirmed on 2+2 that the best hand did in fact win. Which means he either had TJ and/or clubs.

Interesting hand din a very nice day yesterday: ~$1150+. My monthly graph looks a lot better now, not that it was bad before.

The past few months

I'll admit it, I was worried. Even with my $12k score in the beginning of December making it my best month ever in terms of pure money won, the month was overall very frustrating and almost had me thinking about what I was going to do if and when the money started running out. My bankroll after the score was up around $30k - by far its highest point ever, and after withdrawing $4k to handle some expenses, I felt like I was in great shape overall.

Then the wheels came off. Here's my graph of December, up to and including the first few days of January.



For what it's worth, in all-in EV I was down about $1600 in this time frame, but that's beside the point as my play was simply not good. I took a long break and dove back in, and since January 5 my graph has looked as follows:



I've been running hot in this timeframe, to the point where it more than made up for my all-in EV drought in December, but my play has been pretty damn good as well. You can't beat NL200 for 4.4BB/100 over a nontrivial sample without playing well, and while I hold no illusions that that's my true winrate, I'm very confident at the moment. I've gradually adopted a LAGgier style. My stats ever since January 5 have been 16/12 at Full Ring; in December I was playing 15/10. In November I was 14/10. October, 14/9. September, I was 13/8.

No single transition is earthshattering in and of itself, but bouncing from 13/8 up to 16/12 over the course of a few months is very significant.

Not surprisingly, the composition of my graph looks much different than it once did. I don't feel like uploading all of the pics, suffice to say that so far this month I'm within ~$100 of breakeven in my non-showdown pots, something I've never been able to do much of before.

My aggression factor is still not very high, hovering around 2. The top players at NL200 on Full Tilt (and presumably elsewhere) - players like Kush789, BerlinsBest, and ChkRazed - all have AF's pushing 5.0, meaning they're generally more confident in their reads and know when to push or fold. I'm calling too much, and missing too much thin value. Still, I'm pretty good at snapping off bluffs - better than some others, maybe - so I'm not overly unhappy with my stats.

I need to get more volume in - I've known that for a long time - but I'm never comfortable on autopilot after more than a couple of hours per day, and I'm prone to taking breaks. This month's break - over a week - was justifiable, at least, as I got very ill and was in no condition to play. Stupid flu.

But, it's off to the tables now, to catch some of the Friday evening Eurodonks. Friday nights are great too, so maybe another session later tonight.