Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A Bad River Call

I haven't been posting enough humiliating hands in this blog. That was one of the blog's original purposes, so I will rectify that now. In the following hand I make a pretty terrible river call.

Villain in this hand is at 3 of my tables, and is running 17/12 IIRC. Seems pretty solid. About 3 orbits prior to this hand he lost a buyin when his 44 lost to AQ on a A42A board. River 2. I've 3 bet him a few times, but this is the first time he's 3-bet me. On to the hand:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $0.10 BB (6 handed) - Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

saw flop | saw showdown

UTG ($10.15)
Hero (MP) ($25.55)
CO ($14.45)
Button ($25.40)
SB ($12.25)
BB ($10)

Preflop: Hero is MP with A, K
1 fold, Hero bets $0.30, 2 folds, SB raises to $1.30, 1 fold, Hero calls $1

Flop: ($2.70) A, 3, 8 (2 players)
SB bets $2, Hero calls $2

Turn: ($6.70) Q (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

River: ($6.70) 10 (2 players)
SB bets $5, Hero calls $5

Total pot: $16.70 | Rake: $0.80

Results:
SB had A, A (three of a kind, Aces).
Hero mucked A, K (one pair, Aces).
Outcome: SB won $15.90

The hand seems pretty standard until the river. Basically, since this is the first time I've seen him 3-bet through ~100 hands, I'm putting him on a pretty tight range. Something like TT+, AQs+, AKo sounds right. That is probably too loose for most at $10NL, but he seemed fairly decent, so I'll give some credit. Anyway, This is a WA/WB situation on the flop, significantly favoring the WA (1 combo of AA left, vs 3 of KK, 6 each of QQ-TT). So I'm comfortable just calling, since he's not putting in any more money unless he has the AA. He has at most 2 outs, and I might get another bet out of his pairs on the river. Turn and river are very bad cards for my hand, since it improves his range's equity against my hand. I was mentally prepared to call a bet of up to $3.5 on the river before the T came off.

IMO, he never makes this size of a bet with KK or JJ. So I'm essentially calling vs his river range of TT, QQ, AA, and maaaaybe AKs, AQs. I'm losing to all of these but the AK (and even with that hand I think he checks the river most of the time).

At the time, I had been making a number of hero calls at several tables that had all turned out right (for pretty siginificant financial gain), and so I guess I just wanted to keep it going. I thought about the call for nearly 30 seconds before making it, but clearly in retrospect its a terrible call given his range.

Otherwise the day turned out very well. I was able to run at +18 PTBB/100 over 540 hands. If I am able to fold this river, that turns into +23 PTBB/100. At least I know I won't be making the same mistake again soon.

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