yep, thats exactly what he probably thought and i actually was hoping he would fold the all in and i would rake in 3k or 25% of my stack. but like u said it was a snap shot decision i had to make and really didnt wanna see any more cards.
Great topic and commentary @love2eattacos. Playing too many hands is usually disaster and that’s not totally different here than in cash games but it is different. Playing too many hands when people are open-raising and 3-betting will get you broke in a hurry. Seeing lots of cheap flops with somewhat interesting cards when all it costs is 1BB isn’t nearly as risky. Seeing lots of flops on the cheap against players who make huge mistakes post-flop can in fact be extremely profitable.
Open-limping should almost always be a mistake because you allow the players left to act the ability to realize their equity for nothing or next to nothing. The 2 most unconnected rags (7/2o) still have equity against any range but they should never be allowed to realize any of it by seeing a flop. Because of the excessive open-limping and flatting behind, almost any 2 cards in position become profitable to play. Therefore, I’d say the biggest mistake made here is that players are not punished for trying to play too many hands. Players are allowed to realize equity far too easily and so I really can’t fault them for continuing to try to do so.
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For sure. When I started writing my original post I had a top 5 list of mistakes and got carried away on the first one 
. Never raising preflop (or only doing it with ultra premium hands like QQ+) is certainly high on the list.
Some questions to provoke discussion:
- Who is making the bigger mistake - the player limping behind on the button with AQs, or the player limping behind with J2s and 63o?
- How much of a mistake is it to split your range preflop by limping your weak-but-interesting hands and raising your strong ones?
- How should we adjust our play given that we know players are frequently making these mistakes?
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Here is the biggest mistake I have ever seen. The villain was too smart for his own good, and no doubt thought I was taking him for a fool and that he would call my bluff and split the pot by playing the board of the full house of three aces and a pair of sixes and thus save himself a few hundred chips. Oh dear.
I don’t think he made a mistake at all. You limp with AK, then check flop and turn. There just aren’t that many hands you could have and take that line with that beat the board.
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1: tough to say as they are both big mistakes, the J2s and 63o are losing too much because they waste blinds on terrible hands. the AQs is wasting chips on a winning hand by not taking value from a value hand. to really pick one i lean towards saying the AQ limp is slightly worse since value hands happen less then bad hands. but like i said, imo they are almost equal in terms of bad play.
2: depends on the table you are on. on a bad table i would even say it a good strategy. when the entire table loves to limp i happily limp along with them when i hold hands like suited connectors or small pairs. in position i would widen this even more into any suited hands assuming therte are enough limpers. simply because no one would pay attention that im limping since everyone does already anyway. that way i get a cheap multiway pot with drawing hands and i could raise with powerful hands to get a big pot with few people, evenb if they fold to my big raise i already have a decent pot by all the wasted blinds.
however if you are on a good table, it’s clearly a bad strategy. people will find out soon enough what you are doing and fold to your raises unles they hold a monster them self. when you limp they will make you pay for your drawing hands by raising, forcing you to fold it anyway and make you waste your blind.
3: in general if the table limps too much stick to a tighter range to decrease variance but raise bigger with your value hands, the common line here is to raise your standard amount (usually 3 BB’s) but add one blind for each limper in the pot, so if there are 5 limpers you raise 8 BB’s. if the table fold too easily after a big raise i would remove a few blinds from this amont, but if too many call you either way i would add a few blinds to this. in a tournament you can remove a few blinds to this assuming it would fit your stacksize better, if it’s too small then shove instead. when on a table that likes to limp, then limp along with your suited connectors and small pairs, no one pays attention on such a table and you get the cheapest pot with the most people in it, the perfect situation for a drawing hand.
Playing way above your limits. For example players that bring their whole bank to a high stake ring table when they should be on low or medium tables. i see people lose their whole bank way too often in a short time frame or even a few hands. They are hoping to double up then leave the table but most lose all their chips instead. so bank roll management 101 is important if u dont wanna keep starting over again from the bottom.they should be working their way up the ladder and learning at the same time.they usually get burnt the 1st time against more skilled players that have large bank rolls, and if they get lucky and double or triple up then they usually come back another time and play and bet way over their head and lose it all. the more skilled players with high bank rolls love thes players at the table tho, and wait for the right hand to clean out their bank. so i think this is one of the biggest mistakes most new players with low bank rolls make .ive even done this several years ago and had to start over a few times but deffinately learned from it and luckily hasnt happened since because i started playing within my limits.
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With all the poker wisdom I see being offered on this site I believe it would be appropriate for the posters to provide their rank…so that we could see if their knowledge is working out for them…
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I’m currently ranked 9,682 on this site.
According to the Statistics, I fold about 2/3 of the time. I don’t know if that means preflop folds, or all hands folded, but I think it means preflop folds. I win about 1/5th of the hands I play. So, out of 100 hands, I’ll win about 20 out of 33 played to the flop, or about 60% of the hands I don’t fold preflop. That’s pretty good.
But it also matters how much I win when I win, and how much I lose when I lose. That’s purely a factor of how many chips you put in, and how much you get called.
Those stats go back all the way to when I started playing on the site, of course, and I’ve refined my play quite a bit over that time, so it’d be nice to get an idea of how often I fold now vs. how often I folded 2 years ago.
It’s not just how often, it’s knowing when. “You’ve got to know when to fold em.”
I fold when I know I’m beat. And when I don’t want to continue paying to stay in the hand because it won’t pay off in the long run. Learning how to figure out when that is, that’s the key. No, I won’t tell you the key.
That’s about it.
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I hope you are being ironic. 
Just in case you are not, do consider that also a music pedagogue, a football coach or an acting teacher can give excellent theoretical suggestions without being themselves great musicians, football players or actors.
And what does rank count in the end? We have been told lately that we are all “fish”, except the players ranked 1-6. LOL
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This is so very true. Ok, I might bring more than 10% of my bank to a table but if I lose my mind, get reckless and lose 10%? I’ll log out and then curl up into a little ball and sob. Which totally happened to me this past week. On the 3rd I was kicking myself and beating myself up. So angry with myself. Then I calmed down a little and made a strict plan to systematically win it back. But that plan backfired the very next day when I snagged a fish who turned into a whale. Luck sure is fickle and plays no favorites.
But as a life skill, managing your bank translates very well into the world outside of poker- don’t ever spend more than you earn, pay off your credit card bill in full every month, etc. etc. If you have discipline with your poker bank, you’ll probably be doing ok elsewhere too. At least better than if you don’t.
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Where did you get that swell graph thingie? I think I would like one too!
Um, you never noticed it? It’s right on the front dashboard page. To the right of your friends leaderboard and below latest achievements. You just click on 'profit ‘/loss’.
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Any hand with the missing ace in it, so 44 possible ace hands plus any pocket pair higher than 6. The main point was that by calling, he was putting his whole tournament at risk, but the pot was not worth much, and if he surrendered it, he was still in good shape. It would probably take more than a few seconds to calculate the exact odds of an ace hand or a pocket pair. At the last three players stage of a multitable or sit’n’go when all are in the money, the blinds are high and any false move can spell doom conventional rules mean nothing and there is a lot of slow playing and attempts to elicit a mistake. If I had at nothing, I might well have raised to try to take down the pot if I though the BB had a tight calling range, and in that situation one might well limp in with AA hoping that a BB who would have folded to a raise will hit a pair or a draw and take a shot at the pot.Of course the risk is that he might hit two pairs on the flop, but that is only a 2% chance. To that you can add 11% for the chance that he has a pocket pair and hits a set, so still only 13%.
If he makes trips, there will be a pair on the board, so the warning is there. That is only about 1%. Of course in the early rounds of a tournament when half a dozen hands all limp in, it is much more probable that someone has hit trips on the paired flop, but when you are down to the final three at the final table, then you are looking at an Act of God!
It seems to me that rank does not mean much, because it is based purely on chip count. I have less than a million chips,but then I have been on the site for only 1 month and had not played poker for years. Perhaps one needs to divide the chip count by the number of months on the site to get an average gain, but even that is meaningless unless you know other things, like were the chips gained in ring games, sit’n’gos, or tournaments. Someone could easily have several millions chips having placed high in 1 huge tournament, whereas someone else could have won a dozen tournaments and still have less chips,
I was playing in a 37 player tournament last night (in which I finished 3rd when a suited QT in the BB re-raised all in preflop against my AQ raise and hit his flush. Sob.). There was a player in the tournament who was ranked within the top 500 on Replaypoker by virtue of a high chip count whom I won several large pots from in the early part of the tourney. He eventually finished 5th, but his main method at the lower blinds levels seemed to be to call anything all the way down to the flop if he had any ace and then make huge bluffs at the river. At the higher blind levels, he limped everything and (presumably) bluffed a lot, I guess it must work for him, and he has a high ranking on Replaypoker, but it didn’t seem to indicate much skill, and I would welcome him as an opponent any time.
Thanks! Mine is empty though, I haven’t been in a ring game for a year or more.
Ahh, that would explain it. I only play ring games. My life often gets randomly interrupted by things more important than replay, so it’s easier for me to log in and play some hands and log out when something comes up. Committing to tournaments doesn’t work for me.
Also I have no clue how they work, so there’s that.
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Of all the mistakes players make here, the biggest one I see (and make) is assuming the other player can’t have a certain hand because it would make no sense. Players will play all sorts of nonsense for all sorts of reasons, or no reason at all. For example, I just went out of a tournament shoving 15BB over 2 limpers with AKs. Yahoo calls with 5/4s and spikes a 5 on the flop. Really? 5-high. LOL. To be fair, he floated OOP to two strong barrels with a gut shot earlier and spiked his gin card on the river to dent my stack so maybe he was feeling lucky. Still, its laughable.
This can be a fun place to kick back but its not poker in any conventional sense of the word. Its a social site 1st and foremost. The wife only lets me play at very low stakes online and then only rarely. The lowest stake games online are far stronger than almost any of the games played here. I’ve seen some really good play at the very highest stakes but mostly its just flat-bad.
So, I’m amending my answer on the biggest mistake made here - my new entry is that the biggest mistake anyone can make here is to take it seriously and treat it like it was a proper poker game. It isn’t and its certainly not worth getting angry or upset over anything that happens here. If you aren’t enjoying a free-chip poker site, what exactly are you doing here? Relax and have some fun!
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Hi Comic apart from your Poker Talk which I know a little I totally agree. I enjoy chatting to friends even if you only get chance to say GM or Hi before you get moved. Yes most have a MRS that can get in the way, but a very necessary evil to keep on the right track. This site is good for me in many ways, if I have a good day winning some good chips it makes me smile if i loose it makes me think! What did I do wrong, was it a poor judgement, or just unlucky. It all keep the mind working as we get older.
Thanks to the good folk for the site. Love it,
See you at the tables soon dude and take care.
Alan
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