I’ll keep you in suspense till the end, but tell you I flopped huge with a less than prime starting hand.
But do you think there is anything I could have done differently here that would have increased my earnings?
It all depends on how loose or tight your opponent is and how you are perceived at the table. If he’s a total nit and would have folded to any bet/raise, its hard for you to get more value. If you’ve only been betting the nuts, its hard for you to get any more value. If you’ve been betting/raising your draws, then its easier for your opponents to continue and not just exploitatively fold to any aggression. That’s why its important to play a variety of hands the same way.
I don’t know how tight your opponent was opening from the SB as 1st to act but in 3-handed play, Q9s is more than a mediocre hand. If your opponent was opening 50%+ of hands in this spot, Q9s is a great hand to 3-bet in position. If he 4-bets you, you can fold pretty easily but if he just calls, you’ve built a nice pot in position and have the betting lead.
Basically, there are no easy answers when looking at 1 hand in a vacuum. Everything you’ve done up to that hand has to be taken into consideration. Only you know the context this hand was played in. Nice pot though - its always nice to flop a monster like that and get any action at all.
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Thanks for your thoughts.
Regarding my opponent, this session was quite literally the first (and as yet only) time I’d encountered her, but based on the few hands we’d played before this I had her down as a fairly loose aggressive player.
I decided to flat call the pre-flop raise rather than re-raising, as if she had re-raised again it would have been quite difficult to call, and would have probably required a substantial commitment to the pot and therefore risk. In retrospect, of course, the maximum re-raise I could have gotten action on would have been the best value, but I obciously had no idea I was going to flop a boat!
From the flop onwards I’m obviously slow-playing, hoping her hand improves and trying to make as big a pot as possible.
A) Do you reckon another flat call on the turn rather than a raise might have inspired a river bet from her?
B) Based on her playing, and the fact that she is probably a fairly loose player, what would you have put her on? Pretty sure she didn’t have two clubs, else I think she would have either bet the river or check-raised me all in? What do you think her range is here?
Obviously she does not have KK, and presumably would have played AA more strongly. Cannot have QQ. Apparently not 99. Might have had another pocket pair and called all the way to the river looking for the boat. I would have thought she had two clubs up to the end, but apparently not. Doubt she had the missing queen, so perhaps something with a 9 in it, like A 9 or K 9.
Impossible to know. I don’t like counting on others to bet my hand for me. If she was loose-agro, I may have gone with a smallish raise on the flop to try and get her to overcommit to AA or KK? Its not easy to build pots once you already have the deck crippled. Chances are if you got a lot more action after the flop, she had KK or QK. People are terrified of paired boards here so action usually means something bigger than a 2-pair hand.
Also nearly impossible to know. She could everything from AT to a random pair to KJ to AK or even AA. I don’t know much about her and only had time to look over a few of her largest pots won. I didn’t see a lot of bluffing in those hands aside from preflop (she was opening K2o and stuff).
The most likely I think is they had AJ and was waiting for the straight which is why she kept going when the king came and checked when the king didn’t appear . I would have done a bigger raise on the river to see if they responds