I would rather call with 72 than 89s for example, it’s just fun to beat someone with the worse (almost) pre flop hand that exists.
lolllllllllllllllllllllll Guru my bad he had a 12% chance to win…!!!lmao!!!
People from the South do have a way of being polite and subtle with their mockery. I’ve always enjoyed my time there when I visit. My kind of people.
It is a shame, but I’ve ranted about this already. Once you’ve reached a certain skill level here at Replay, your progress is somewhat abated by the never-ending hordes of people like this. I’ve certainly run into this wall. Leagues are probably your best bet for now… assuming we do not get private tables on the html5 version of Replay.
If/when I get into a position to come back full time, I’ve thought a lot about starting a league for like-minded individuals. It would probably be some form of a multi-stage tournament of champions type thing. The best of the best of the best…
https://i.imgur.com/1A6PbhB.gif
Anyway, @puggywug glad to see you’re in a better frame of mind. Was worried about ya there for a while. Keep taking it in stride, buddy.
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Folded AA here, because I didn’t have a spade, and didn’t want to get beat by a flush or a straight or a royal flush. Terrible flop for me. I actually would have won the hand, but I think it was still a wise fold.
I think people get overexcited when they pick up a pocket pair. You have no decent hands for a while, then you pick up a pair of pocket 9’s and think “Right, this is my chance”. You put in a huge preflop raise and get two callers. Flop comes KQJ. Hell, you think, all I need now is for a T to fall and I get the mighty bottom end of a straight when anyone with an ace has the top end, or I might be ahead anyway, and if another nine falls it is all good. In any case, I only have 900 chips left now and the pot is 4000 chips. Get all the chips in the middle, build a massive pot, shut your eyes, and pray.
Then everyone types in “gg”.
Eventually it will occur to me that trips can get beat, and I’ll quit slow-playing them in multi-way pots, but today is not that day.
Try hand 510716712 - set of K’s takes 2 out and cripples a 3rd
The high-volume set thing continues. Its insane tonight but at least I made 1 too.
The T5o thing also continues. Lost count of how many times I’ve seen that hand in 4 games.
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Its all ridiculous hands so far this evening. Sets are being made like they were on sale at Costco. I mean every other hand is a set vs TPTK vs nut flush draw. At a minimum its top 2 pair vs bottom set.
I’ve also had T5o at an absurd rate so far. Twice an orbit or thereabouts.
A wise man named George Jetson once said : “Jane, stop this crazy thing!”
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www replaypoker com/hand/replay/510707361
@puggywug ,
There ya go… thats pretty rediculious…
This can’t be a moderation issue, why cannot I not post a direct link to a hand. That function is an integral part of 1 whole section of forum…
3 Likes
IMHO, this was not a well played hand. Your raise size preflop accomplished nothing. Make people pay to see the flop, especially as the big stack. With 3 limps in, you could go to 900 easy, if not more. Make them all commit their stack to seeing a flop if they want to. Put anyone who did see the flop all-in there, especially without the A of spades. If they have something, good for them.
If someone is going to limp/call with A6o and JTo, make them pay for being that bad.
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It wasn’t, but it wouldn’t have changed much at the flop for me, anyhow. I’ve been trying somewhat smaller raises at high stakes because it seems that bigger ones make the table too shy, and you end up just stealing blinds too much. I wanted to get a call here, and I didn’t want to tip off my hand by raising bigger than I normally had been in this game, so…
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Wow, bottom and top ends of a club straight flush… that must not happen very often, huh. At least you had the good end of it!
Opening hands of a new tournament.
First hand, player behind me has AA.
Second hand, player behind me has KK, and takes 2 players out of the game.
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/510787052
Third hand, I joke “QQ next, right?”
Yep.
Fourth hand, I get 33, my opponent has 66, the board has TT99, and 66 wins with a kicker.
Fifth hand, I get 33 AGAIN. And the winner of the hand has AA. WHAT. THE FFFF.
6th hand doesn’t have a pocket pair that I get to see.
7th hand, I get JJ, and get killed by AQ pairing the flop.
8th hand, I shove 85 remaining ships on 66 and of course get beat. Why would I even win one hand in a game?
Adjust and readjust. Name of the game. Hope you’re having fun in that league.
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I finally took another win. 2-7 on the week so far. This game was the polar opposite of the previous one that I posted about above. We went over 40 minutes and no one had gone out. One player went all-in at around the 40 min mark, but won their hand and stayed in a while longer. By the time we hit the 1-hour break, the table had just gone 3-up.
I was right in the middle when I got dealt AQs, raised up big, got a call from the big stack at the table, flopped top pair Q, dry flop, and they made a big bet at me; I called, they had… tell me if you’ve heard this one before… AK. The board missed them I took their big stack away, and held on to it nearly to the end.
Ended up HU with this player, and prevailed, although at one point it was looking bad. But I had the cards and the luck at the right time, eventually taking him for a reversal of plot with AK over K7, good hand.
Then finished him off in the next hand, KT over T6s, pairing the King.
Really good to finish my night on a win, and it nearly brings me back to breakeven on the week.
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Dear Puggy(abby),
I’ve noticed recently a different kind of rediculiousness around here… the preflop min raise of the blinds… Now, I can see this play in PL games, and some promotions… but all in all, for regular NL… it seems bad for a few different reasons. ( yes I’m just talking about ring games, and not omaha hilo ), But then I consider a 2.5bb raise just fine, mainly cause its a manually input bet and its above the 2x min raise Im talking about.
To get the desired result of a preflop raise around here, it seems rather than the normal 3.5-5x raise, it takes twice that so 6-10x. Considering into this, that each call will increase the chance of price’n in ppl yet to act… when someone “pot-builds” or min raises the blinds, everyone who will limp usually will pay this (wont fold) and anyone trying to raise now has to, dbbl usually, thier bet to compensate for more ppl being “priced in” to call a smaller raise due to pot size. 
I always thought that if you’re gonna “come-in” to a hand, you raise. You need information, you can’t get that by limp’n or min raising. Bonus is you get betting equity once the flop is out… as the pre-flop raise’r. 
Sure in certain situations, on certain tables, in certain games… pot-building is a great idea… just lately I’ve seen this play alot more than normal… … …
Is this the new “in-thing” to do, seems counterproductive to me ??
Sign’d : Mistified in the Midwest.
2 Likes
I think it is very important to look at raise sizes. In RP games large raises often don’t succeed in pushing players out, it just enrages them and they start shoving en masse like lemmings.
When you are putting in a raise with a good starting hand, you need to look at how many player are likely to be in the pot, what the size of the pot will be at the flop, and how much a half-pot or full-pot flop bet will be relative to your own stack and the stacks of others. So, to put it in simple terms, if you are whacking in a big raise preflop with something like AQ, you need to have a plan for what your next bet will be if you hit the flop and if you miss the flop.
In tournaments where it looks like there will be a multiway pot, I may well just limp in with hands like AK and AQ rather than get myself stack-committed against a horde of limpers. But everything depends on the situation, and at other times I might shove if I was fairly confident of burning off the limpers.
One of the most dangerous situations in No Hold Em short-stack tournaments is when you are dealt AK and find yourself up against an opponent with pocket 9s and you want to give yourself a chance to get away from the hand.
Those are great points.
I think many players here are at a skill level where they don’t know how to handle difficult decisions post-flop, so shoving works well for them because it eliminates those decisions entirely, and forces opponents to make a decision to continue or not with less information and maximized risk. It can be tough to play someone like this, but it doesn’t mean that they’re good players.
At Pegasus league, I’m seeing a lot more subtlety at most games, players are Uber-tight early on, most fold and even small raises can buy the blinds, and limping is more prevalent than I would have expected.
In early position with a hand like AA, I see a few possible approaches:
- Donk shove, hoping someone reads this as a bluff and calls.
- Big open, generally will buy you the blinds, but maybe more likely to get a call from someone, hopefully just one isolated opponent. But if you do this you’re advertising your strong hands, not disguising, and good players will catch on quickly.
- Standard open, by whatever rule you follow to size your standard open. This might buy the blinds, or it might get you into a multi-handed flop, depending on the table.
- Limp-raise. Risky, since many times the table will just limp around and you won’t have the opportunity to raise, and now you’re multi-up against unknown ranges that may have hit the flop in ways that can kill AA. Not good. But if there’s a reliably loose player behind you somewhere, this can be a good play. Getting an extra 5-6BB from limpers who drop their hand when you pot-sized raise is way better than buying the blinds.
In the referenced hand, I knew what I was doing and why, but the table went a different way than I predicted, and didn’t cooperate with my plan, and then the flop was awful for me.
I don’t think it’s a new thing, but I have been seeing more 2BB openings at Pegasus league than I did at Ursa Major. When I started playing Ursa Major SnGs, I saw lots and lots of limping, little to no opening. 5-6 handed flops were common. A few months of this, I “discovered” opening, and started doing it, and soon everyone started doing it. Worse, big openings were failing to achieve intended results, leading to bloated multi-way flops, and often donkey shoving and bad bluffing.
A 2BB raise when the blinds are less than 100 just isn’t enough to dissuade most limpers from playing. You might get 1-2 to fold who wouldn’t have otherwise, but you’re still looking at 3-5 way flops most of the time. Really it’s a symptom that the current blind level is too small for the stack sizes.
At Pegasus, in the early levels, 2BB will get too much action, or none, and 3BB will often get none. If you’re raising to isolate someone, maybe 2.5-2.75BB would work better. This will probably-maybe not hold true a few weeks or months from now, as players adjust. I expect at some point to start seeing a new approach of a big re-raise from late position when a table all comes in for 2BB. At Ursa Major level, I don’t know-- there seems to be a broader diversity of talent in those games, some very good players, some maniacs, and a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing and why. So that’s inherently harder to predict.
Well Puggy,
It seems to me that potbuilding as I call it, is better suited to PL games, and Omaha Hilo… my standard raise is 2.5-3.5bb… but as each person limps in they price in more limpers and anyone minraising the limp, just prices everyone in more… thus now to get folds you’re look’n @ more of 7-10bb , which as u said can induce shoves. It seems in NL preflop holdem, the minraise, its almost a “jamm” against future raisers and “potbuilds” at the same time.
Sure when its Omaha Hilo, you need to get “dead money” into the pot so when you split later on, its still worth it… or even reg PLO or any PL game , you’re potbuilding preflop, so that once you hit the flop, you can sufficiently raise to push out the draws and other riffraff postflop.
now Puggy, its also prevelant when a player effectively raises the blinds @ a particular stake level without raising the buyin. By that I mean, you sit @ 1/2k table for 100k, but you play it like a 2/4k table and minraise constantly, if noone else does… but instead of a buyin of 200k on that 2/4k table, you only have to risk the 100k buyin on the 1/2k table should you need to shove to defend your hand.
You’re also right about “openings or come-ins” and the fact ppl are unsure how to play post flop. You should always be prepared for the flop, if you’re gonna raise pre-flop.
And Puggy… I was really talking Ring games, because in SnG/MTT setting, the whole dynamic of increasing blinds and no rebuys… completely changes some reasons for and effectiveness of , min raising preflop. Ring games are unlim rebuy situations along with never increasing blinds, so thats why I wondered if its some “new thing”, as it does kinda Jam anyone who wants to raise and get 1-2 players isolated. You really do end up with 5-7 limpers even at 2x. Prolly 80% of players willing to limp, will pay 2x, especially if they already limped and now they gotta pay the 1bb raise.