So what yer saying is that AQs is a loser in 34% of hands it plays against any two random cards.
Yep, exactly.
This literally just happened seconds ago:
I’m 88 in early position, 2nd hand of the game, I raise 2BB (lol pugs are so cute!), late position raises big, I jam, thinking to myself that he’s going to call and have me beat, and I’ll be looking for a new table immediately. He flips up Kings, I hit a set of 8s and knock him nearly out of the game, and then he’s gone a hand later.
Sometimes, a fella jumps off a cliff and lands on a flock of big fluffy sheep and survives.
This doesn’t making jumping a good idea.
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But why did you jam? OK, you got lucky, but it was practically a certainty that you were against an overpair or two overcards. Looking at it from the other side, with KK you don’t really want to be playing your whole stack against an Ace, but it is pretty difficult to fold the jam at this point. In this wild games, I might just flat call with KK, take a stab at the pot if no ace on the flop, then check it down if possible, or fold to a check raise.
I find that hands like 66, 77, and 88 are difficult to play unless you flop a set. If the flop comes low, you may get top pair, but if you get calls on the flop, you are vulnerable to overpairs, unpaired overcards, straights, and flushes.
I jammed because I didn’t feel like folding. I was really hoping that they might fold to the jam. I figured that for a raise that big, I was probably beat by a bigger pocket pair, but it could have been TT or JJ, in which case they might well have folded. I thought there was about a 50-50 chance that I might be up against AK, and if so then 88 would be a coin toss.
It wasn’t like I was aware that I would hit a set, but like you point out, it’s hard to play lower pocket pairs because if you don’t hit a set on the flop, it’s easy to have someone pair an overcard and then they’re ahead of you. So partly jamming avoided me having to make a decision on the flop (albeit at the cost of losing all my chips and regretting not being able to make a choice to abort the hand.)
The fact that it worked out for me and I won the hand over KK makes the hand “ridiculous” in the sense of a donk shove that shouldn’t have been made ended up paying off the donk (me). The fact that the outcome favored me doesn’t make it any less ridiculous, and it doesn’t mean that I have skill or supernatural foresight. I was honestly surprised that I won the hand.
First hand of a 9-seat game. I get TT on the button, entire table limps, I try to buy the pot with a pot-sized raise to 315. One player calls, the CO shoves. OK fine, from limping late to shove? Clearly a donk, right! No, just kidding, I know I’m cooked. I’m just going to give it a ride. I give it all to him, he’s got QQ.
And in my very next game’s opening hand, I get Q3. Thank you, something I can easily fold!
Well, it made trip Queens. Possibly still beaten by the one player who took the hand with a min bet on the turn. But we’ll never know. Just to fffff…iddle with my head.
OK NO SERIOUSLY
I’m dealt 97 in the BB, and the table limps so I’m seeing the flop, which is J46, and I think, I could hit a straight if I had a 5 and an 8, or a 8 and a T. But nah, runner runner draws aren’t good enough for me. Player ahead of me min bets, I fold. I think to myself, “watch it hit now.”
Turn, 8, River, 5.
A8, I don’t even know why I’m in this hand, but somehow I am? I flop… a pair of 8s. Not even top pair, but I figure, if I see another 8 that would be strong.
I don’t see another 8, but I do see three diamonds. Eerily, no one bets when the third diamond comes, which tells me that for sure that 2-3 players are definitely suited diamonds. Well, the river is an Ace, and so now I have two pair. Some min betting happens, and I raise, and am called by… no not a flush, a straight, made by someone playing T6, because no one folds when no one bets, and apparently big river bets on flush boards aren’t scary to straights.
Two players on Aces get shovey when they see an Ace on the turn, but I’ve already got a set of Tens improving to a full house.
That right there is the answer to the question you posed on the other thread…the difference between free and “real” poker.
It cost you nothing of any consequence to make that jam, and you wanted to do it.
In “real’” poker you still want to jam but the penalty for doing so holds you back.
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I guess that hand just goes to show that when people are playing for play chips, it is a case of easy come, easy go, and looking for the quick double up, which does make some kind of sense.
In the last hand I played on RP, I was eliminated right on the bubble, having decided to go for a double or quit, so that if I won I would be in a good position to get onto the final table, and if I lost, I would not waste any more of my time playing poker. Unfortunately the big stack opponent who started with an inferior hand made a straight and I was eliminated. Probably if playing for real money, I might have played differently on the bubble, although if I had not shoved the end result may well have been the same, as I would have had top pair on the flop, but opponent had second pair, on the turn opponent added open ended straight draw with a gutshot for me, then on the river he completed the straight and I did not. Had the board paired, I was home and dry.
That’s a really good point, and kinda what I’m looking for in an answer to that question. I think my play here is at risk of being distorted by the players who don’t care about their chips. You watch them make stupid plays and win big pots, and you also think to yourself if they’re playing that loose I can get them all in when I have a high pair. Then you do, and they beat you with 35o. Then you get a middle pair, and figure that anyone raising you is as likely to be playing 84 as AA, and you figure you’ll call. So, it’s not really good preparation for real poker.
@puggywug - there have been some well-meaning but terrible pieces of advice posted here. If you want to get better at SnG’s specifically, study SnG strategies from people who know what they are doing. If you want to get better at the MTT’s played here, study turbo format strategies. The deepest games here are still basically turbos. Opinion without data to support it is just opinion. Here are links to 2 articles just to get you started.
FYI, AJo 5-handed is a big hand, especially facing 1 limp and you’re in the SB so only the BB to act behind you. It is EV+ to limp behind with that hand but far more EV+ to raise. Your size was a bit too small but 99 was calling you there regardless. With stacks that shallow and a good top pair on the flop, size up the flop bet to set up a turn shove. Will you be facing a set sometimes? Yup but that’s 100% irrelevant. These are turbo games and you need to go out and take them, not hope they just come to you by being passive. These are not the same as multi-day big field tournaments like you see on TV. High volume, high variance and go for wins. Bust out a ton but win more than your share and you are maxing out your profitability.
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Final hand, I’m the small stack, I have 87, flop trip 8s. Opponent has top pair, Queens, and made 2 pair on the flop. He bets twice, I smoothly call the flop bet and shove on the river, he calls – good! and sucks out with a river Queen.
Thanks @1Warlock
I’ve asked for advice in other threads, about specific things. “How to beat ridiculous hands” or “How to beat ridiculous play” isn’t something I’m asking advice on.
I’m posting frustrating hands when I have an extended downswing because… well, a number of reasons really. One, it’s good to vent. Hopefully I’m entertaining enough while doing it. So, two, entertainment value.
Three, it might be a good “Diary of Tilt” that I can look back on and see why I get tilty, and maybe keep my head in the future. I will sustain a bad beat or three, and not every early exit in a tournament makes me angry or puts me on tilt. It’s usually something stupid I did, a bad call, a bad bluff, a bad time to play for a big pot. And that’s fine; I own my mistakes, and I try to go back and learn from them, and I like the pain to be memorable so I can use it to resist the temptation to try that play again. Sometimes it takes a dozen beats on similar situations for the lesson to sink in, but it eventually does.
Sometimes I’ll lose because I misclicked and called when I meant to muck, and lose more chips than I meant to. It happens less than 0.1% of the time, but it still hurts if it ends up costing me a big pot, or a game. But those are also my fault, and I own those too. They suck, but they don’t bother me for very long.
I also don’t mind being beaten by a donk play that should be very -EV most of the time. I want players to make those plays on me. In most of the hands that I get into like that, I’ll come out way ahead. And that’s great.
After the 5th or 6th ridiculous beat in a row, though, that’s when it starts to get to me. If it’s supposed to be +EV for me, and the odds are well in my favor, and I’m still losing an unnatural-feeling number of bad beats in a row, that’s when I go tilty.
Then I stop caring and enjoy watching the ridiculous hands happen, and I want to see them. I collect them and I put them here. I root for them to happen. “Thank you sir, may I have another!”
So I’m listening to the advice people are offering to me, but I’m not necessarily looking for it, and I’ll either take it or leave it depending on if I can see merit or not.
I’ve always thought of myself as a “good player” even when I wasn’t, because I can’t understand why someone would want to do something for fun that they’re bad at, and having a positive attitude is important. Lol, but then the positive attitude goes right out the window when I start taking an extended string of ridiculous hands, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s the thing I should be working on.
Certainly among the examples of ridiculous hands I’ve posted here, there are more than a few hands I played badly. I may or may not realize that. Mostly for those it’s the ridiculousness of "oh hey I finally got KK, now here’s trip 3s on the flop, and someone holding A3 – which they should have @#%#ing folded because I raised 12BB and A3o is a junk hand to begin – with has the absolute nuts. And I know that they probably have A-kicker or even quad 3s, but I am just like “Well @#%@#$% I guess the game wants me to lose chips to day” so I’ll pay off with my 3s full of Kings.
That didn’t actually happen, but hands like that happen to me all the time during these strings. Fold rags for a half hour, get a premium hand, and get ruined by a terrible flop, and have to give it up, then bleed the rest of the way out as the blinds swallow you. Or just get it over with quick and painless and put me out of my misery.
Eventually, day breaks and the curse is lifted and I’ll go back to winning more than I lose, and things will be right for perhaps a week or so. And then it will happen again.
Really, all it takes is me winning one in, say, 3-5 games for me to feel like the beats are fair.
This was so beautifully put that it brought a small tear to my eye.
I will add that you have to pick your spots. If you open rags and get called, you will almost always be behind. Starting behind all the time is not the road to victory. It’s just not. Really, it’s not!
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Alright, now I’m 0-for-2 in games where I never sit down.
Why is this happening? How am I getting registered for games and not notified when they start?
Now my First 20 this week will have two slots filled with ZERO. This basically destroys any hopes of getting into the chip zone on the first 20 board this week. And of course it also costs me 50K in buyins for the two games.
It should - its almost verbatim from the advice you gave me when I 1st got to this site, and had no idea what I was looking at with these short games. I wasn’t bright enough to figure it out myself but I was plenty bright enough to remember it 
Beating ridiculous play is your bread and butter. It is frustrating when you keep getting it in good and losing for long periods of time though. Every single person who has played this game enough has gone through the exact same thing. No one likes it. The best we can do is not let it affect our play.
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Tripling up on a pair of 2s after desperation-shoving K2s and seeing only one club on the board. Two callers missed the board.
Pocket fours takes a hand, again dodging in a multi-way pot where no one’s hand hit the board.
I guess when I don’t bet I do better, huh?
Playing junk A6s, flopping 2 pair, knocking out a player on pocket 7s.
Poker is a lot like sex: few people are as good at it as they think.
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I read the second article you llnked to on S’nG strategy and I think it is excellent and applies very well to the MTTs here on RP.
I actually posted something here a few days ago about my “low-ball” strategy in the early stages, in which I made the same point about trying to keep pots small, so that you don’t end up committing half your stack on the flop with a marginal hand.
On a passive table with little raising, I would be a bit more open in my limping range, but careful all the same to generally avoid the lower suited connectors that may give you the bottom end of a straight or a non nut flush. For example, you have 5 6 and the flop produces a 7 8 giving you a straight draw, and on the turn comes the Nine, giving any ten a better made straight or a draw to a better straight. J T, on the other hand is fine, because if it makes a straight, it will always be the nut straight.
I also agree very much about the late stages strategy. It is surprising how many times I have been on a final table with 8 or 9 players and moved up from last place to being in the final 5 just by NOT calling raises, and only folding and shoving while other stacks larger than mine eliminate each other, and then trebling up with a huge hand and taking the tournament lead. (The final table is also an excellent time to examine the strategies of other players, many of whom you will already have seen on the way to the final table.)
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I realize that, and I can’t play unless I have confidence in my game. Confidence is sexy.