Hi Jazz,
Is it this hand? https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/401000713.
Is there a reasonable expectation that 66 is winning when you bet the turn? He has to call 540 out of 4,500. If you bet again on the river, he has to re-evaluate.
Maybe the call was with the intention to bet the river because he did not believe you had a king?
Do you call off your stack (you still have 2,800) with AQ, JJ or TT if you had them?
yes he ofcourse he thought I don’t have the king and his 66 was good…like most bad players he couldn’t read nor does he have the ability to read an opponents hand…apart from the fact he got married to his hand.moreover they live on the fact that bluffing is the biggest strategy to play poker hence you see so many players above 10k trying to bluff every second hand…Frankly I detest all these tournies which are below 50k but then again in my time zone I don’t get the bigger ones its much later in the day the 50k.100k 250k come around…I personally have to come to terms with the fact that the bandwidth of calling hands in the smaller ones is 23 upwards…and hope to crack AA or any premioum hand…
I was on a final table yesterday think it was a 20k buy in this guy ranked 120,000 calls a players all in with 15000 chips (table average) with 23 offsuit and guess what he won the hand I think It was against AK…its simply frustrating …its sad to see so many players who disrespect calls then again that’s what you gonna get in a small tourney…sometimes its harder to win a 1k tourney than a 1 million tourney for each hand 3 to 5 all ins x 100 players…hard to last and finish first …
Hey @jazzbythebay - First of all, thanks for the kind words. I will be including your comments on the value of my time in the letter I send to clients informing them my fees will be increasing later this year 
There is a saying that to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Now I’m not sure what percentage of people here want to learn about the other tools available to them but I’m sure some do. I know I do. One of the most enjoyable parts of the game for me is learning new concepts and then figuring out when and where they could be applied.
Anyone who wants to succeed at poker, whether played here or elsewhere, needs to adapt to the format and the field. Playing “by the book” may not be optimal when facing people who haven’t read the book. They are not going to adapt their game to fit ours. It is our job to take what we know and figure out how to exploit them. If that means having a totally unbalanced game and playing “bad poker”, then so be it. When playing against humans, the goal is to beat them out of their chips, not score higher on a poker proficiency exam.
Anyway, I enjoy sharing the little bit that I know with people who are interested. I appreciate when people who know a lot more than me give me the opportunity to learn from them. Learn, experiment, re-evaluate and repeat. Its a great game.
Ok here’s a loss I took-
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/400960360
I’m dealt AA and feeling confident but want to string it out. Then the 2pr show up and I’m feeling more confident and continue to raise. So I call the big raise at the river and I’m whomped. Yes, I should have known better and seen the 3 kind possibility at the river let alone the FH he had but I was so in love with my AA.
Calling was a classic mistake. But I’m also thinking that stringing the play out was another. Should I have gone in with guns blazing at the start and forced folds? I essentially gave s23bog the opportunity for that hand because holding only a 8c2s he would have had no reason to stay in.
Hi Daffodil, thanks for posting this hand. To me it has so many things I think are key to understanding how poker works.
You did not raise UTG pre flop, which is often a mistake in hindsight, unless you have a reason to believe there will likely be a raise from another player. In the last two hands the player on the button has raised pre flop, so maybe a legitimate ploy here.
Jc 2h 3c. Up against 4 opponents with any two cards at the Duck Pond. The flop is not bad. The chances of getting someone to call bets with a draw or a Jx are reasonable. Your bet of 10 did not scare anyone apart from Alan. I think this punishes not raising pre flop a bit because drawing hands (including those which made a single pair, like 82os) are getting better odds with 4 players and AA has a much lower chance of dodging a bullet against the wide range of unpredictable hole cards out there.
Turn eight of diamonds looks OK but we now know it was not. The only apparent danger at the time was J8 or maybe 88. Things like T9, A8, Q9 and 8x suited in clubs got a bit of help,. The important thing for me is we need to make those hands lose as many chips as possible to us if they want to continue. Because of this need to get value from hands worse than our AA I think bet size here is important in this hand. 20 is too small. The pot is 50, you have 243, so I would prefer to see a bet size which leaves you with the chance to make an all-in pot sized bet on the river if you get 2 callers. Something like 40 or even the full pot. The chances are we will want to get more chips into the pot on the river. Anything but another jack should be ok.
As played the 2c on the river could be rescuing you from J8 or J3 but the flush draw gets there and any one of your opponents could have stayed in the pot with a deuce because you did not make it expensive enough. Betting 30 followed your theme of keeping them in with worse than AA, but now someone plays back for the first time in the hand. Personally I call the raise, but I am aware that a raise here is not often a stone cold bluff. Most low stakes opponents normally believe they have a raising hand when this happens, I call because our hand is under sold and they could still have something worse than AA. At higher stakes against an opponent I know a little, I might fold.
I like this hand because this sort of situation happens ALL THE TIME, whether on Replay or at any poker table and so many players do not understand that making sub optimal plays costs chips in the long run because if you repeat an unfavourable situation over and over it will cost you chips, either because you lose more in a bad spot or you win less in a good spot. The great thing about ABC poker is you generally make a fairly good decision. Not always the most profitable but usually not bad unless someone is capable of trying to exploit you.
This underlines Bankroll Management being so important too because taking 25% of your Balance to a table is a bad decision and eventually a hand like the one we are looking at will happen and you will get stung.
Rob
Good analysis. What it looked like as I played my hand: I was the BB holding 5-3o. Had there been a preflop raise, I’d have dropped like the rock I am. Even holding 2nd pair (3-3) on the flop, it seemed a poor investment–and terrible position–to bet into a reasonably good top card and possible flush draw. So, when Daffy bet the pot, I dropped. Had she bet only 2 instead of 10, I might’ve called, but I doubt it. I think I would’ve folded to almost any bet. And, had I been the LB, instead of BB, I would’ve folded preflop.
Ron
You’re welcome! And thank you- to get thoughtful analysis like yours is why I began the thread.
I fully expected Alan to fold. If he had raised me, I would have considered folding immediately because I know him. DoWeCox is a solid, sensible player. The other two were unknowns to me but are pretty low ranked in terms of bankroll, which is the first thing I look at when I sit down at a table. It is not necessarily an indication of skill level but it can be a clue.
I think I tend to play it too shy sometimes, not because I’m not aggressive but because I prefer to let other players hang themselves if I’ve got a good hand. I have to kick myself to not fall in love with my pocket cards.
If I go to a table with 10% of my bank I’m leaving if I’ve lost more than 2.5%.
HAH! I know you, too. If I had raised anything less than all in–and even with JJJ, I wouldn’t have raised more than the pot because I’d WANT you to call–you might’ve gritted your teeth, but you’d have called. If the turn didn’t improve either of us, you might’ve folded to another pot-sized bet, and if it got to the river, I doubt you’d have called my all in at the end. But, none of this applies if we don’t know each other.
You mention looking at player’s ranks. That’s good, but incomplete. You need to glance at their profile to see how long they’ve been here. Someone low ranked after a few days or weeks, may be a good player you just haven’t run across before; someone who has been here more than a few months and is still ranked above 5-digits is likely an infrequent player or a problem player. Knowing how long they’ve been here narrows that uncertainty a lot.
Great analysis, @Chasetheriver. A few things I’d like to add:
I appreciate you posting and asking for advice/feedback/criticisms of your play. It’s a great way to get better!
Side bar-
Oh, I totally check the join date. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do? 
Another factor is that rank is based on the number a chips a player has and if they’re willing to buy chips the rank is meaningless wrt skill, it’s only aspirational. What I find most curious are the players with a 50 Champion RPP level, who’ve been here 2+ years, and have only 4-5k in their bank. How does that happen? I’ve been playing 8 months, I’m a level 37 and have over 500k in the bank. I’m a totally average player.
I remember one time I commented to the table that the bingo amongst us had only 50 chips left in his bank and he’d be gone soon. Another player was astonished and asked, “How the heck do you know that?”
I explained and the other player was grateful. He’d been playing Replay for a couple of years as I recall. I was astonished he’d not figured that out.
Many of our players are not computer savvy or just aren’t curious enough to click on things to find our what they do. (A partial explanation of this may be our average age–I’m over 71, and most of the players I talk to are close to being eligible for Medicare by age, if not already there.) I’m sure there are players who’ve never realized they’d been sent a friend request because they didn’t look. (Replay notifies us when a request is accepted, but not when it’s first received unless the recipient gets notified by email–which many have turned off–but there’s no obvious notification here.) Some, of course, never stop looking.
As to the player’s “level,” that seems to be weighted by how high the stakes they play for are, how long they play, and how frequently they play. So, a wildly aggressive player, playing at very high stakes continuously for a few days might easily run through a few million chips, have a level 50 rating, and only a few chips in their bank. Make sense? Again, it’s an imperfect guideline, not a guaranty of the quality of their play. In something as uncertain as poker, even an imperfect guideline is better than none at all.
In the spirit of “Each player has three hands. The hand they actually have, the one their opponent thinks they have, and the one they try convincing you they have.”
I’m dealt 8sAs. We lose one player pre-flop and now there’s - Qd 2s Qs. I raise the minimum with the intention of doing two things- bump the pot a little in case there’s another spade yet to come (my kicker is killer) and convince the other players I might have a deuce, pocket pair or even a third queen.
Now we get the 9h. I keep up the pretense, maybe everyone else has got nothing and with my little show of strength can get them to back off. Everyone stays in. I’m ready to bail in a New York minute if anyone raises but we all wait for the river- 10s. Woot, I’m doing a happy dance!
So I bet the pot. Not all-in or they might suspect what I’m doing but enough to let them know I’m feeling confident with 3Qs or two pair. Fingers crossed, I get a call and then Merlin goes all in on the strength of his straight from the river. I suppose at that moment he’s the one doing the happy dance too. Dude, I love you! He can be forgiven for believing it was his but that was the idea all along. It’s a rare nice moment when your opponent believes they’ll be raking in the chips two seconds from now. I’ve been on the other side often enough.
I could have been snookered by a FH, it’s happened to me before and he’s an experienced player but I took the risk.
what risk my friend its cartoon poker and as u said u didnt have the best possible hand, i used to really enjoy playing here and did extremely well, now im sour grapes just hangin around to lose on the river, i guess my problem is i treat it like its real $$$$, enjoy ur fake poker lucky win…
It’s pretty obvious that that table is playing as if it’s real $$$$.
Micro stakes table with players having decent banks and betting logically.
There are lots of players here that aren’t playing just to try to win chips if you look for them.
I would suggest when you find one send them a friend request and keep good notes on anyone you play.
Maybe next time you play you should search for DaffoldilFine.
Whether it’s play or real money the risk is your ego. Losing hurts. Winning feels wonderful. If you care about making money? Playing real poker is one really dumb way to go about it- better get a law degree or become a nuclear engineer. Work on Wall Street even. Poker is about something much different, the excitement is in getting the better of your opponents, not the real world value of the chips at stake. Pride, ego.
That pot was 388 chips and I felt pretty good about how I played it out. I’ve folded with 10k chips on the table and shrugged it off because the hand was boring and I had nothing, no ego, at stake.
It depends on when I’m playing. If it’s late at night, I’ve a nice dinner and too many glasses of wine, I’m a really bad poker opponent- I’m careless and lose my chips over and over. Or maybe that makes me a good opponent?
I’ll tell myself, “Jus’ log out Daffy, you’re durnk” and then I ignore myself.
I’m late to the party, but I really like the idea of this thread, so here are my two cents on that last hand.
It was pretty standard preflop. You should be raising preflop in general rather than limping but suited Ax is good multiway and not going to get enough folds to make it worth raising. Postflop, I like how you bet because ace high can be good and you have a great draw, but you really need to bet larger so that you can actually get your opponents to fold because you are essentially bluffing without a made hand. It also makes the pot bigger for when you do hit your draw.
On the river you need to strongly consider folding because your opponent should only be going all in with a full house. The board is paired and the flush draw hit in a multiway pot, so a straight is basically trash that would have to be optimistic to call your bet and pray that you have trip queens, but no good player is ever raising a straight there. It could be a smaller flush, but even that should not be raising because you can have a full house with Q9, QT, or even 99/TT/22, or the nut flush. It’s fine for you to call his raise because players here are clearly bad enough to overvalue weaker hands, but you really don’t beat any actual value hands. So, overall, pretty normal play, but definitely a huge mistake from your opponent on the river (though not that surprising in the 1/2 stakes).
Now to think of a recent hand to add to this thread…
Here’s one.
https://www.replaypoker.com/hand/replay/407750679
It’s mostly pretty typical, but the one interesting part is my preflop decision to flat. Ordinarily I would always 4-bet AA, but I respected the skill of my opponent and thought that he might fold QQ/AK and maybe even KK because most players on Replay will only 4-bet KK+. Plus he is a good enough player and the stakes are high enough that he can have a wider 3-bet range that includes some bluffs. So I decided to let him keep the aggression knowing that the stack-to-pot ratio was so shallow that my chips were going in no matter the flop.
Also, I knew that the opponent in between was capable of calling the 3-bet with a wide range of hands and that stacks were not deep enough for that to be a correct decision on his part (someone correct me if I am wrong, is it ever good to flat in his spot with 55 or 76s or JTs in a 2 SPR pot?) What kind of range would you put him on in general?
Even before the flop, I know stacks are going in, but a KQ9 flop of all clubs could have scared me. As played, there was no avoiding going all-in with KK vs. AA on that board.
Thanks for the feedback. My immediate sense was if he was sitting on another Q or a pocket pair of any kind he would have been more aggressive earlier on. That and I think he was underestimating my hand, which was deliberate on my part as I’d had nothing until the river either. The speed with which he went all in indicated to me he wasn’t thinking about it much.
What I find cool is comparing the size of the pot in your example hand to the pot in mine and the fact it doesn’t change how the cards fall at all. High stakes or low- 2 pair still gets beat by 3 of a kind every time. Initially I was intimidated by big numbers but then I realized that whether it’s 250 chips or 250k, the odds are the same and that our ‘Best Hands’ often win us the smallest pots.
The number of digits may change and there may be some differences in skill and how hard players are trying, but ultimately the math is the same and the decisions are similar.
A few interesting bits about this hand though you are correct in that stacks were almost always going in at some point. Are you always opening to 3.5x these days? Just curious about that. Also, what did you make of the size of his 3-bet? Pretty hefty size IMO.
I suppose there are two ways to look at this. The 1st is to play it the way you did and try to extract maximum value. The second would be to 4-bet and also start including some bluff 4-bets into your game when facing this opponent. The question is which approach do you think will have the best long term returns? How long would it take him to adjust because you could expand your opening ranges to include more potential 4-bet bluffs and maybe make more overall using that approach? That would also depend on the other players at the table of course.
Well, this is a tough one. I have no idea whether this player has a 3-bet range outside of KK+, AK but I do know he flats a ton of hands, in and out of position. You flatting the 3-bet priced him in to call with a good part of his initial flatting range I’d think. I’d assume typical hands we see here like 77-QQ, suited broadways, A2-A5s, A10-AQs and maybe some other suited connectors (I doubt these could flat the 3-bet but you never know). No, it is not profitable to set mine at these depths nor should he really be playing many drawing hands OOP at these depths either, especially sandwiched between the initial aggressor and 3-bettor. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t but its not a correct play if he was. My inclination would be that he flatted hands that can flop essentially the nuts vs 2 likely strong 1-pair hands. Therefore I’m thinking mostly pocket pairs and some better suited broadways/aces.
Nice haul. For me, I’d be in the 4-bet camp when I was OOP and not have to worry about the random hand in the middle at all. I don’t know either of these players well enough to have decent reads though so I’m playing it straight until I do.