How do you know who you can push off a pair?

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates/responses to everyone's blogs.  I have been dealt a very difficult project at work that is taking a ton of effort to get off the ground.  It's an important project, it's interesting, and I'm looking forward to working on it...but as the project manager, I am a big bottleneck at the beginning and so I've got to bear down and get things in place.  Once things get rolling, the guys doing the actual work will take over, and I can get back to focusing on the truly important stuff...cards :).  I got an iPhone and have been able to check in on your guys blogs using it (Google Reader for iPhone is awesome), but it takes way too long for me to type anything on the touch screen, so I've pretty much been lurking, unfortunately.  If you've got a hand/issue not getting enough love, feel free to email it to me if you'd like my input (for whatever reason ;).  I believe I am up to date reading, though.

I've really slowed the hands down the last couple weeks, too, and have done no study either.  This hurts, obviously, but even before then, things were just going tough.  I was forcing the play...playing when tired, thinking about other stuff, etc., so I just decided to bag it, and it was for the best.  I was still green in EV and way red actual, but I'm positive that a significant chunk of the poor results came from playing my B/C game...hell my A game isn't good enough yet to guarantee anything, so it's really bad when I'm not on it.  July is going to be a brutal month, maybe my worst ever $$ wise thanks to another encounter with 200NL.

So, here's one of the issues I've been thinking about.  Sometimes you'll see a video or a hand will come up where Hero makes a play in order to push Villain off a marginal hand.  Let's define a marginal hand as top pair or worse (against some guys top pair is the nuts, but against us, since we're supposed to be reasonable, I would say that top pair is at the upper end of a marginal hand).  How do you guys know who is capable of folding it when shown strength (say a c/r or a double barrel, or something beyond us just betting)?

When the cards are shown down, we can only get a read on those guys who refuse to fold a pair.  But when they fold, who knows what they have?  They might have just folded a pair, or they might have folded their crap, and since it's much easier to have crap than a made hand, it makes sense to assume they folded crap.

I'm not talking about the very loose guys who we know won't fold anything anyway...I'm talking about all those guys who have somewhat reasonable stats, at least in terms of VPIP/PFR and postflop aggression.

Is it a mistake to assume at 200NL and below that people are not really prone to fold TP at all?  Or do you guys assume that if they have somewhat reasonable stats that they can fold TP to strength unless you actually see them showdown a one pair hand when shown strength?

Not much to report

Poker's been kind of meh lately....I've lost some momentum and some enthusiasm.  I'm playing pretty well for the most part.  I'm running hot and cold (which is a big improvement, nice to have some "hot" in there).  The motivation is there; I'm getting in a decent amount of hands compared to my historical level of play.  But it just hasn't been quite as fun, for whatever reason.  Plus things have been pretty busy otherwise, so it cuts down on the amount of time I spend reviewing my play, reviewing everyone's blogs, reading forums, watching videos, etc.

I keep bouncing between 100NL and 200NL.  I've been doing fairly well at 100NL, playing well and running decent.  I've been doing crappy at 200NL, playing well until I run bad, then doing a pretty poor job of not letting it affect my play.  I know the mindset I should have, but my outlook/discipline are just not there.  So, I run up enough to take a 5 BI or so shot at 200NL, then eventually lose those 5 BI and start over.  The poker treadmill.  Last Friday, I lost 4 BI in 3 hands somewhat close together:  KK < KQs, Turned straight/flush draw < higher flush on river, and middle set < top set.  Plus a bunch of middling pots where their flushes got there and if I had a draw, it never did.  Pretty standard stuff, and I should be able to take it, but somehow found myself AI vs a preflop maniac with 64s for 80bb.  That right there should have been enough to sit out on all tables.  Ugly stuff.

The silver lining is that the overt spew-tilt is still really rare.  I think I'm playing sub-optimal, but generally on the big losers either my money is going in really well or it's just a cooler situation.  I would just like my enthusiasm to return so that it's fun again.  After all, this is supposed to be a hobby for me and is supposed to be a way to blow off steam, not to cause it :).  Usually, making the right decisions and improving is enough to keep me enthusiastic.  Even when I feel frustrated, it's short-lived, and I'm able to see the big picture.

I actually lost probably a couple days of both poker and work last week fooling around with my new iPhone.  My old "smart" phone was really a POS and if I couldn't get a credit returning it, I would have figured out some really clever way to smash it to smithereens.  The iPhone is pretty fun to use.  I've also never had an iPod (small cheapo MP3 player ftw), so I get to fool around with some fun stuff there, too.

At work, there was a top level executive change.  It won't directly affect me (and if it does, it would only be for the better based on limited history with the guy taking over), but there are a bunch of fire drills to create some decent presentations for him to get a sense of what we're doing.  Also, it's annual review time.  For those of you not in the corporate world, count yourselves lucky that you don't have to go through this :).  Actually, it can be a pretty valuable mechanism to focus you, but the administrative aspects are a pain in the ass.  And because I manage folks, I have theirs to go through and comment on as well.  It's even harder for me to do those because I want to give them decent quality feedback.  I can do it pretty well meeting face to face or on the phone, but it takes a lot longer to write stuff up.  So those things get kind of piled on to business as usual.

Finally, I'm a victim of my success at work.  Today, I got handed someone's pet project that is pretty complex and was not getting enough love from the prior owner.  So, because I've shown that I can push through some tricky projects with some good creativity and vision, it landed in my inbox.  While hard, it seems like a pretty fun project, so I'm only complaining from a time-it-will-take-me standpoint...I'm actually looking forward to it.

Hmm

SB: $175.85
BB: $100.00
UTG: $251.45
Hero (MP): $110.70
CO: $108.50
BTN: $50.00

Pre Flop: Hero is MP with 6c 6h
1 fold, Hero raises to $3.50, 1 fold, BTN calls $3.50, 2 folds

Flop: ($8.50) Ah 7c 7s (2 players)
Hero bets $5, BTN raises to $10

=========================

This seems like a pretty simple hand.  I'm looking over some older sessions, so I forget whether I had any read/history with this guy, so let's just say unknown.  As an aside, my default read of someone who has a half stack for more than a few hands is that he's not that good.

Question #1:  Do we need to worry a ton at these stakes about balancing our play in these spots?  I don't think so.  Unless we're up against a regular, we won't develop enough history on them, and they won't have any on us...probably no notes, just stats.  If they have notes, they won't contain the context of the play.  And a lot of the guys we do/will have history with are either not good enough to worry about them exploiting us or are playing too many tables to notice.  Certainly at higher stakes against more regular, better players, balance is good.  But at 100NL?  On a big site?

Question #2:  If we don't worry too much about balancing our play, should we bet?  If we should bet, should we also bet with air?  If we should bet with our hand and/or with air, should we bet with Ax?  Taking any sort of metagame out of the equation, bets should get value from worse or cause better hands to fold (with some variations, like semibluffs and betting for protection).  If we c-bet with air, we do it because we think better hands will fold.  If we had AK, we'd be doing it to get worse to call, but we would hate for worse to fold because they will have so few outs.  But it's the same opponent, and our hand shouldn't matter.  However, there are 8.5 big blinds in the pot already, and so that could make betting with air correct even if betting with AK is also right.

Question #3:  What to do about his little min-raise?  First of all, if you were the one who cold called on the button and your opponent c-bet into you, what legitimate hands would you raise?  How often would you bluff-raise your opponent's c-bet?  Now, take some random I've-only-got-a-half-stack donk's viewpoint?  What do you think he does with his legitimate hands?  In other words, get inside the mind of the donk.  (This, by the way, is one of the worst parts of my game.  I do a pretty bad job interpreting people's actions, both good and bad players.)

Question #4:  What's better between calling the raise and shoving?  I actually think that this is the easiest question.  I'm not asking if we should fold, just giving a choice between shove and fold.

June Swoon

June was a weird month...in some ways really satisfying, but results wise, it kind of sucked. My graph looks like I broke pretty much even, but here's the thing...I did it in BB's because I played significant amounts of two different stakes. I played about twice as many hands at $2NL than $1NL, and my win rate was negative at the higher stakes (about -3 ptbb/100), while it was positive at the lower stakes (about 7 ptbb/100). So, my roll dropped overall. The big downward movement you see was the end of $2NL for the month, and it happened in brutal fashion, as detailed in some prior posts. I got back just about enough to jump back in at $2NL and see if the poker gods will smile on me...hopefully third time will be the charm.

On the other hand, I was able to play more hands this month than I believe I ever have, and for the most part, felt like I played solid. Not that I don't have some more to go, but I felt like I got away from auto-pilot, didn't feel lost on too many hands, and was validated even on some of the big hands I lost where my money went in as a huge favorite. I went back and looked at that little downswing in some more detail (I think it was about a 12 BI downswing), and it seemed like I was making big hands a fair amount, but too many of the ones that generated action went against me. Also in that stretch where a lot of money went in and I was behind but with good draws (where I had way more pot odds + fold equity to play), I only hit my draw once, and I stopped counting at 8 times...so I was running below expectation there. I guess that's all the stuff that downswings are made of, even when you are playing well. And to my credit, I continued to play well -- for the most part, anyway -- through it, whereas in the past, I probably would have tossed another few BI's in there out of frustration.





I've managed to loosen up my game quite a bit from a few months ago. As expected, I ran pretty cold at $2NL, looking at W$SD. But my other numbers show that I was sufficiently aggressive...I could be even more, but some of the key stats I look for are within my target range...W$WSF, 3-Bet, Attempt to Steal.

Away from the tables, I did OK reviewing my play and studying videos. I'd like to start posting on strat forums again, but I'm unsure how much time I will be able to do it realistically in July. My time will be more limited, I think. I've been getting some feedback on hands here and there from my coach, and that's certainly helped, so from that sense, I do get a chance to write out my thoughts and validate them. But what I don't get out of that is responding to other people's posts, and I think that's pretty valuable, too.