Live Cash Puzzler. This is a good one!

I'm playing live $1/$2 NLH at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut and not doing as well as I have the last couple of weeks. In fact, I'm down exactly $200, but the table seems soft so I rebuy for another $100 promising myself that I will quit for the night if I lose that too.



The very first hand after the rebuy I'm dealt A♣2♣ in the Highjack seat and open raise to $6. The CO calls and the Button reraises to $20. The BB calls, I call, the CO calls. Pot =$81


Flop is 665 all black
BB checks, I look directly at the preflop raiser and check.
CO checks.
The Button looks at me suspiciously and checks.


Turn is 3♣
The BB checks
I again look directly at the Button and announce "All-In" for my last $80 with my Nut Flush Draw.
The CO folds.
The Button tanks for over a minute and eventually folds.
The BB says " I HAVE to call this!" and he does. The pot is $240.



The River is 8♣
The BB stands up shows his 9♣7♣ and says "Straight Flush!"
Mohegan has a nightly High Hand Jackpot and the dealer announces to the room "New High Hand! Nine High Straight Flush!"
I show my ace high flush, say "Very nice hand" and quit for the night.



Something bothered me the whole drive home. Can you guess what it is? This is a good one.

Why did the BB call the PF re-raise w 97s?
or
The black 5 wasn't a club after all? (I'm reaching here.)

You say on turn you have a flush draw. So only one of the three cards on flop are clubs. So the 5 was not a club.

ouch, sticks right, the black 5 wasnt a club or else you would have made your nut flush on the turn.
EDIT - cardriverx beat me to it :P lol

4 color decks FTW. But surely someone noticed it?

That's it! Very good.

Right. I made sure to add that I wasn't on a draw until the turn. My Shove was a semi bluff. I put the button on AK.
That's a good question. Someone may have. As i said, MS has a high hand jackpot that runs from 6-9pm. The floor manager was on his way over to verify that the hand qualified but I didn't wait around to see what happened. The thing is, if I had mucked my cards, at least the pot would still have been his, but I didn't, I turned them face up. I believe there's a rule that Cards Speak. In other words, even if I had thought I had lost the hand the dealer would have been obliged, had he noticed, to correct my mistake. This happen alot in Omaha. But to be honest, the floor manager looked like he was about 16 years old. I think it's possible that he might have just rubber stamped the high hand. Shame on me for not paying better attention.
But this does beg an interesting question. What if someone does notice? I'm gone. There's no way to identify me. What happens to the pot?

are you sure it wasnt you who saw things wrong? hard to believe no one else at the table, the dealer , and the manager would miss it?

The BB had very luck in that hand and in my opinion I will never pay $20 with 97 black pre-flop

I am sure of my hand, the board and the dealer announcing "9 high straight flush.

So I assume you didn't notice this before you left the table. I mean if you are as sure of your hand as you are (and I believe you) then you should have stuck around.

I guess since you left though, and if somebody did catch the mistake, the the pot would have been awarded to the only live hand at the table.

dude that sucks, too bad you didnt notice it at the time

Still not sure what was bothering you?

Did u get mesmerized by the moment and a false announcement of a st8 flush? When in fact it was only a str8 and you actually won, but were snowed?

Hallucinogenic liquor?

Fold preflop

Yup. The mesmo part I mean. I'm not an experienced live player. When the dealer announced the straight flush it didn't occur to me that he could be wrong. I was tired, tilting and ready to go. I started thinking about it before I even reached my car.

That you put 1/5 of your stack in preflop with A2s??? That would bother me forever too.

Yeah, not a good feeling. Unless you were playing heads up, if it was not a straight flush, someone would have caught it at the table to correct the dealer.

This is a great scenerio of Tilt:

1) It seems as though on your 3rd buy in you may have been tired and not in the right mind set to continue playing. I know whenever I tell myself "Ok.. this is the last buy in" I am not usually in the best mindset to play. (but also may not be in your case)
2) calling 20% of your stack with A2 suited out of position. Not the best hand to try to go against multiple opponents with 2 players behind. Had you not been playing and loosing do you think you would have still called this bet with 2 players behind or do you think you would have picked a better spot?
3) Because you may have been tired and/or upset at previous losses you may not have seen the cards clearly or were not thinking correctly. Had you been in the right mind frame you would have taken the time to make sure you had the winner or ensure you lost.
4) At the table I would imagine that if somone saw this error they would have spoken up (but not guaranteed). This is also why you should hold on to your cards till you see for yourself that you are beat. Had you been in the right frame of mind hopefully you would have done so.

Overall hopefully you learned something from this and can think of it that you paid $100 to learn a valuable lesson about 6th street and tilt.

Raising preflop with hands like that is pretty standard for me, especially from middle to late position and I've done pretty well with them. I probably would have folded to just the button raise but the BB's call made the odds pretty tempting. Assuming the CO is going to call as well I'm getting better than 4:1. The implied odds were through the roof. folding would have been a big mistake.

No they weren't. With a $100 stack and needing to call a $20 3bet preflop even best case that you win $100 from all 3 other players (you never will but let's dream) you're not getting anywhere close to the odds you need.

Honestly if this is your standard play, you're one of the reasons live play is so profitable.

Being down $200 in a $1/$2 live game is bad but not the same as on-line. Live 1/2 plays a lot more like 2/5 on-line. Opening raises (not mine) are in the 5-10 bb range and nobody folds once they've so much as called. You'd be surprised how quickly $100 goes. I don't feel like I had made any mistakes up to that point. Compared to the rest of the table I had played pretty tight. Finding a spot to open a pot in late position is actually pretty rare. But it's true that things had not been going my way. Neither my raises or my CB's were getting the sort of respect I'm used to and I wasn't getting the flops to take advantage of the loose calls. I don't regret the way i played that last hand. I do regret not paying more attention to the board. We on-line players can be pretty lazy that way. We're so used to letting the software do the thinking for us. I understand that I still have a lot to learn in regards to my live play. I'm up to the challenge. BTW, I'm still up $900 in the last 3 sessions.

Point well taken and appreciated. But it wasn't $20 to call it was $14 and even with implied odds as they were 4:1 still looks pretty good to me. PT3 says I'm a .64/100 winner with A2s-A5s when I open late over 130,000 hands. Not a huge money maker but by no means a big mistake. So, for now I think I'll keep that one play in the toolbox.

Filter those hands by ones where you call a 3bet OOP and see if it's the same

I don't mind opening with Axs there. It's calling the 3bet that's bad.

the chances that the 5 wasnt a club are slim to none if they announced it...personally i've never just heard someone announce their hand and taken their word for it, i look at the board and see how it played out and let it sink it, especially when its a ridiculous hand like that...if it was a misread hand casino's are usually pretty good about things like that and you should have gone back when you felt like u realized u had been jerked out of the hand, they would have most likely made it up to you somehow...that is really unfortunate tho, and just goes to show you shouldnt be playing when you're so tired that you can't read the board clearly

Yeah, there's no way the 5 wasn't a club. 8 other players, a dealer, and a floor manager could not have all misread the board...

moral of the story; don't play tired

+100.

Even with only 50 bb?

Did youu have a player's card. They could identify you by that and bag up your chips after you left.

yea if it was misread then they'll definitely find a way to contact you and get you ur money back somehow....they wont just leave it be if they were wrong

In a live game with a smallish raise like OP made I think it's likely +EV since we're likely to get lots of callers and we're fairly likely to win a decent amount if we hit.

Hrm? you mean 2cent/5cent?

Sorry for the delay. This is a good question, maybe one that deserves it's own thread but for now I'll just post the short answer. Folding everytime you get raised is bad poker, calling everytime is worse. So what do you use as a criterion for calling and folding. Well, in the case above had I simply been raised by the one in position oponenent I certainly would have folded. But after the BB called with good reason to believe the cut-off would as well, I'm getting pretty good odds to stay in the hand with anything other than absolute junk. In this case I think A2s qualifies as a keeper.
This is a pretty specific situation and I'm not sure I have a large enough database to make meaningful conclusion but here it is.
First I ran a filter for everytime I open raised at a full table (7-9 players) with any hand and then called a 3 bet. There were 444 occurances and the results were pretty horrifying. -2.84BB/100 with a 30.18% winrate for a loss of $389.99.
If we looked no closer we might conclude that we should just always fold to a 3 bet right? But in the example above I was getting tempting odds to call so I changed my filter to include only hands where 3-4 people see the flop. Things changed considerably. There were 188 occurances, as expected my winrate dropped to 28.19% but my BB/100 rose to .62BB/100. My 2 biggest winning hands were AJs and A5s.
Conclusion, Fold spec hands to one raiser, call with 3:1 or better odds.
Gotta go.

Did you also filter for hands where you only had 50bb? I doubt it.

It's a losing play. I guarantee it.

Not sure the best way to go about doing that but when I filter for only the hands I won my avg BB/100 = 24.43. That's Big Bets, not Big Blinds so we're pretty close to the 50 I was carrying. There were 53 hands. Of those, 18 were hands where I won less than 50bb's 32 were more. The biggest win in terms of BB's was JTs with 101BB/100 = 200bb/100 +/-.

Not sure the best way to go about doing that but when I filter for only the hands I won my avg BB/100 = 24.43. That's Big Bets, not Big Blinds so we're pretty close to the 50 I was carrying. There were 53 hands. Of those, 18 were hands where I won less than 50bb's 32 were more. The biggest win in terms of BB's was JTs with 101BB/100 = 200bb/100 +/-.