$0.10 NLHE MTT: Did I play this too conservatively?

EnigmaTTO

EnigmaTTO

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Winning Poker Network (Yatahay) - 40/80 NL - Holdem - 8 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

MP+1: 24.44 BB (VPIP: 100.00, PFR: 100.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, hands: 1)
Hero (CO): 35.46 BB
BTN: 65.49 BB (VPIP: 20.00, PFR: 25.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 5)
SB: 23.37 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 6)
BB: 107.9 BB (VPIP: 13.04, PFR: 8.70, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 24)
UTG: 94.91 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 2)
UTG+1: 71.37 BB (VPIP: 42.86, PFR: 25.93, 3Bet Preflop: 7.69, Hands: 28)
MP: 49.82 BB (VPIP: 14.29, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 14)

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has A A

fold, UTG+1 raises to 3 BB, fold, MP+1 calls 3 BB, Hero raises to 8.12 BB, fold, fold, fold, UTG+1 calls 5.12 BB, fold

Flop: (20.75 BB, 2 players) A 8 8
UTG+1 checks, Hero checks

Turn: (20.75 BB, 2 players) 5
UTG+1 bets 5.19 BB, Hero calls 5.19 BB

River: (31.12 BB, 2 players) 4
UTG+1 bets 7.79 BB, Hero raises to 22.15 BB and is all-in

So I'm not sure whether I could have played this any better in terms of trying to extract as much value from the hand as possible. Villain was somewhat loose up to this point and had won a couple decent sized pots. Though it was still early on so I didn't want to put too much faith in this. I wasn't sure what kind of bet sizing I would be able to get away with so I kept on the smaller side with my preflop re-raise to where I was fairly certain I'd get at least a call.

The rest of the hand I played pretty passively once he checks to me since I'm 99.9% sure I have the nuts and I don't want to scare him off if he had nothing at all. On the river I figured that he would likely have just folded any re-raise I make there so If he didn't make a hand so I decided to shove. In hindsight, I'm thinking that I should've gone alot smaller.

Thoughts?
 
Q

quant1986

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I think you line is fine, maybe get hero call from TT-QQ, don't think you need to make it smaller

Will smaller size get called by TT more often? probably not
 
Jacki Burkhart

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I think you played this hand well...most likely he just has nothing and you extracted maximum from his bluffs and really weak value. sometimes we just dominate the board so much there is no way to make money.

preflop is fine. I think most players are price insensitive at this buy in level with 3bets. he either has a hand he's going to call with or a hand he's gonna fold so I would have raise the full 9bb but that's nit picky.

flop I agree with checking back. if you bet he's just gonna fold a ton and if he folds hands like 99-JJ that's a disaster since you have them almost dead and they will likely pay 1-2 streets later.

turn: when he leads this small size he mostly likely has a pure bluff or a very weak value hand. so I doubt his hand can stand a raise. I think flatting is best to keep his bluffs alive and to maybe get a small bet out of him on river. if he checks river we can bet like 33%-40% pot and hope for a hero from pocket pairs

river: it's great he leads and we have no choice but to jam. It's important to understand that he's folding almost his entire range to any raise size we make. So we want to target the strongest parts of his range to make the most off those. basically the rare times he has an 8 we want to make the most we can by jamming.

well played
 
Matt Vaughan

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Agree with missjacki 100% and just wanna add a couple things below.

I think you played this hand well...most likely he just has nothing and you extracted maximum from his bluffs and really weak value. sometimes we just dominate the board so much there is no way to make money.

preflop is fine. I think most players are price insensitive at this buy in level with 3bets. he either has a hand he's going to call with or a hand he's gonna fold so I would have raise the full 9bb but that's nit picky.

flop I agree with checking back. if you bet he's just gonna fold a ton and if he folds hands like 99-JJ that's a disaster since you have them almost dead and they will likely pay 1-2 streets later. Those hands will also occasionally sometimes improve to boats on turn or river where betting the flop might prevent them from seeing those cards. Even 77- can improve to boats when we check back, and those will generally go broke in this hand. While these are "unlikely" outcomes, getting to stack him the times it happens is important.

turn: when he leads this small size he mostly likely has a pure bluff or a very weak value hand. so I doubt his hand can stand a raise. I think flatting is best to keep his bluffs alive and to maybe get a small bet out of him on river. if he checks river we can bet like 33%-40% pot and hope for a hero from pocket pairs. I'm not sure that villain always HAS to have weak holdings, though I agree it's more likely. And I like just calling for basically the same reasons as on the flop as well.

river: it's great he leads and we have no choice but to jam. It's important to understand that he's folding almost his entire range to any raise size we make. So we want to target the strongest parts of his range to make the most off those. basically the rare times he has an 8 we want to make the most we can by jamming.

well played



One last point I want to make about slowplaying in general that I think is SUPER important. Slowplaying gets better and becomes more efficient the shorter the effective stacks are.

Repeated another way: How good of a slowplay a certain spot is, is inversely proportional to stack depth.

When short, slowplaying is generally pretty good with our very good hands because weaker hands are more easily able to put chips in and the value of catching bluffs is higher (because they may account for a large portion of the stacks anyway). When deeper, we will often not want to slowplay as much because 1) bluffs will account for only a small portion of the stacks in play and 2) the small amount of the times that we cooler certain hand types, we need to be winning more than we'd be able to by slowplaying across multiple streets.

So in this specific example, if we were maybe double as deep as we are, I'd still check back flop but I'd be more inclined to start raising on turn so that we can cooler 8x and boats for their entire stacks. If we were MEGA deep I'd DEFINITELY be raising turn, and probably doing it pretty large.

Now all that being said, it's still really hard to cooler hands on this exact flop when we have top set, but when deep, we're more concerned with getting value from the cooler hands EARLY, whereas when short there's more value in trying to let stuff catch up since villain's stack off threshold is going to be lower anyway.
 
EnigmaTTO

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Thanks for the feedback folks! I appreciate the insight, especially the point about slowplaying with respect to effective stack sizes. Definitely would've never thought about it that way, will try and put this into practice.
 
Jacki Burkhart

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Agree with missjacki 100% and just wanna add a couple things below.





One last point I want to make about slowplaying in general that I think is SUPER important. Slowplaying gets better and becomes more efficient the shorter the effective stacks are.

Repeated another way: How good of a slowplay a certain spot is, is inversely proportional to stack depth.

When short, slowplaying is generally pretty good with our very good hands because weaker hands are more easily able to put chips in and the value of catching bluffs is higher (because they may account for a large portion of the stacks anyway). When deeper, we will often not want to slowplay as much because 1) bluffs will account for only a small portion of the stacks in play and 2) the small amount of the times that we cooler certain hand types, we need to be winning more than we'd be able to by slowplaying across multiple streets.

So in this specific example, if we were maybe double as deep as we are, I'd still check back flop but I'd be more inclined to start raising on turn so that we can cooler 8x and boats for their entire stacks. If we were MEGA deep I'd DEFINITELY be raising turn, and probably doing it pretty large.

Now all that being said, it's still really hard to cooler hands on this exact flop when we have top set, but when deep, we're more concerned with getting value from the cooler hands EARLY, whereas when short there's more value in trying to let stuff catch up since villain's stack off threshold is going to be lower anyway.
yes very cool point! thanks Scourrge that's something I had never thought about exactly like that. I think I have intuitively landed on the same strategy but never considered exactly why this is true about slow playing. the way I have always thought about it is "if you're deeper you have to start getting more money in the pot earlier in order to get it all in by the river" but that is too simplistic because of what you said about their stacking off threshhold; depth of stack completely changes how strong of hands they are WILLING to stack off with.
 
Dejange

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Thanks for the feedback folks! I appreciate the insight, especially the point about slowplaying with respect to effective stack sizes. Definitely would've never thought about it that way, will try and put this into practice.


Great hand to post here for feedback, and you get expert opinions from 2 of our best CC Members!
Jacki and Matt both knows how the poker game is played, and here in particular you could answer yourself why you are feeling more comfortable when you just shove or huge raise pocket hands like AA, KK or AK early in large MTT's :)
 
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