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Mike Sexton is wrong [Jul. 2nd, 2008|01:43 pm]
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Playing in a $.25/$.50 no-limit game, I've got $105 in front of me, and I pick up 33 in late position. Everyone folds to me, I raise it to $2.00 and the BB calls. Flop comes T73o. There's $4.25 in the pot. (I'm ignoring the rake for the example. I remember the bets, and it'll be close enough.) I bet $2. Pause for thought, and a call. ($8.25 in the pot.) Turn card comes a 5. Check and I bet $4 and after a long pause BB raises it to $12. That's $24.25 in the pot with me to call.

My read at the time was that I was probably beat. Just from the table presence, I was pretty sure I was the losing end of a set-over-set situation.

Can he have an overpair? Yes, he can, but it's unlikely, since he didn't raise pre-flop. Can he be bluffing? Sure, and I saw a bluff out of this guy an hour earlier, so he either doesn't do it much or mostly gets away with it. The pause sure felt like the guy calculating how to extract the maximum amount of cash out of me.

So, let's say my read is good but not sure, and put him on a higher set 80% of the time, an overpair 15% of the time, and a bluff 5%. That makes my pot odds poor.

But I have two things going for me: 1) he actually has me covered. 2) I'm pretty sure that if I'm beat, I'm going to get to see the cards for free. Given this guy's prior play, if he has a higher set, he's going to try to check-raise me again on the river, but he'll put in a bet on an overpair, and he'll either continue a bluff or give up on it.

So my implied odds are much better, $8 against a chance for $115. That's 14:1. My chance for the case 3 is 43:1, but with my 20% chance of actually being ahead on the hand, and the possibility that my read is wrong, I decide to make the call and worry on the river. If the 3 doesn't come on the river, if he tries for a check-raise, I'm checking the hand down.

Yes, making the call is a mistake, but not a huge one, once you add in needing to not back down all the time at the table, which will cause your opponents to just run you over.

No worries. The case 3 came. He checked, I bet, he raised, I reraised, he put me all in, and yup, he had TT, just as I thought. He complained about the bad beat, never knowing that I made the call on the turn against the chance of delivering one to him.

Oh yeah, the bit that Mike Sexton is wrong about is when he's commenting about set-over-set on the WPT, saying that the lower set can't ever get away from the hand, and was doomed to put all his money in. Here, if either my opponent or I had less money in front of him, or the river didn't hit so favorably for me, I'd have been out of there in a flash.
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Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]patrissimo
2008-07-02 07:52 pm (UTC)

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It boggles my mind that you are thinking about getting away from sets, when there is no flush or likely straight, in a 25c-50c NL game. Unless this happens to be the one super-tight guy at the table, that is not a game to play in. I mean, I'm totally down with the idea of laying down small sets, but 98% of my time at the poker table is in games where I would rarely lay down a small set. And most of the remaining 2% is in big tournaments, where you have that mix of very good players and very inexperienced players, such that it is still profitable to play, but you might make a big lay down.

Laying down KK preflop is similar. Sure, there are times when you should do it. But it probably means you are in a bad game.

It's just such a huge laydown to make. In the early rounds of the WSOP $10K, against someone I knew was a tight player, I'd have no problem doing it. In my local $10-$10-$20 game where I know the players well, there are people who I'd do it against. But it is not a big part of my game.
[User Picture]From: [info]herooftheage
2008-07-02 08:15 pm (UTC)

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Normally, it wouldn't be a large part of my game either, but I had been playing with the guy for about an hour, and thought I had a good read on him, and, rightly or wrongly, I trust my reads. He didn't seem to me to be multi-tabling, which brings random pauses for inconsequential actions, and so I thought the tempo for this hand was telling.

Now of course, I'm still playing in the $.25/$.50 game, and not the $10/$20 one, but I ascribe that to going slowly, not playing poorly. :)

[User Picture]From: [info]carneggy
2008-07-02 08:08 pm (UTC)

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Worth noting that Sexton is talking about the final stages of a large tournament, and not a relatively low-limit cash game, so the scenarios have some notable differences.

Also, I suspect that most of the people who can make a final table of a major tournament would play it very differently than your opponent did; I doubt many of them would check-raise a blank on 4th street after check-calling the flop.

Unless they really -wanted- to telegraph 'hey, I have a big hand! over here!' :)

Mind you, my analysis may be way off, but to me that raise on 4th street practically screams 'monster hand' - I wouldn't think you'd see him calling a big pre-flop raise with T5 or 64, and he's not likely to call the flop bet with 55.. he might have an overpair, but why wait until 4th street to find out where he's at?

[User Picture]From: [info]carneggy
2008-07-02 08:11 pm (UTC)

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And yeah, Patri's advice carries way more weight than mine. :)
[User Picture]From: [info]herooftheage
2008-07-02 08:17 pm (UTC)

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Worth noting that Sexton is talking about the final stages of a large tournament, and not a relatively low-limit cash game, so the scenarios have some notable differences.


Quite true, but I think he's also trying to give advice to the masses throughout, and so, I suspect I generalize his comments a bit more than perhaps I should.