Day 2: Tourney, Cash, and Friends
Tourney: I played the $330 deep stack at the Venetian and I lasted about 3 hours. There were only 3 important hands that I played the entire tournament and the summary could be summed up with those.
Hand 1: We are in the first level of the tournament probably not 30 minutes in, I had some pretty good reads on my opponents even though I haven’t played with them before. I get AQo in EP and raise it to t300 (blinds 50/100 effective stack 12k) and the button calls; he’s very taggish but in a bad way–very predictable and easy to put on hands. I put his cold calling range on pocket pairs and broadway cards, which is fairly narrow given how bad some of these players can be.
The flop comes J92 rainbow and since I’m OOP here my standard play is to C-bet and get my opponent to fold 33-88 as there aren’t many strong hands in range given this flop, although there are a fair amount of draws that I get value from. I bet t400 in the t600 pot and he flats; the turn is a blank 4 and I check to him and he checks behind with the pot being 1400. I fully expected him to bet though if he did have a hand like 33-88 on that turn just because a lot of bad online regulars/tournament players turn those hands into bluffs and I would have folded. Once he checked back though his range was much weaker than had he bet so that’s a plus for me. The river paired the 9 on the board and was a very good card for me. Not only did it reduce the likelihood that he has the 9 but its a relatively safe card not likely to help me either and makes it a good card to expect a bluff on. I check to my opponent and he fires t900 into the t1400 pot and I started to think of all the hands that he would do that with and it didn’t add up.
Before I played a lot of HU I wouldn’t even have thought about calling, or maybe I would have attempted to turn my own hand into a bluff and fired again. Assuming my preflop reads are good he’s not likely to bet 33-88 here as that would make no sense (and if someone did bet it here it is extremely note worthy) so his river bets are going to be JJ+ (unlikely), Jx and I guess 98s for value and a ton of missed straight draws like KQ, QT, T8s. The problem is a Tag isn’t likely to have too many Jx hands in this spot, maybe QJ, KJ and AJ only (30 combos) and then 98s (2 combos) to complete the value range. The bluffs will make up 22 combinations and my opponent needs to be bluffing only 900/2300 for my call to be profitable. Since he’s bluffing 22/54 our call is mainly on the break even variety but I felt like he was bluffing a lot more than for value so I did make the call, and he showed QT for the missed draw. This call alone pretty much made my day even if the results didn’t turn in my favor. My chip stack: ~t13,500.
Hand 2: The only woman at the table was sitting to my right and thankfully she was friendly because otherwise it would be a complete Bore to play as I was doing a lot of folding. She seemed to know what she was doing to some degree, but you could tell from the way she complains about the beats that she’s not the most experienced of players. She’s down to roughly t5500 chips with blinds of 75/150 and limps in EP; I make a fairly loose isolation play with QsJs up to t600 and I get 1 caller plus the lady to my right. The flop is KdTs7s giving me a sick draw; the lady to my right leads into me 1000 chips and I don’t think too much about it and raise it up to 3000 chips. These players like to lead fairly weak into the Pre-flop raiser mainly for ‘information’ so i wouldn’t be surprised if she did bet there with Tx and I don’t expect her to ever fold a king anyway. My raise size made it so that if she did have top pair her most +EV move would be to just go all in right there and give me my most equity; if she called though and she checked to me on the turn I could very easily check behind when I missed as she’s committed anyway. Unfortunately she did just call though to my displeasure but no worries, I turned my flush. She decided to put the rest of her chips in after I hit it and she was fairly upset that I raised here ‘with just a flush draw’ but oh well. Chip stack: t19,500.
The final hand for me had the effective chip stack at t18,000 with blinds of 100/200/25. I’m on the button with KK and it folds around; I make it t600 to go and both the SB and BB defend their blind, the pot is t1800. The flop comes T54 two-toned and my Taggish opponent in the big blind leads t1000 into me and I don’t really hesitate to raise it to t3000 and he quickly makes it t7500. At this point I had some pause but with the flush draw out there this is how many people would play naked flush draws like 4 years ago when they thought they had fold equity. Fortunately I know better than to fold an over pair to my opponents while playing tournaments lmao and I just ship in my last 15,000 chips. He didn’t snap call but he did make a ’sigh’ before calling and flipping over K5s for the bare flush draw. His equity was pretty poor and I really don’t like the bet/3bet line as a semi-bluff in this situation; I would have either bet/called the flop or check/called and possibly check/shoved had the stacks been small enough. The turn brings the flush and its gg; I bust probably around the 675th mark out of a mammoth starting crowd of 850 and head to find something to do.