Marginal Moves

Thanks to everyone who showed up for last nights Bloggerment and well done to Rosie for taking it down again after beating Mr Edge ( Mauzj) HU.I finished 7th after running 55 into Aces.Who says presto is gold?!

I played an interesting hand in the bloggerment against Res and Riggstad which caused a bit of debate.Feel free to call me donkey in the comments section!

I had A5 in the sb( 100/200),Res was on the button with 340 after losing a big race a couple of hands previously and Riggstad was in the big blind.Res had just given me a walk in the previous hand ( I had 88 )and when he pushed this time I reckon he thought he would get more respect because he if was pushing any two,he would have been all in on the last hand.He also knows I'm tight and usually don't call lightly.

Anyway I look down to A5,I have 1800 chips and see 640 in the pot including my 100 small blind bet.I reckon Res is pushing an even wider range ( at least 80% of hands) after his last fold.

On checking on Pokerstove it looks quite close.A5 is 55.68% fav v 44.31% if he's only folding the bottom 20% of hands, and fares slightly better at 57% v 43% v a totally random hand.I also didn't expect Riggs to call me lightly (he had K10) as I thought an 800 bet would look like I had a huge hand that wanted to tempt a call.
If I'd shoved it would have looked weaker there.When Riggstad folded it cost me 240 to potentially win a pot of 640.As it happened the board blanked until Res hit his 10on the river.

With 7 or 8 left maybe I should have been focussing on seeing someone eliminated and if it was nearer the bubble I would never have played it that way.As I was relatively shortstacked compared to the rest of the table it didn't matter to me much if there were 7 or 8 in the game.I reckoned if my Ace high held it was worth the extra 640 chips which would have taken me to nearly 2.5k.That would have given me more fold equity and room to play.If my hand had won I'd also hope to be able take advantage of my new crazier image to get action on my bigger hands as I think I'd probably looked fairly tight/agg until that point!

On reflection it's not a move I'd make every time and perhaps it's more for turbo's where there is less time to accumulate chips.I have to confess at that point I hadn't checked to see when the blinds were going up again.

I still think in the context of that game,that it didn't totally suck donkey ass but it was certainly marginal and kept me awake for a while this morning at 6am when I finally went to bed!

That A5 hand did force me to download Pokerstove and learn how to use it properly after messing around cluelessly with it in the past.It was much easier than I expected to use and I'd highly recommend playing about with it.

Later after the Bloggerment I played four $22's at Party and busted one,bubbled,came 3rd and took one down for about $60 profit.I enjoyed using a reverse auto-timing tell trick I've found seems to work quite well.I'm always on the look out for those auto-check button users to take advantage of.If someone quickly auto-checks a hand it's almost certain they have nothing and it's usually worth a bet to steal the pot.

If I notice someone auto-check folding a lot preflop then I will min raise to steal more often.No need to risk more.The reverse move is simply checking a monster as quickly as possible to make it seem like an auto-check.This hand is a good example.The money may well have gone in regardless, but the weak looking quick checks from myself and the other villain ensured the fish went broke.

I ended up winning $116 over 17 games at Stars which was a relief after my recent run there.It was still a struggle though, and it was just before 6am before I managed to turn things around and get into the black for the night.



Ok,off to pick Nacho up,take him for a run and come back and watch more of Euro 2008....