blonde poker forum

your default line here please


A complete unknown has just sat down late at the table as an alternate

Its a 10k starting chip freezeout with a good clock, £100 buy in, live

At the start of the second level, 50-100


You raise to 300 with  Aspades Js in the cut off, with 9000 behind

button calls

complete unknown calls, so he has 9600 or so behind. Its his first hand. He comments

"ooh we've got 10k chips, thats good,I normally play with much less"

big blind calls

Flop comes 

 4s 5s Tc

checked to me

I bet 900, don't mind winning it there and then..if called its a pot builder

passed to complete unknown who insta check raises to 3,000


I consider all three options here, and might do any against different types of player

What is your default line in this spot?

pass everytime, its not worth the risk ( unless i have a solid read, which we dont), ge coulc have flopped the any set, have an open ended straight flush draw,  all of which make this hand less attractive.

muck it and move on.

Shove every time, i dont think he can call without a set and his hand looks like a draw.

I shove our hand is two overs with the nut flush draw which has a big amount of equity on this flop and we have enough chips to give us a reasonable amount of fold equity.

I think I pass v an unknown

ALL IN!!

My instinct says 'push' but I'm on a draw risking all my chips and he might have the set already. I know nothing about him and the ' oh we got 10k chips' could mean anything. He might be doing a Mantis non verbal thingy...:) I guess its about risking what you got to make him fold or hitting the 2 overs/ a lovely spade if he calls..... hmmmmmm  Could I call? Its only 2100 more? If I hit I've got him unless the board pairs:)  The more you think about the answer the more difficlut it becomes. I think I'm calling...lol

Later on in the tournament you could well be crying out for a situation like this and you would push without hesitation. I don't think you should exercise caution here just because it's early!...that doesn't sound like a good enough reason to me. This is a No Limit Hold'em Tournament and you win them by pressuring your opponents and winning pots. You want to kick off your campaign in the right frame of mind and I don't think passively retreating from a situation like this does that. If you push here your oppo almost certainly puts you on a big pair because the action fits that type of hand perfectly. So he can only call this bet with a draw that you are ahead of right now, a set or 2 pair. Flopped sets are quite rare but in that worst case scenario we have the flush draw to fall back on. The point is that feelings of a) It's early b) He could have flopped a monster c) I could loose this hand d) I don't know him....are feelings you want your oppo to be battling with when YOU push, not worrying unnecessarily about them yourself.

Calling the re-raise is a non-starter because you will never win. If the spade doesn't come you probably get pushed off the pot if a brick hits the turn and if the flush DOES come your oppo probably shuts down and you wont get paid.

mad says her instinct is to push and we all know we should be following our instincts more in poker.

I dont even think this is marginal  taking into consideration a clock of less than an hour and an average field for a 1/2 decent player. Flushy could find better spots though prolly.  ;marks;

I push :) lol 

I pushed

You say all 3 options are viable, but i'm never calling here, 1 of 2 options...

pushey wushey :)

I like the push here. 

If he's got the set he's calling and you're looking for the spade, if not you've won a nice pot.

the call is horrible and we should never be considering it here.

the pass is not terrible if you don't like coin flipping for your tourney early on but I'm lumping it all in here.

we have massive FE with the push and the only hands we're scared of here are 44, 55 and TT (I'm assuming he won't have called PF with a 2 pair hand  and would've reraised with AA). Everything else we're either way ahead of or we're flipping.

given this, what do you think his check raising range of hands is?

I would be honest and guess he is playing A, 10, Hit top pair with top kicker... and is a very loose aggressive player, is worried about the flush so wants to take the pot there and there

2 options for me there, Im pushing all in, or folding, Never calling as if you miss the flush your just chip donking!

lesser flush draws/ combo draws/ sets. But we have FE baby!!!!

Your oppo is a complete unknown and so speculating about his range is probably a useless exercise. However, putting him on a set until you know better is a very restrictive stance to take imo....because that is the LEAST likely scenario.

If this was a limped pot or a different stage in the tournament the passing option could be given due consideration. But this is a pot YOU raised pre-flop and a pot YOU juiced on the flop....so to get pushed off YOUR POT when drawing to the nuts is an eventuality I wouldn't want to entertain.

I have talked before about the sliding scale in tournaments between chip accumulation and chip preservation. Well here, the tournament has just started, everyone has the same amount of chips, and EVERYONE is looking to accumulate. If you slip into chip preservation mode so early you are going to be left behind in the rush to accumulate.

When you push your oppo will sometimes fold and sometimes call. Sometimes he calls and you will win a big pot when the spade comes and you will be out if it doesn't. So what. The important thing is that you approached a No Limit Hold'em tournament in the right spirit and you are doing what it takes to win. Folding only gives you the guaranteed opportunity to gamble a little later with less chips....and you will still have a passive mentality to contend with.   

TT+,55-44,ATs,A5s-A4s,KTs,QTs,JTs,ATo,A5o-A4o,KTo,QTo,JTo

against this range it's a flip, throw in weaker flush draws and the ever present chance that he's making a move with air and we're ahead of the range. this plus out FE makes it a push

but we're favourite against the OE SF draw. this is normally massive but only if both the straight and flush draws are live, here the flush draw isn't so villain would have 9 less cards to hit than he'd expect

We shouldn't have any FE here given that he is going to be getting over 2 : 1 on the call for the rest of it. Jus saying.

saying our opponent has pot odds is not the same as saying we don't have FE. Our FE increases as the likelihood of our oppo passing increases. in this case I'd suggest that the likelihood of the pass is high with a lot of holdings as we're asking a player who's never played with a deepstack to put in close to 7k of his 10k starting stack

---
  25,740  games     0.016 secs     1,608,750  games/sec

Board: Tc 4s 5s
Dead: 

   equity    win    tie          pots won    pots tied   
Hand 0:    54.868%     54.87%    00.00%             14123            0.00   { AsJs }
Hand 1:    45.132%     45.13%    00.00%             11617            0.00   { TT, 55-44, KsQs, KsJs, 63s, 63o }


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ranges wise, this is what I got on PStove when I deliberated earlier


He had 10 10 by the way for flopped top set : a desire to open out my game and accumulate early or go home ran into a monster

I make that range a bit tight (surely needs AT in at least if not KT, QT, JT and overpairs) and can't see 63 being in there as he's called the PF raise but it makes very little difference. I think my range came out about 55-45 in villains favour but either way I make the push correct

I would add that A-K is also in the range of any American opponent

What? The bigger the amount of money in the middle relative to what is left to go in: the less FE we have. When the amount of money in the middle becomes more than twice what is left to go in people fold with a rapidly decreasing frequency. He has made a bet that makes it very difficult for him to give up on the hand. On average (and this is against an unknown remember) the likelihood is that we get called here. Other ways of looking at this problem are irrelevant.

 rotflmfao

I agree with gatso on this. The chap sits down and tells the table he's not familiar with bigger events....and offering up this sort of free info to all his oppos shows he's none to familiar with the fundamentals of poker either. This is why I think pushing is the right play for THIS guy and we do have the increased FE gatso talks about. It is quite possible the maths will escape him and/or he was just getting excited with tp.

And he WILL lay tp down because he doesn't want to go out. And not wanting to go out is often pressure enough to push someone off a hand they should call with, especially early on.

this is of course assuming he's being honest... :)

We probably have more fold equity than we think, as Gatso and Mantis point out players tend to pass here more often than they should. An unknown live player in general don't go with the Maths per se and everytime I play live I see loads of laydowns getting ridiculous odds to call with any two.

We only have to have a small amount of fold equity here to make pushing correct and if he calls with the whole of his range, our hand is not going to be far from 50/50.