88 utg cash game

[nirvana]

In a live cash game only one way to play this:

Raise to £19 pre - don't make it £20 as you'll price out the one caller you want

On the flop, dwell, scratch chin, stand up, sigh (audibly but subtly - it's an art but you can learn it) then smash remainder of stack in to the middle, for this scenario I would suggest the last chip of your stack should nearly reach right across the felt.

Thank you

[Cf]

Thanks for the feedback guys. General consensus seems to be to lead out on the flop, but a couple of people suggest checking.

As for the river, I did not bet. I checked behind and my hand was good. Think villian had a 7, so a value bet may well have been called in this instance.

[AlexMartin]

i like how u played it all. wp. assume this was 5handed btw.

You like checking the flop? Why?

when we dont cbet our hand is misrepresented. ppl will put us on missed overs and hence make mistakes.

our hand will rarely end up strong in relation to board strength, so i dont want to bloat the pot and play this oop into a tonne of other players who probably have assorted bs that i wont be able to hand-read well enough oop to play optimally.

basically i just dont like cbetting as we have problems on the turn and river if the pot gets much bigger. 

I love this and something I try to do but never at a 50p/£1 LIVE cash game.

Personally I like the pre raise but am never checking the flop here.

Gotta agree with Neil here. In a live cash game in a multiway pot where I've raised pre I'm never not betting here.

Apart from protecting our hand against a lot of ugly turns against the other 3 players who have limped behind we are losing a ton of value from the idiots who will spew off chunks with random 7's and lots of assorted sillyness.

hmmm, havent played live cash for a while but generally if a good player is acting behind us here we are gonna get pwned by inflating the pot. check call will be a fundamentally better line with 88 on the flop becaue we can expect good villains to float and bluffraise and as the pot gets bigger our decisions will get tougher. Playing guessing games in a small pot on the turn/river > building a big pot  to extract value from the few hands we are crushing and leading to very tough spots oop deep later on. 

Nice hand though and good to see some debate.

[T_Mar]

My first reaction was to bet the flop, but I really like all the reasons you give for checking Alex... by checking you actually end getting max value from hands like the villian ended up having - and at the same time keeping the pot small in an semi awkward spot, nh