Posted on: Today at 12:10:00 pmPosted by: badhaircut
Re: Tournament Hand of the Week: August 13th
Doesnt it make a more sound play to lead out of the flop? You are out of position with a weak kicker. Leading out would be my play here to find out where i stand. Flop play puts you in awful postion for turn and river. I understand that keeping pot size small is key here, but you wud look preety silly check calling all the way down if he has overpair. Id bet out flop, in this instance the guy is likely to shove with his pair and a flush draw (results orientated) then you can fold to his shove range.
No scare card hits the turn, maybe a stop and go bet on the turn is a better play having called the flop. check calling the turn gives you no understanding of where you are in the hand, that leads to majestic/calling station call on the river, depending on the outcome. by betting out the turn more information is learned with a weaker hand in this spot IMO. I woud never check call top pair no kicker on flop turn and river ever! To me that is preety poor standard of play.
The bad play was to continue with the hand at all on the flop when my plan was to fold. However, venturing into bad play territory highlighted a couple of lessons that were the foundation of this hand.
The most important issue was to challenge the theory of betting out to define your hand. Every Blonde who bets out here folds to the re-raise. You essentially say the same thing...bet out to see where you stand...then fold when the re-raise comes in.
But you would be folding the best hand. So the interesting point is....
Are you actually defining your hand by betting out or are you just donating chips to the inevitable re-raise!The second point is...aren't the bet sizes Tin~Tin puts in a better definition of where you stand? Betting less than half the pot on both occasions with an over-pair on a flushing board seemed quite unrealistic to me at the time.
Betting out to "define one's hand" (oh how I loathe that expression, it means defining the OTHER players hand!) causes the loss of almost more chips than any other play, defending Blinds being the other most wasteful culprit.
We are better off just letting go of this on the flop, once he bets. If he's at it, fine, let him have it. We will play our hands on our Terms when we have position & circumstances working better for us. We are being dictated to by others here.
The problem with leading out is that it's nearly always an information bet, often to find out where you stand, and a good aggressive player will take advantage by raising you off the pot. The best way to deal with this is to lead out with very strong hands. Aggressive players then tend not to put you on monsters and attempt to raise you off pots. The weak lead (I mean weak in the sense of how it's seen, not necessarily a weak bet) is the best weapon against players like this.
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