OK so two hands I think are really interesting / close and I may've gone the wrong way both times so I thought I'd go through them in detail, both for you guys to see where it all went wrong, and for my own piece of mind to learn/improve.
Hand 1: Hijack raises to 350 at 75/150. I call BTN with
, Ian Simpson calls BB.
Ian checks, hijack checks, I bet 525, Ian raises to 1750, hijack folds, I call.
Ian bets 3100, I call.
Ian bets 9800, I call, Ian had
.
OK. Seems pretty bad right?!
So my thoughts on the flop were that Ian is full of shit a lot of the time here. Likes to just represent whatever comes on the board. Just think he's frequencies are way out of whack and since he's defending the bb here probably 85%, the combos of pure bluffs vastly outweigh the 7x and 22. Yes, I'm guessing down the streets, yes he'll still have 25% with even the 86o types of hands, I was happy to call the flop really. I've got two outs to his stack if he does have it, too.
Gotta call this turn for sure if my flop logic is sound.
The river is really interesting. He bets 9800 into 10825. So I need around 32% to call. So let's doing some combinatorics.
Value: With this sizing I can say with around 80% certainty that he doesn't have a flush, and 90-95% certainty that he has a bare 7. I'm also ruling out any sort of 1 (technically 2) pair hand better than mine.
So that leaves full houses. 22 - 6 combos, 74s, 3 combos, J7s 3 combos, 72s 3 combos. I'd say he'd very likely play J7 and 74 for this, and probably 22, but not that likely to have 72s, so in total i'll give him 5+3+3+1 = 12 combos. Plus the odd flush and 7x that I discounted heavily above. Let's give him 3 of those. So 15 total.
So to make a breakeven call I need to find 7 combos of bluffs.
BluffsVs most people you have to assume 0 total airballs here, some sort of backdoor equity or blockers, but Ian is the most likely person in that hiroller field to have a Q9o sort of hand here. Those who've played with him before can back this up. He puts you in very tough spots and it's hard to ever put him on a hand. So counting his bluff combos is more or less impossible.
But I really don't think it'll be hard to find 7 bluffs combos. Even if you rule out complete airballs like Q9o, and just count his
x hands, or
x hands, there's gonna be enough.
x combos, I'd say defends 100%, 3betting maybe AJ+ or AQ+. Let's count the
3, 5, 6, 8, 9, T combos = 2+4+4+4+4+4 = 22 combos. And let's say he chooses to take this line with these hands 20% of the time. that's 4.4combos.
x combos, defending maybe just K9, KT, KJ, KQ, we've ruled out KJ so that's 12 combos. Less likely to bluff with these (though maybe not as Ax works as a call better than Kx so might be calling Ax on the flop and raising Kx), either way, it's unlikely but let's say this counts as another 1 combo, so that's 5.4 combos.
So we need 1.6 combos from his
Tx sort of hands, hands like 89 with backdoor equity, or even just pure airballs. I think there'd be enough but it's very hazy.
Analyse like this is so open to tweaking the numbers to suit an agenda. So I won't go any further, and don't think there's any point. It's so hard to say how often he's gonna choose to take this line with those bluffs, maybe way less. But then it could be way more, he's the type of player that'll just decide to bluff this board with whatever cards he has, whatever the runout. I think it's really a really marginal hero call.
My thoughts at the time were basically, he's got a full house or nothing here, not many combos of fullhouses on this board, it's Ian Simpson, I call. And what's written above is what my brain was doing behind the scenes to produce this conclusion!
Hand two on the way. Need a biscuit after all that. Get me those Golden Crunches.