I'm considering re-naming this weblog "Wired Kings", because I always seem to have them cracked in some ridiculous chip-depleting fashion. This time I was in the early rounds of a SNG, with 9 players left, dispite the seemingly loose play I was seeing. I see my KK and decide to throw out a ridiculous bet, hoping to get some action from the fools who are playing any two suited cards. If not, I'll get a few arguably small blinds. Whatever.
One person calls my 250 chip bet, and another raises me all-in behind him. Now I'm a little worried about pocket aces, but mostly about these chumps holding Ax and the board putting up an ace. I call all-in, and the guy who called my original 250 folds. My competitor shows 99 vs my KK, and the board flops a 9.
Why would this guy re-raise all-in with a 99 when there was a raise and a call in front? At BEST he had to know he was going to be looking at two overcards from at least one opponent. That puts him at about 50% chance to win the hand, and he just risked almost his entire stack. There are better spots to push. Why would I raise to 250 with garbage to steal 25 chips in blinds?
So assuming anyone is actually reading this, is/was there anything wrong with my 250 chip bet? Could I have played this better somehow? Perhaps more interesting is my opponent: is his play here as stupid (yet lucky) as I have pointed out, or is there some strange wisdom in what he did that I'm not seeing?
posted by Chris @ 1:37 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Re-reading this, I realize the statement "there are better spots to push" *could* be assigned to my play as well. Sure this guy made a stupid move and got lucky. Sure I had a good pre-flop hand that I needed to play. But the bigger problem is my choice of betting 250 chips with so little to gain if everyone folded (the blinds were still very small) and so much to lose if I got called.
Yes, I had been seeing some loose play, but I think more often than not you tend to see that in the early levels of a SNG. These loose players are usually your 7-10 finishers. So I threw out 250 chips (100 would have been a better bet, risking less with the same effect of thinning the competition), then got called, raised to like 700, and here's where my play becomes suspect.
Fearing Ax (or even a disastrous AA), what do I do? I call. Turns out the other guy was an idiot with a pair of nines who got lucky, but I could have just as easily been up against and ace, a pair of aces, or any good high connectors to make a straight.
I *really* try to stick to the concept of "never go all-in unless you're 99% sure you'll win the hand, or you hold less than 6x the BB"... it's just good solid advice for tournament players (especially the online SNG's in the early rounds... late rounds are a different animal), and here I was provoked into liking my KK just a little too much. It ended up knocking me out in a way I didn't anticipate, but it could have been worse: it could have knocked me out in a way *I did anticipate*.
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