Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Jackace no good?

I got out and about last night and got to see some friends and we ended up playing a 6-handed NLHE freezeout. Was a lot of fun since I have had no opportunities to play live poker since December's trip to Las Vegas. Early on with 60BB effective stacks, I found myself in an interesting spot in the big blind with the suited jackace in diamonds in the big blind. The short-stacked player on my left (who had lost the early big pot to the player in the small blind with top pair versus a rivered straight) raised to 3x the blinds and the small blind called. I called.

The flop came down 7d2d4s. It was checked around to the raiser, who bet 12 BBs and was clearly committed to playing for his stack with only about 18 BBs behind. The small blind called. The pot was large and I read the small blind as weak with any two cards, and the other villain with an overpair to the board, probably nines or tens. So I opted to check-raise for my stack hoping to get a loose call from the small blind, expecting to have more than 33% pot equity, and if I forced her out I'd have approximately 15 outs twice with some dead money in the pot going headsup against the shorty. Sure enough, she snap-called and we all flipped our hands over.

The small blind had 8d4d for a pair and a baby flush draw.
The big blind had 9s9d for the overpair to the board.
I had the AdJd for the nut flush draw and two overcards.

Sadly, I bricked out and 99 held for the main pot and I transferred the remainder of my chips to the small blind.

When I got home, I ran an equity calculation and verified that 99 was about 38% to win, I was about 45% to win, and the 48dd was about 17% to win.

I was not all that happy with how I played the hand, though. I could have re-raised preflop. On the flop, I made a risky play and even though I had the best of it with a nice overlay to make my hand I put my stack at risk.

This was just another data point in the ongoing struggle to balance risk management and expected value in the early stages of a poker tournament. For comparison's sake, if I was playing an online poker tournament, I probably play this more aggressively preflop and I'd have much more hope that jackace would end up being the mortal nuts.

1 comment:

Memphis MOJO said...

I like the way you reasoned the hand out. The card gods didn't cooperate.