The lure of a good hand

So I buy-in at my usual $5.. (ok no flames about that now plz) Creep my way up to $9. I'm pretty happy about myself here, adding 80%. But then I was thinking, damn, I never even once got a good hand preflop. So I leeched these winnings with pretty crappy hands.

Just as I thought this, I got AK. Ok, not the best hand in the world, I vastly prefer the higher pps, but atleast it's a hand I can raise with for a change. Throw 50cents, usually good for 1-2 callers. The whole table joins in. Wtf. Flop is all low cards. Minimal raises all round, which, together with the huge size of the pot, justify me going for my 6 outs. In the end the pot is taken by A7-guy going hitting pair of 7s. Hmf. Next hand I get AJ. Ok, not a winner, but in 6max already a pretty good one. another raise, get 2 callers now. KJx on the flop, I c-bet, get reraised.. and like a DONK I call it. A microsecond later I'm thinking.. bloody hell, what did you do that for? Big raise on the turn and I fold instantly. (guy had KJ) So now I'm down to $4.90. After my "good hands".

Irony.. maybe, but I think in part what might have caused me to throw needless money away there, is the "expectation" to make money off of a playable hand. A very dangerous thing. A leak even. A better hand gives you better odds than a weaker hands.. but to think it has to pay off is donk-play! Ok, I do expect AA and KK to pay off in the vast majority of times, but they're the REAL killer hands ofcourse.

Epilogue:
So it continues, I get a suited connector, hop in there (on the sb I think) with the rest of the table, chase my flush draw with nice odds, it hits and I'm up to $7.

So now I'm thinking, man, who freaking needs a good preflop hand lol. Ok, it's not rational ofcourse, stay focussed on the odds instead of the results jack! Good I said that to myself, cuz right after I got QJs, got in the middle of 3-way brawl and took the pot with yet another flush. Cashed out with $17.

At microstakes, taking a big hand and dropping the hammer > playing smallball with rags.

*Last edited by ed on Thu, 30 Mar 2006, 10:23pm; edited 1 time in total*

When I look down at AK I usually go "yay, I hope they fold". Especially if I'm not in late position and there's already limpers (obviously). I'm just not confident about how to play a missed AK.

A higher pp like JJ is so much easier to play. If you get a shitty flop like 248 rainbow, atleast you got a nice overpair to go off. With AK.. eh? Check/fold? But here I threw a huger than usual raise out, to hope to narrow the field, and essentially what you said, hope they fold. Or get one guy and hope you can c-bet him out of the hand. But then the whole table joined in and it missed.

Goal for the weekend will be to learn how to play AK properly. Plan of attack is to first go through the AK examples / hand histories I can find on the forum, then analyze my own hands, followed by asking for feedback on them.

Look at who you play and not what you play with when you don't hit it.
A Passive (Fish/Rock) will call you with a hand, fold without. Aggressives can be a bit dangerous, especially if they are Loose. That is why when you pre-flop raise, you limit the number of those who are to see the flop. You get one, or maybe two, to go to the flop, you can win provided if no one hits (using c-bets). You play against 3 or more, and it check/fold here. Beware of loose players though. Don't C-Bet them. Semi-loose is questionable, but Rocks and Fish are great to C-Bet into unless they did hit. Flop bets in this AK situation call for value bets and/or C-Bets unless you're playing a maniac or bomb. You have to know who you're playing when you do hit it and how if no one hit, how you can still win with Ace high.

I just lost $2 when I got my flush with T high, but the other guy hit the flush with J high. Right the hand after I won back $1.5 with nothing vs nothing A high lol..

AK makes its money when you hit an Axx flop and AJ called your raise.

Dont get upset just because you got a low card flop. Do some maths and look at how unlikely it actually is to hit the flop with AK.

I've played a lot over the last three days - 1500 hands or so - and in that time I have been destacked twice and destacked others 8 times (this is at £25 and $25). One of these stackings was with AK and TPTK (he decided to try to bully me with third pair no kicker but didn't realise that byt the river I only needed to win 16% of the time to make a crying call); the others were with flushes, straight and, best of all, boats. Sample hands which won stacks for me: T3o (from BB), 86o, 89s, 78s, 8Ts.

Small sample size, yadda yadda yadda, but if I didn't play SCs and occasionaly gappers and unsuited connectors, I'd have 1/4 of the profit.

(haha - seems the 8 is my lucky card)

This level is about seeing flops and taking stacks with winning showdowns. Preflop raises are more pot builders than anything else. Much like Omaha. You raise AK here because it's likely the best hand. You punish the callers who have less. You then must avoid rewarding the hands that outflop you by hanging around too long with bad odds. You can't justify their bad calls before the flop, by handing over implied odds like candy.

If you raise into a villain with a better hand, and then he outflops you, you hit him on the short end, and must deny him value on the long end to effectively "win" the hand even though he won the pot.

Jack, please tell me if this comment is out of order, but I wonder if you think almost TOO much about poker. I get the feeling that your thinking has jumped ahead of your play, and I worry that the gap between theory and experience might not lead to trouble for you.

In the post you quote, I say I made most of my recent profit playing suited gappers/connectors etc., and indeed I did. But I also have spent 60,000-odd hands learning *just about* how to play such hands, and the reason I feel I am now able to do so is because I have a "feel" fgor the game which I suspect only comes from playing hand after hand after hand.

You are almost too good a student, like a 3rd grader who is so bright he studies up to 7th grade level at home and then gets to class and discovers he's in some kind of limbo between what he knows and what he is expected to know.

Hm, that last thing kinda describes me as a kid. But not for a long time anymore, atleast in my studies. Much to the aggravation of my parents, I never do anything. I flunk most of my classes year after year lol. But I guess it's still inside me when I actually get motivated for something Razz

Anyway, what can I say, I'm a big geek. I've spent the last few hours mathematically analysing basically the entire game of poker and the rules that govern it. Still at it now, quite some time to go too. There were some things in my head that just didn't add up, that kept confusing me. And I hate that. Finally got to where I went wrong, but still more to do. I don't really mind doing this either, I figure I can hopefully turn poker into a little side-income in the future, if need be. Reached some nice conclusions, but like most of the things I post here, that will probably just be psycho-babble that only makes sense to me, so I won't bore you guys with it Wink

Funny thing though.. the previous semester I was in my "going out, socializing and picking up girls"-phase, and everyone (talking about real life people) was all like "wow", "how do you do it?", "teach me too" bla bla. Now everyone is all like "man wtf are you playing poker for all day?!" Lol, whatever..

Sacrificing girls for poker is a VERY worrying development - are you sure you've got your priorities right?

Though obv sacrificing girls for the poker gods is entirely acceptable. Carry on.

Every time I get dealt an AK offsuit I inwardly cringe. I lose regularly with this hand. In fact I think AK stands for Anna Kournikova. Sure, she looks great, but she also never wins any money.

Checking my PokerOffice stats..

I have seen AK 19 times in 2700 hands, seen the flop everytime, only won 5 times. Over all, I have lost $.50 each hand (at 10/NL).

Which tells me.. I need to learn how to play AK post flop.

Just last evening, I lost $6 to a straight (A-1o) with two pair (Aces and Kings).

The reason is:
1) I can't help it. If it's on my mind, that's all that's on my mind.
2) I picked up poker less than a month ago. Didn't even know the rules before that. My way of doing things is to "freak" on something for a relatively short period of time, to get good at it quick so I can ease on that skill after, rather than moderately learn over a longer stretched period of time.

It's not like I'm gonna be like this for months. How it usually goes is that when I get a sense that it's going ok or something, the urge goes away and I move on to new projects.

K, that's more understandable. I kind of have that tendancy to, though maybe not to the same extreme. I dunno.

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The lure of a good hand