Any way to get away from a better set?

Originally Posted by OngBonga

There always seems to be a tendancy to consider unknows at the micros to be donks who go wild with any top pair. I think if villain was a complete donk, then hero would have at least some sort of read after ten hands, so I'd be more inclined to believe villain has at least some idea what he's doing, at least until he shows us that he doesn't. We do have a read, that he's not done anything stupid in the ten hands we've seen. Donks can't usually hold out this long without some form of spew.

I second that. Underestimating your opponent, in poker as in everything else, is a mistake. My "standard unknown" at 5NL is pretty TAGG until proven otherwise. However, it doesn't take much to have an idea, like the villain in the OP who is not full stacked and raised 3xbb in EP behind a limper, these are the first hints that he is probably not all that good. I am defo not folding my set here.

Originally Posted by PokerWang

If you want to set-mine then you want to do it as cheaply as possible. If you don't hit your set, you fold. You also have to make better reads to know if your opponent has a better set.

Some mod please strike this guy who has 81 perfectly useless one line posts to his count, stating the obvious or repeating what other posters in the thread already said.

Originally Posted by daviddem

Underestimating your opponent, in poker as in everything else, is a mistake.

I think so. If a decent player has just sat down, and we assume him to be a donk because we haven't got any hands on him, then right from the start he's able to exploit us. I'd sooner fold the best hand to an unknown than stack off with the worst (not in this spot, obviously never folding a set here). If noob villain is making dumb plays, he'll lose his stack sooner or later, we don't need to do him NOW. Sure, stack size and bet sizing can be indicators of a how skillful (or not) a player is, but at $5nl not many people are particularly accurate with their sizing, and some half-decent players might prefer a short-stack strategy (fuck knows why). You can make assumptions, but we don't know for sure if someone is a donk until we have a sample, so I prefer to give a villain at least a little credit until he does something that makes me reassess his skill level.

Also, I found $5nl to be a lot more difficult than $2nl, and suprisingly more difficult than $10nl. Seriously, after a few decent mtt wins, I left $2nl and stepped up to $5nl. After 20k hands or so, I was losing, so I just skipped $5nl altogether since I was easily rolled for $10nl, and now I'm making money. This after pretty much owning $2nl. Go figure.