Friday, July 20, 2007

Ryan Blows a Hand

I'm back online, playing at cakepoker on the advice of Mr. Sola. I play this hand a half hour into the session...

I'm making a conscious effort to only open raise, no open limp, so I make a standard pop in late position with 55.

Villain repops me, so I'm putting him on a nice pocket pair. We're both relatively deep and he's get me covered, so I figured it's worth the set mine to call. Pot has $8.75.

The 346 rainbow flop gets me into trouble, giving me the open-ender and what I figure is a ten-outer.

I check, and as expected, he bets out for $5.

Stupidly, I raise to $15. This was a terrible play. I mean, he's not going to fold, and the extreme likelihood is that he's going to reraise me and put me to a test. I regret the raise the moment I click it.

He puts me all in, and I'm mentally slapping myself. I could have called the $5 if I wanted to chase my 10 outs, with solid implied odds to do so (although if I hit a 5 he might not pay me off), and instead I put myself up against the wall.

Now, I have 15 seconds to decide whether or not to call.

I fold, and in retrospect, it was a bad fold. Not as bad as the raise on the flop, but bad.

$74.85 in the pot, I've got $36.110 left, so I'm getting about 2:1 with ten clean outs. I could stove it for the exact numbers, but we know it's somewhere near 40%, enough for the mathematical call.

I'm hating myself so much for the bad raise, and I so don't want to go broke on the back of that mistake, that I fold. It's not a huge mistake, but calling that all in is +EV by that point in the hand.

This is certainly not an isolated case of this mistake for me: making a blunder, realizing it, and then wanting to bury my head in the sand with my tail between my legs (I love a good mixed metaphor), instead of clearing my head, putting it behind me, and making the correct play post blunder instead of compounding it.

So, you can feel free to analyze the hand, but my main point in posting it is: don't let a recognized mistake on one street shame you into making yet another mistake on a later street...

10 comments:

Austin said...

I'm curious if there's any mental mantras you try to go through when you know you just made a stupid play and are trying to make sure it doesn't happen again. Since I've started playing with you guys I've tightened up my play a ton, but I've noticed that every once in a while I'll go on a binge of terrible calls and they all seem to be related to one another.

I think something like asking myself constantly if every move I was making is being made because of the odds, a feeling, or a tilt/good ride, then that might help, but it's so hard to remember when the emotions of the game catch you up.

Marshall said...

I have done this also while playing. You really have to contain the fire as quickly as possible. Online it sucks cause you are dealing with much less time, and less information also usually. If you are going to be a player who uses pot odds all the time you will need to make it a permanent part of your routine where there isn't a time when you don't calculate your odds during the decision making process.

jtrey333 said...

Just curious... who is Austin? (I'm sure I'll be going ohhhhhh once I find out.)

Austin said...

I started working at Surreal 6 weeks ago and sit right next to Joe. I've been playing in the lunch games quite regularly lately, so I wanted to get help on beating everyone ;).

Marshall said...

oh you came to the right place then. We are the guys that destroy the Surrealites every Wednesday night :)

royalbacon said...

So what's the story with CakePoker? Is NetTeller in action again, or is there some other way to be able to deposit money and -- better yet -- a way to withdraw money from your account easily?

Ryan said...

Withdrawing money has never been a problem, has it? They can just cut you a physical check and there's not much the US government can do about it.

As for adding money, I gave Joe some cash and he transferred money over from his account, so that's how I handled that.

Man, I am so much worse at poker online. I can't seem to make the good laydowns I'm able to make in live games, I just orange belt all my money away...

royalbacon said...

Good point on the cutting of a check -- I never tried that from Pokerroom.com. I might just have to check out CakePoker now that I know Ryan is giving all his money away there.

Ryan said...

Yeah, Joe lured me in with tales of copius fish on cakepoker, but it turns out he wanted me playing on cp to help reseed the hatchery...

I was up a little bit at first, but a mix of bad luck and bad play since then have halved my initial stake of $200.

One time, at .25/50, I standard raise in middle position with KK, and get two callers before the BB moves all in for about $22. I iso raise all in for a little over $50, and everyone else folds. He shows A6o and catches the river rocket to break my heart, and one of the folders rubs in some salt by claiming a mucked ace.

The fish are definitely there, but every table has some good players, too. Even as I speak, one of the good players at my table has busted one of the fish I had my sights on. I hate that.

Marshall said...

Ryan got Greenstein'd by a fish.