turtleknife_poker_blog

Cash Game Hands

Coop responds to hand play noted here:
http://tournamentindicatorforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=1608

AJoff on the button: This is full-ring. And only one player involved, the raiser. I think it is a correct fold. If it was suited I would raise for two reasons here, even if there had been more callers.
1.You are on the button, have a pretty strong hand and can increase the value preflop.
2.In limit holdem the preflop aggressor should lead-out on about any flop again. So some hands that beat you, even postflop, will have a hard time continueing to play if the flop has missed them, they are out of position and you bet again.
On a shorthanded limit table I would raise it preflop on the button, even offsuit, except for a very tight opener, to whom I will just fold it as well. Shorthanded raising ranges are so big that AJ off is still a favorite against a lot of opening hands like suited connectors and one gappers, weaker Aces etc.

Just check the poker calculator comparison on the Match Cards for Tournament Indicator.


KJs in the CO:
The only thing I would do differently here is to get more bets in on turn. He is super-aggro you said. So it is pretty likely that you have the best hand and if not, you have 9 hearts, 3 Queens for a straight and most likely 3 Jacks and 3 Kings to hit for you. That's a total of 18 outs. And in case he has a hand: If you keep betting the flushdraw he will pay you if it hits. If you call with the draw and raise when it hits the pieces are pretty easy to put together. But if you kept raising before he can't put you on that hand and might still raise again with a pair (yes, bad players do that sometimes.) and definitely with better.
A nice hand, but I think on the way to hitting the draw you lost some value. Maybe I am wrong. You could explain why you think you should bet the flop strong, the turn weak and the river yet strong again no matter which cards fall on the last two streets. I don't understand the turn part.


BTW, I just played a bit limit poker (shorthanded, $.50/$1) and I just got torn apart. My Aces got cracked in a capped preflop pot by 27suited from the BB. AK suited got cracked by K2off. Capped preflop as well. QQ was good until the A on river for my A7off holding opponent. He had not even a gutshot draw. He was chasing a damn pair until river. Oh, forgot that. Had a set of deuces. There was a set of fours around to beat me...
While on most hands I made some big profit long-term I must say I am running pretty horribly playing poker tournaments at the moment... But well, it has to change soon. Pretty confident it will so everything is fine I guess.

Cash Game Danger!!!

Are you in the bankroll building stage of your online poker career? If you don’t even know the answer to that, then you need a lot of luck if you are going to avoid a reload. However, if you do know that you are in a building and learning stage where you want your $50 or $100 to last as long as it can while you are learning the game then you may have a critical decision to make. That is, should you be playing in the NL cash games or sit and go and multi-table tournaments?

If you follow Chris Ferguson’s exploits at Full Tilt Poker, while building his bankroll he mainly sticks to the tournament circuit keeping his buys in check, and playing straight-up solid poker. (Yes, the same Chris Ferguson who won the 2000 WSOP!) In fact, on his quest to go from $0 to $10,000 at Full Tilt in a bankroll management challenge, he made his first big leap in a $1 Multi-table tournament where he finished 2^nd of 683 entries and earned a whopping $104.

Now this is a guy you can take advice from.

However, we should look at those action-packed No-Limit cash games as well, because a bankroll can grow rather quickly with just a few good hands, not the months it took Chris Ferguson to get out of the penny ranks.  Even with limits at .25 and .50 you should probably not sit down at these tables with less than $20, so if you’re starting bankroll is only $50 or $100, well you have made your first bankroll mistake already.

The lure of these tables are really based on quick, almost exponential growth of your bankroll where a turn of a card can send your draw into poker lore, while 3 other players in the pot watch in amazement as you suck out on each of them.

That kind of hand happens more than you think, but with you on the losing end facing a reload and/or re-buy to exact your full revenge and let your opponents know how resilient you are. Hey listen, you may actually get out of those tables with a profit, even with your limited experience, but it would have surely been based on luck and happenstance that you did. If you do profit, that is actually the beginning of a problem, not a successful bankroll, because you did it in a way that couldn’t have possibly built your skills at the game or money management.

That is what building a bankroll is all about: Getting in your playing time, learning from other players, adopting and perfecting strategies, and seeing real hand to hand combat. The best way to do that is in tournament where you can limit your losses to your entry fee and stretch out your playing dollar to the maximum benefit for learning. If you do that, and still have to reload, there isn’t anything wrong. That’s when you know you can try again and again by doing it right and skill building along the way.