Since I’m going to be getting up early tomorrow and hopefully spending the entire day playing the $2K at Foxwoods, I decided to pass on playing the big Sunday tournaments today. Another consideration was that the Sunday Million on Poker Stars today was a $1000 buy-in, which I didn’t really feel like shelling out. So I played the Sunday Warm-Up, which I don’t usually play, and made it about 2.5 hours in before my AKs lost all in preflop to AT. Must be Sunday.
I did play some 2/4 NL and pulled off one bluff that made me pretty happy. There was a rather loose and aggressive player at one of my tables, his poker tracker stats were like 42/29. He was loose enough that I wasn’t trying to make too many plays at him pre-flop, even though he was raising way more than his share of pots. Finally, a moderately fishy player open limped, the LAG potted it to $18, a pretty solid player called in the SB, and this looked like a good spot to squeeze. Holding KTo in the BB, I re-raised to $90.
The LAG could have quite a wide range of hands, and I wasn’t really sure which he would fold to my raise, but I did think he would fold often enough to make my play profitable. As for the SB, I figured him for a good but not great hand, probably a medium pair that he wanted to play for set value. Assuming the LAG folded, SB would certainly not have the odds he needed to see a flop, so unless he decided I was making a play and shoved on me (which would be tough, as I hadn’t done anything like this yet at the table), I figured I could count on him folding.
To my dismay, the LAG called, at which point the SB was getting much better odds and called as well. At this point, I was ready to be done with the hand. There was about $250 in the pot and only $350 or so in my stack, so there wasn’t room to take another stab at the pot, not that I would want to with two callers anyway. The flop of J44 was no help to me, but no one else bet at it either.
An A turned, and the SB checked to me again. I checked, but I go to thinking. SB will pretty much never have an A in this situation (and pretty much always a medium pair, I think). Good players just don’t play so loose passive with a hand like AK or AQ, and if he had KK+, we definitely would have heard about it preflop.
The LAG was the wild card, but again I thought it somewhat unlikely he would show up with an Ace here. Certainly it wasn’t impossible, but it’s more likely that he decides pre-flop whether I’ve got the monster I’m representing, in which case he folds, or that I’m full of it, in which case the pot is plenty large for him to come back over the top. Although he could and probably sometimes does call with an A there, it’s not that likely. He checked the turn as well, though I wouldn’t expect him to bet an A on such a dray board, so that didn’t clarify matters.
The river was another J, making the board AJJ44. SB checked to me, and I thought it through. With $250 in the pot, a bet of $200 needs to succeed less than 50% of the time to be profitable. I was very sure SB did not have an A or a J, and I figured there was a greater than 50% chance the LAG didn’t either, so I bet the $200 and took it down. It is very, very rare for me to bluff the river in a re-raised pot against two opponents, but in this situation the board could only help a very narrow range of hands, and based on the pre-flop action, I was the person most likely to have such a hand.
Good night, and hopefully I’ll have a great trip report from Foxwoods coming up soon!