Q: I was BB ($600) and held KhKc. UTG+1 LAG ($500) limps CO limps Button (<$100) limps SB limps and I raise to $10. Perhaps on the small side since the table was loosening up with the end near but I can typically play post flop well.
UTG+1 calls
CO calls
Button calls
SB calls
Pot $50
2s exposed and made burn card. With this flop the 2s was a factor. Flop Jc 2h 10h
SB bets out $5
BB (Me) disregards and makes it $40 as I would have regardless.
UTG+1 makes it $100
CO folds
Button all in for less
SB folds
BB (me) thinks through and folds
UTG+1 LAG player I know is not folding to my shove.
My thought process was his range was pretty wide preflop. I narrowed it down to best case to worst TP, flush draw, TP flush draw and top two. Having the Kh and knowing his play I would have shoved. Here is where the nit in me comes out. There are 15 minutes left to play. If he has the top of what I put him on or he wins that 40+ percent of the time there’s not enough time for me to come back and book a win. I fold they show and UTG+1 takes it down with top pair Jh3h flush doesn’t get there.
Too nitty?
Just plain wrong?
Correct thought process?
Incorrect to play according to the clock?
Thanks for any consideration.
A: The answer is (D) Incorrect to play according to the clock.
Do the cards know what time it is? Is money won at the end of the session worth less than money won at the beginning? Is there a prize for being in the black at the end of a session?
A “session” is an arbitrary length of time. Your entire career playing cards is one long session, and your goal should be to be up as much as possible. Passing up profitable calls isn’t the way to do that.
I’ll take that back a little bit. If you assign some value to having a winning night, it will put you in a better mood or whatever, then it’s up to you to decide how much that’s worth. In my mind, it doesn’t mean anything, though, and if your goal is to maximize your profits at poker you’d do well to stop thinking in terms of winning/losing sessions and just look for winning plays.
If you think you had the chance to invest $500 with a 60% chance of winning, then you are passing up about $50 in expected value (fuzzy math here, it’s actually more than that because there’s already a lot of money in the pot too) by folding. Is it worth $50 to you to be able to say you had a winning night?
FWIW, I do think you should have raised more pre-flop. I’m also taking you at your word that it’s going to be profitable for you to get all in here. That seems right to me, but I don’t think it’s really the main point of your question, so I didn’t evaluate it myself. If you want to win money at poker, then play each hand you’re dealt as well as you can and forget about the concept of a “session”.
I have a mailbag question for the TP inbox
What is your opinion on having a crack habit and being a professional poker player?
Is crack any more troublesome than travelling the globe, playing from hostels, and randomly falling into riots and revolutions?
I’m kidding, but there are lots of risks being taking by lots of smart people who play poker.
I wish them all well.
Don’t think I know enough about it to form an opinion. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment here and your 2p2 post, but it seems like this is something you feel pretty strongly about?
I would not say I feel strongly about it per se. I am no expert on crack. I’ve never smoked a cigarette (not one, brag) and never done anything outside of pot and booze. So I guess this makes me an ignorant square.
I’ve seen people I care about destroy themselves though through substance abuse. I’ve had the personal opportunity to destroy myself when it would have been nice and easy. So maybe that biases me.
Maybe I got flustered when Shane writes stuff that essentially rang to me as “we never talk about the 80-90% of users who don’t hit rock bottom” (not a direct quote). Really, because the 10% (spotting him a number) of people who end up with strange cock in their body, or dead, or both, are really hogging the spotlight. Like how much of one’s sober time do you think nuancing one’s views on crack should take up? How self-important that we understand your personal little niche that falls into neither reformed addict or former person. That angle was interesting too, the “reformed addicts are dominating this conversation” — what a ridiculous sheeple creating media we have!
I think smoking crack is pretty stupid.
The piece was a great, amazing read for reasons that don’t reflect well on Shane apart from his commendable honesty and smooth prose.
Either way, the first comment above was to nudge you to have him back on the show, nothing more. I’m certain you and Nate would have interesting things to ask him. Haralobob’s twitter was interesting on this.
Sounds like a serious topic, but I can’t lie. Damn near died at strange cock.
PieFarmer says “I’m kidding, but there are lots of risks being taking by lots of smart people who play poker.”
funny how PieFarmer nails it IMO. Gareth chasing around the world enjoying (I hope) his travel/freedom with a ‘poker lifestyle’ seems little different from Carlos’ attempt to use ‘poker lifestyle’ to fuel his life. Carlos’ nitty lifestyle seems a little spartan for me, so Gareth’s appeals to me more. But I think both are potentially roads to nowhere. So for me, more risk than it is worth. But who am I to judge for them.
Is crack much different than heroin? Keith Richards has had some recent things to say on drugs and rehab:
http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/06/rolling-stones-keith-richards-defends-heroin-use-slams-rehab/
I have seen Keith in an interview extoll the qualities of heroin. He seems to have no regrets. Should I judge him?
Will look up Shane’s comments. Should be interesting …
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Gareth writes: “Really, because the 10% (spotting him a number) of people who end up with strange cock in their body, or dead”
What is your estimate of the number who do not wind up dead?
Gareth, for someone who seems to enjoy being single (believe you were saying you “like women, and being physically fit(you), they seem to like you”–rough paraphrase?)where would you place the value on this?
Isn’t every girl you hook up with winding up in the same place you caution us so eloquently against?
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lol I was writing a reply to your first comment and now I am trying to formulate one to this, which seems considerably more difficult without coming off as more brash than before. I don’t enjoy being single, for what it is worth. Women I fall in love with leave me, so I am not often single by choice.
I don’t fuck on first dates and I have never had a one night stand. I turn down strange pussy all the time. I would let you in on my plodding sexual progression with respect to my Peruvian girlfriends (all 3), but I am saving the betrayal of their confidence for my book deal. Anyways…
I take women out to dinner and I pay and maybe if something physical happens down the road, that’s great. In short, I date, and always have. Those are just my personal, sexual preferences, which we can explore in further detail! I get really turned off by sex that doesn’t have a personal intimacy. Every time a woman (or man) has offered this, at some point, I recoil.
Just to let you in on more of my genital machinations, I have privately conjectured that this state of affairs could be different were I capable of maintaining an erection, make that forming one (let’s not be too generous!), when highly intoxicated. No matter my cardiovascular fitness (considerable) or massive libido (ditto), I just can’t manage it. Apart from the ruinous alcoholism I have witnessed in my life, this attribute is one of the reasons I avoid the fourth glass of red.
One other possible conjecture, which seems to me at least equally likely to be responsible, is I have a huge ego that is entirely out of control.. so that I have irrationally high standards with respect to whom I invite into my pants. I hope the above prose are all the evidence you require to attest to the size of said ego. But if not, consider that I don’t ever watch pornography. Ever. Is it because I have an incredible, vivid imagination? Quite possibly! But also contributing, likely, is my desire for ego-centric fantasy.
Oh and I didn’t mean to imply that my cock wasn’t strange, if that’s what you were getting at. It is just not strange in the sense of strange that I meant in my first post. Sometimes it looks like an alien parasitic organism in a discovery channel type symbiosis with my body. Unless you meant that every girl I hook up with winds up dead? Because that is true. That road to nowhere you mention, we are all on it. An interminable nothingness awaits!
well, thank you for the information (perhaps a little too much for my older senses) but the “you” I was asking about in my last line was the universal one.
If we (and to be perfectly clear here, I am NOT talking about you and I) have at times engaged in sexual acts randomly and for free, what is the problem with having any other motivation attached to it? Be it money, drugs, a perceived intimacy (promised or not)in the future, or even a perceived societal approval?
Your bluntly stating a percentage and alligning it with death (presumed prematurely?) leads me to infer you deem it a bad thing.
my point relates to why is it bad for folks doing drugs but not others?
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I think that’s a nice bit of backtracking, and as much as I think I have another humourous soliloquy in me, I have no idea what you are talking about.
If I understand correctly, Gareth wasn’t so much judging people for “ending up with strange cock inside them” as he was pointing to it as an example of people finding themselves in situations that they themselves find noxious and come to regret. In other words, the fact that people end up doing things that they hate themselves for doing because of their dependence on drugs calls into question how much control you can really have over it, and how honest you can be with yourself about your level of control.
Gareth writes: “I’ve seen people I care about destroy themselves though through substance abuse”.
It is hard to watch others make decisions that seem to be killing them. Even harder when they go to rehab and are completely toxin free, and still revert to their ‘bad’ behaviours.
I mean how many parents would encourage their kids to try crack? But then how many parents would encourage their children to become pro poker players?
Either one is statistically liable to wind up badly.
But beacons like Keone and Keith survive.
One might be a lighthouse, another a pirate.
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And the Thinking Poker Oscar for the post with the strangest comments goes to…
Haha, I was thinking that myself.
This is why I use a moniker when posting. Google is too good for me to escape unscathed.
The original post was quite good, but Gareth has turned this into a glorious read.
Some of my best writing methinks! Sometimes ad hominem logic fails just inspire.
But I am glad foucault managed to post some conciliatory and explanatory remarks to balance the obviously salty, and quite possibly uncouth (but uncouth in the name of funny!), way I chose to respond last night.
Ah I should add, now that everything here is so far off track, that Shane has been very tempered, conciliatory, and reasonable (or more reasonable, if you prefer), in the 2p2 thread. So I would encourage people to check that out. I don’t agree with some of the choices he made in the piece, it seems like he isn’t so confident in them himself, and I am not quite ready to take the self-aggrandizing sticker off yet, but a real fleshing out is taking place in that thread and that’s worth reading further.
I missed that part of the comment but Gareth, I recently had the same issue as you. As a non (never) pot smoker, I struggled with my girlfriend occasionally indulging in a puff or two at parties and I was even stricter than you were. I was also very judgemental, blame the french and portuguese parts !
I am still on the issue of wondering why I’m that much against the casual use of it. Is it because they’ve got a power I don’t have ? I mean, I’ve been outrageously drunk, to the point I couldn’t walk nor feel that I was falling of a chair while (believing that I was) sitting still.
I mean, crack seems like a drug you can fall for, but also can alcohol or even cigarettes, right ? I still feel that smoking crack or taking any drugs is stupid but I feel that this (mis?)conception is because I’m afraid that I am not stronger than millions of men and women who fled their lives/problems/shenanigans into this kind of indulgence.
I know Shane is not in this category but I’m a tobacco social smoker. Some are weed social smokers, they won’t buy it but would share a joint with friends. Hell, I even know a guy who only takes cocaine at parties and would only buy and take some with friends.
I also feel that we are judgemental of what we think people are doing to themselves. The same way you don’t fuck on first date, which is a nice rule to have when you travel preventing you from getting your wallet (or genitals) stolen it’s after all only a rule you put on yourself because you dont feel attracted by emotionless sex and also as you own barrier about fucking up.
For some people, losing control is a fear and they won’t take any drugs (hi). For some others, drinking alone is a nono because of potential alcoholism…
Again, I don’t think Shane is using crack the same way my part time cocainated friend is but the question sits on our face nonetheless : are we possibly all too scared of our own eventual (drug) abuse that we can’t conceive someone being in control of their pleasure ? Or worse, just the fear of losing control ?