This hand came up fairly deep in the Poker Stars $20 rebuy. We were well into the money, and I had been playing very aggressively since assumulating a big stack. The player to my immediate left had expressed his frustration with me in the chat box and called or raised me pre-flop a few times. I’d folded to his reraises and sometimes given up on the flop, sometimes fired again. I didn’t get the sense that he was a particularly good player, since good players will understand why you are playing aggressively and not complain about it.
Blinds were 800/1600/75. I had about 150K chips, and my opponent had 75K. The action folded to me in the SB, and I open completed with Tc 4s. How I play a garbage hand here is very dependent on our history of blind battles, and since this was our first blind battle, I was mostly curious to see what he was going to do when I limped. He checked, which suggested to me that he didn’t have a particularly strong hand either.
The flop came out Ac 6s 9h, missing me completely. However, I thought it was unlikely that he would check an Ace pre-flop, so I went ahead and bet out 2350. Without much hesitation, my opponent raised to 8000. I immediately did not believe him. As already mentioned, I didn’t put him on an Ace pre-flop, I doubt he would raise one on the flop. Especially since he considered me overly aggressive, why not just call and see if I’ll keep bluffing at it?
A lot of people won’t raise there with a 9 or a 6 either, even though they probably should. And even if he had those hands, I didn’t think he would stand a 3-bet with them. So I went ahead and raised to 22350, giving myself room to fold if he jammed on me. He folded and seemed annoyed.
Against a better player, if I wanted to take the pot away, I might just call and look to bluff the turn or river. Frankly, that looks more like an Ace than my 3-bet. Using pretty much the same reasoning that I did, a clever opponent could deduce that when I 3-bet, I probably have either air, 87, or two pair+. Against that range, a 4-bet bluff shove is going to be pretty profitable, and I left the door open for him to do that, largely because I didn’t think this particular opponent would be capable of it.