Help me make a poker decision please. - long please read

[Low Limit Loser]

*Grunch*

Hand 1 fold the flop. You have a better and a caller on a board with no draw. You CAN'T be good here.

Hand 2.

This looks pretty standard. I hate the river card. I may c/c the river. I tend to do that in multiway pots when the river helps complete both a flush and a straight.

Hand 3.

Ugh, conventioanl wisdom would be to fold to the cap on the turn. your 2 pair have just been conterfited to anyone with a J. trip tens is so likely that I will say you are drawing to 2 (maybe if noone has another J)outs and don't have the odds to continue. This is a very tough hand emotionally to lay down though. It looks MUCH better than it is.

Hand 4

fold preflop

Hand 5

You have a very vulnerable hand here. You have to protect it as much as possible here. That means bet and raise when you can.

bet the flop. The ONLY reason not to bet the flop is if you are going to C/R. you did neither.

Bet the Turn. The Only reason not to bet is if you are going for a check raise. Again, you did neither.

River. Call down here. The 9 makes 4 to a one card straight possible AND a flush. You waited to long to get bets in. Call down here.


LLL

[kiemo]

[ QUOTE ]
. Although you have not yet addressed my concerns directly about if these were bad luck hands or just plain bad play I think I am getting the message that maybe naked twister might be my game.



[/ QUOTE ]

My scorecard reads
1 bad luck
4 bad plays


Hopefully you can find some ladies to play twister with.

[Low Limit Loser]

Just to recap a little

based on only these 5 hands.

1) You don't fold enough

2) You aren't aggressive enough in the hands you don't fold.

this would make you a Loose/passive. A deadly trait when the cards aren't coming.

Tighten up and push your vulnerable made hands.

LLL

[milesdyson]

1: preflop good. fold flop (bad play)
2: played well. w/o a v. strong read you cant fold the river (good play, bad luck)
3: fold the turn for two cold. you are drawing too slim to a T or a straight (bad play)
4: fold preflop. postflop w/ a read you can fold the turn (bad play)
5: dont check when you hit a hand after raising preflop. and then dont check raise when one of the most obvious draws gets there. you should be betting and raising this flop/turn. (bad play)

now focusing on whether or not these were bad luck is results oriented thinking. you really have to get away from thinking like that. the majority of the losses in these hands was caused by a bad play on your part, however. don't think about "luck." sometimes you will have AQ vs. AK and pull out the win. in this case you may play the hand perfectly well and get a bit of luck to pull off the win. you can play perfect poker and lose a ton of hands. i'm taking a shot right now at 3/6 and i lost ~40 BB last night playing pretty good poker. i can go back and look at those hands and see that i did make a few bad plays (a little tilt near the end too), but overall i played pretty well - well enough in my opinion to be a winner at the game. does that mean i expect to win every time a sit at a table? hell no.

so get back to the tables. stay at full ring right now since it's probably what you've been playing the most. shorthanded games are different beasts. don't try to mix the two yet. play 0.5/1 at party, forget about bad beats and bad luck. use the sshe preflop chart, focus on making good postflop plays. bet your good hands every time. do not slowplay. fold when typical passive players show you that you're beaten. don't get married to AK on a JT9 board or JJ on a KA9 board. realize that poker is swingy and that if you let the swings get to you it will only take longer for you to get in the black. more than anything else, party it up.

[bottomset]

hand1: very easy flop fold
hand2: good, though you lose most of the time there
hand3: fold the turn
hand4: fold preflop, looks like a turn fold
hand5: wow this is terrible, you butchered all3 postflop streets, put in the minimum while ahead, and a ton while behind .. seriously bet the flop, you get all sorts of calls on that type of flop, and there are plenty bad cards that can come off

[marchron]

[ QUOTE ]
I began to over apply the 2+2 concepts and began to loose.

[/ QUOTE ]
You already know the answer to this post. You've "overapplied" the concepts being taught. 2+2 certainly doesn't advise to be aggressive when it's likely you don't have the best of it.

I should also add at this point that if you're looking for a hug, you're in the wrong place, too. You're getting tough love. It's okay: sometimes you need a kick in the ass. I know I have before.

That said, let's go over these hands:

Hand One: Pocket Queens is an excellent hand. This flop is terrible for pocket queens, though. There's still a chance that you're ahead, but the bet and raise in front of you says you're probably toast. If you had reads that your opponents were super-duper aggro maniacs, then staying would be different; but even if they're super-duper aggro maniacs, you don't want to have to throw a lot of chips away to find out one of them had K/4. Good hand; bad flop. Fold. There's no shame in it. (At least you realized the turn Ace completely screwed you, but you gave up a dollar you didn't have to lose.)

Hand Two: Not a damn thing you could do. (If you think this is bad, I got ran down with a set of Aces not too long ago.) SB paid a bet and a half to stay in preflop with a crap hand (then paid an extra bet after your reraise, but he had to call that one), flopped a gutshot and had odds to see it on the flop, hit it on the turn and then backed into the flush on the river to add insult to injury. It's conceivable that you can fold the river when SB wakes up to all those draws, but in the heat of the moment I call about 100% of the time, too. Remember who he is and then punish that sumbitch next time he decides to hang around with junk to your primo hand.

Hand Three: I complete with this, too, and it's not even close. Recognize, though, that it's a dangerous board. The turn counterfeits your two-pair and trips up anyone with middle pair. Your bet has been seen, seen, raised and reraised: get the hell out. You have four outs and 6½-1 odds. What do you think?

Hand Four: your top-pair-no-kicker was three-bet. The turn didn't help you. This one's read-dependent, but I can't see you being ahead unless Villain is a moron. But! You didn't continue to flush money down the pooper when your kicker hit on the river! Good play! More inexperienced players wouldn't recognize that the trey did them no good on the river. Pat yourself on the back for that small victory. Next time fold the turn, though.

Hand Five: Now you've overcorrected and decided to play passive with two pair. To compound the problem, you decided to get aggressive only on the river when a terrible card hit AND someone new bet into everyone. That, friend, was unwise. Button was smart enough to see he was boned on the river. If you had raised the flop, you might have pushed that fish off his bottom-pair-backdoor-flush-draw. But you let him stay in and disaster struck.


Here's my advice:

1) Drop down to .25/.50. If you're playing with the last bit of money you're willing to invest in this game, for God's sake keep it cheap. You will likely continue to lose until everything you're being taught sinks in and finally "clicks" for you.

2) Read Small Stakes Hold'em. If you already have, read it again. And again and again and again. If this forum is a class, then SSHE is the textbook and we are the in-depth discussion panel. We discuss more complicated things than books have room to go into. Hence why we insist that hand posts come with reads.

3) Forget about the fact that you are losing money, to whatever extent you can. Focus on making the right plays at the right time. You did in Hand Two and got unlucky. But let's go back to Hand One. Let's say you correctly folded the flop, then the hand played out and the winner had J/6, for sixes and threes. Does that make a difference? No. You did the right thing at the right time with the information you had available. But now you have new information to incorporate. Think about what you're doing every time you make a decision, and gradually you'll find that your decisions will get better and you'll increase your winnings over the long term.

[badbill7]

That said I must still be playing to many hands, and playing them in an ignorant way. It looks like I may be the sucker at the table and this troubles me because I do not see this as rocket science but as an exercise in logic. I really have never hit a brick wall like this before with anything that I tried to do. Most times when I can not seem to fully grasp something I can eventually identify the problem and solve it. It is hard for me to admit defeat. I don't want to but I do not seem to be able to pick up the info and retain it.


Have no comments on hands. I think from reading some of the posts that your play is as much at fault as luck so thats one answer. But the real question is do you like poker and can you take the money lost. If you cant quit. If you want to learn it no one said you have to learn with real money. reread things and try to apply principles at play tables.continue to read and post and then if you save up some mad money and then give it a shot again if you get the itch. Best advice is to study twice as much as you play if possibel. But dont give up just because you dont win now unless you dont want to deal with the inevetable learning curve that hurts your wallet. Gl and i hope you make the best decision for you

[Hince]

[ QUOTE ]
I want to thank those who have responded so far. Your answers are not quite what I wanted to hear but they are truthful. Thank you. Although you have not yet addressed my concerns directly about if these were bad luck hands or just plain bad play I think I am getting the message that maybe naked twister might be my game. It might be easier to get a "straight".

[/ QUOTE ]

Your preflop isn't too bad in these hands, niether is your flop play. That is,until you run into a bad board, missed flop, or aggression then you call, call, call. Oh, and you slow play your good hands so you are losing value bets, and failing to protect your good hands. It also makes you easy to read.

I'll be honest. You're the kind of guy I like at the table. Easy to read, lets me draw cheap, and calls down in a hopeless situation. You're the kind of guy I would value bet and bleed you of your chips. Until I notice you start to lose your nerve and fold too much, then I would push you. Or, if instead, you went hyper-aggressive on me, you would pay me off faster. And when you left the table, I would look for you at other tables, and push, and push. If you left completely, I would right your name down on my list, and scan for you in the future.

I hope that doesn't sound harsh, but that is the mentality of many of the players you are up against. Is that something you want? If not, it's time to go to school.

[bravos1]

[ QUOTE ]
I do not see this as rocket science but as an exercise in logic. I really have never hit a brick wall like this before with anything that I tried to do.

[/ QUOTE ]

Poker is absolutely an exercise in logic, but you must apply that logic before each decision. We can do some play-alongs on these hands and get your thoughts... this may help you greatly when you compare them to the others around here.

Lets look at the first hand.

QQ is yummy and you 3-bet it like you should. No problem there at all. UTG caps it and MP1 comes along for the ride.
Flop comes K63r and the action is bet, raise before you.

At this moment, I would like to know what thoughts you had right before you decided to call.

[Bonesy]

I might add one more thing. The best limit player in the world will lose all these hands as you did, but lose quite a bit less. That is the key here. Losing less is making money. In hands 1 and 3, you had an excellent chance to save some BB's. Losing those hands suck, but saving is making.