Adjusting with Aces by Nate Melvis

[Nate.]

Brizz --

Thanks.

Matt --

I really like your thoughts. It's possible I paid too much attention to his four- and five-out hands when I was sizing my bets.

If I don't have a good physical beat on Villain, I just bet more. It reduces his advantage on the big streets and is something closer to some sort of game-theoretic optimum (given the preflop just-call).

I do think Villain would have folded to a reraise preflop. On the flop, I'm not so sure.

Re: "If we really feel that he hit the ten..." -- pure arithmetic dictates it was a good possibility given his flop-call range, but it took his calling the turn with the attitude he did for me to be very confident. Now, it's possible that I should have figured that many of his calling hands would contain a ten and therefore bet more, but as I said I was still figuring many other four- and five-out hands in his range.

Thanks again.

--Nate

[creedofhubris]

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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

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5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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Your hand weighting made no sense to me, because you put in a decent-sized checkraise on the flop, and these hands, which you give him a 50% chance of holding based on his turn action, are no pair no draw on the flop.

Do you really expect people to call you with nothing but random overs, not even ace high?

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Creed --

Yeah. I only made it a few hundred more, and I think he would have called with all sorts of garbage. As it turned out he called with two overs and a gutshot. He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type.

--Nate

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I think you have to give him at least ace high or a gutshot to call you there. And since you've got two of the aces blocked, he's much more likely to be holding a gutterball type hand. People have to suck super hard to call with no pair no draw like your putative QJ dude. As you can see, even with the nut outs from the gutshot besides his "my overs might be good" outs he thought long and hard before calling you.

It's unrealistic to assume people are crappy enough to just autocall you with random hands; this is a tournament and those extra few chips you checkraised are still actually a meaningful amount.

When I find someone who speculates on flops with hands like QJ/just overcards in a cash game I buddy list them; they are a rare treasure, and you shouldn't expect to find them just anywhere.

[lapoker17]

nate, i just read this article and i have some serious issues with it. before i get into the bad, i would like to say that i enjoyed reading it - you write very well and i felt like i was at the table. now...

working backwards, you state that described opponent will fold these weak hands to your pf reraise, but will have no problem floating a flop checkraise with dry overs. and "He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type". these two things seem wildly inconsistent. if you have such a sick read that he completely changes his tendencies depending on street, then you may get a bit of a pass, but that would be quite rare and you never mentioned it.

now, onto the meat of where your NLHE thinking breaks down on a very fundamental level: the fact that he can be raising any 2 here makes it far more important that you DO reraise pf. had he opened for 4x or whatever signified strength, i would be fine with your flat call as his range is now so narrow that we can both play more perfectly against him and by disguising our holdings, almost force him to play imperfectly against us. but his ability to have such a wide range here makes him quite dangerous if we let him see the flop at a price he chooses. the fact that we are oop only serves to magnify the error.

i've played tons of live poker, so i am quite familiar with making some unorthodox moves simply because i can feel they are right at the time, however, the error you made is not one that can be easily mitigated by the fact that you can look into the guy's eyes.

note: stack sizes are always super important and the fact that you are reasonably shallow here makes your mistake less glaring than it would be if deeper. and though i've read your comments in this thread regarding stacks, your lack of discussion of depth in the article leads me to believe it was not that great a factor in your thought process. the article reads as if you are unilaterally endorsing this "tricky play" regardless of stacks.

again, i enjoyed the article, and look forward to your next piece.

[Nate.]

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nate, i just read this article and i have some serious issues with it. before i get into the bad, i would like to say that i enjoyed reading it - you write very well and i felt like i was at the table. now...

working backwards, you state that described opponent will fold these weak hands to your pf reraise, but will have no problem floating a flop checkraise with dry overs. and "He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type". these two things seem wildly inconsistent. if you have such a sick read that he completely changes his tendencies depending on street, then you may get a bit of a pass, but that would be quite rare and you never mentioned it.

now, onto the meat of where your NLHE thinking breaks down on a very fundamental level: the fact that he can be raising any 2 here makes it far more important that you DO reraise pf. had he opened for 4x or whatever signified strength, i would be fine with your flat call as his range is now so narrow that we can both play more perfectly against him and by disguising our holdings, almost force him to play imperfectly against us. but his ability to have such a wide range here makes him quite dangerous if we let him see the flop at a price he chooses. the fact that we are oop only serves to magnify the error.

i've played tons of live poker, so i am quite familiar with making some unorthodox moves simply because i can feel they are right at the time, however, the error you made is not one that can be easily mitigated by the fact that you can look into the guy's eyes.

note: stack sizes are always super important and the fact that you are reasonably shallow here makes your mistake less glaring than it would be if deeper. and though i've read your comments in this thread regarding stacks, your lack of discussion of depth in the article leads me to believe it was not that great a factor in your thought process. the article reads as if you are unilaterally endorsing this "tricky play" regardless of stacks.

again, i enjoyed the article, and look forward to your next piece.

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lapoker --

Thanks. I've been learning from your posts for many months now and I'm glad you took the time to comment here. (And thanks for the compliment.)

A few things:

-He wasn't opening any two here; he wasn't the type to open J4 or anything. (I thought.) So I had a better idea of what his hand was than just "any two and not a big hand."

-Stack depth was vital in this decision, though I should have probably discussed it more in the article. I've discussed them already in the thread, and besides, it's nothing you don't understand.

-As strange as it might seem, I think that this guy was folding many hands preflop but loosening up once there was money in the pot. That said, it would be very easy for me to have overestimated his propensity to peel with something like bare overs or a gutshot with no overs. I think it's not too wild for him to give himself to weigh overcards on the flop as probable outs, though.

I agree that this play will often be a mistake, but forty blinds deep against an opponent I can comfortably peg as having a hand roughly in the 25th through 40th percentile of hands, who will give me physical information not just preflop but on every street, I think the call was better than a reraise at the time.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

--Nate