Question

[GeeBeeQED]

Thomas, how many chips the other player has remaining in his stack is also important. The pot odds situation outlined above is covered well. When your going for a draw, it's sometimes correct to call against pot odds because of bets you might get the villian to call if you hit. However, this is not one of those situations unless your villian is stone cold sucker and that's not likely. You could call 170 here no problem. If you call the 350 however your putting in about $180 more than the pot odds justify. You've only roughly a 1 in 5 chance of hitting. In my mind, I have to see where if I hit I can get the villian to call a subsequent bet of $900 to break even (5x my over call of $180), more to make a profit on the money over your pot odds. If he does not, I'd be winning the pot but losing money long term. This would be an error according to the theory of poker. Now think about this. You call, there is 1200 in the pot. Your beautiful non-board-pairing heart comes off on the river. Your opponent cannot have a heart in his hand (if your read is correct) so he's very unlikely to call $900+ with 4 hearts on the board when a calling opponent suddenly wakes up and bets on the river.

Now that I consider this further, you've only really got 8 outs because the 4 of hearts (acording to your read accuracy) gives your villian a full house. So your situation is a little worse than I've described above.

The situation is much better if you have 2 hearts in your hand, your villian has the set, the board has only 2 hearts on it. Now he can give you credit for bluffing on the end or think maybe your playing some other hand he's got beat. It would be much more likely you'd get the call you need or even a reraise you'd love on the end.

On balance I'd say it's the donaters in the game who call 350 as you describe the situation above. Don't be that guy. If he's got the set it's a great bet to get a poor player to call off his chips against pot odds. In short he's tempting you to make a chip draining mistake.

Another issue to consider is the chance your wrong about the read. This leans us more towards raising to find out where we stand if we had a pair here.

Another issue is your read. Where I read a player for Jacks is usually a player I have some experience with who over raises pre flop. Lets say the typical preflop raise has been 3xbb. Suddenly our villian makes it 5 or 6bb to go. I've found it very common this player is holding TT or JJ as you suspect. I consider both hands about equally likely when I know the player well. It's a common play. If I hit my A or Q and a J ot T hits the board I'm worried. But with a flush draw the villian might be able to milk some sub pot size bets out of me if I have the nut flush draw to go along with my top pair that might be winning 50% of the time. I don't like being in this middling situation.

The bet size (350 into 500 pot) looks very much like a continuation bet. He could have TT or 99 here looking to see if a modest bet can take down the pot or at least tell him where he's at. Good players do this. Also, a good player might make this size bet to represent a sub top pair hand to draw in somebody holding a J, 8 or an overpair to calling against his set. He's remembering you called his preflop raise with something after all.

Whew, those are all my thoughts on this hand.
Dave