How to stop Overplaying TPTK?

[Sir Folds A Lot]

PSR sounds like M in Harrington on hold em. I think it is a Sklansky concept, but I haven't read his book yet. Harrington explains M as the amount of your stack compared with the blinds and antes added up. If the blinds are 100/200 and $25 antes at a 5 handed table and your stack is 3000, you have an M of 8. 375/3000=8 It basically tells you how many orbits you will survive until you are blinded out. When your M is low, Harrington recommends getting all your money in when you have a decent hand like TPTK.

I don't even know how to fold mid pair, so I can't tell you what you should do with TPTK.

[SellingtheDrama]

M is generally more applicable as a preflop indicator, PSR is more useful is very-high M situations, such as cash games, where a stack that would be considered large in a tournament is actually a short stack.

[Albert Moulton]

lol, you don't give enough information to answer intelligently.

In a hyper aggressive 6-max game with 100bb effective stacks in a reraised pot, for example, TPTK is frequently a through ticket to play for your stack.

Just some of the information you'd need to add to get meaningful responses would include the following.

How many players?

What are the blinds?

What are the effective stacks?

In position or out of position post-flop?

In EP, MP, or LP preflop?

In limped, raised, or reraised pots?

Heads up, 3-way, or multi-way post flop?

Does the flop have lots of draws ("wet," i.e. 8s9sJc), or is it relatively draw-free ("dry," i.e. 2s7cQh)?

Is your opponent giving you resistance aggressive with draws post-flop? Or does he only raise or c/r with sets or better?

What is your table image?

Are you in cash games or tournaments?

If tournaments, then what king of tournaments? What are the blinds? When do they go up? What's the payout structure? How many players left?

Etc., etc., ad nauseum...

[GinaSD]

[ QUOTE ]
Save your big pots for your big hands. Protect two pair and trips and a set. Protect non-nut flushes and weaker straights. Play TPTK with finesse. If you are against TPWK, you are not going to get a whole lot from him so no need to hammer away. He will be happy calling a 1/2 pot bet once and checking the river and so should you.

Yes, you will lose to good draws once and awhile. But on the river, if you did your pot control job properly, then the bet you will be calling won't be a large one.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am definitely going to take this advice to heart.

I thought by potting my tptk hands I was denying draws the odds, and protecting my hand.

However, I just reviewed my first 4k hands in PTracker, and found that TPTK is my biggest leak. Did I say leak? It's more like Niagra Falls. I've doubled my buyin since playing, but in that time I've lost a full buyin to TPTK errors. Ugh.

Thanks for the advice.

[stickdude]

[ QUOTE ]
Is there any straight forward answer to this question?

[/ QUOTE ]

No. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

It really is player/situation dependent. Some villains will only raise if they can beat top pair, and you can safely fold against them. Other villains will shove with gutshot draws, so you're better off calling.

My general rule is to avoid big pots with TPTK unless I have a specific reason to get it in against that particular player - meaning, if villain is unknown and showing strong aggression, I'll let TPTK go and let someone else look him up on a later hand. Once someone looks him up, you can get an idea of what kind of hands he'll be aggressive with (be sure to make a note) and you can adjust appropriately.



As an example, here's a hand where I called a river PSB with TPTK on a board that's about as scary as they come -

Hand #1308012204001416: Chelsea (6-Max) 12204
Seat 1: WELLRIGHT (100.00 in chips)
Seat 5: HUGEtitties (147.50 in chips)
Seat 6: swongsr1thng (132.70 in chips)
Seat 8: bum211 (218.05 in chips)
Seat 9: ajml45 (183.60 in chips)
Seat 10: stickdude (92.00 in chips)
ajml45: posts small blind $0.50
stickdude: posts big blind $1
Dealt to stickdude [ T[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] ]
WELLRIGHT: folds
HUGEtitties: folds
swongsr1thng: folds
bum211: calls
ajml45: folds
stickdude: checks
*** FLOP *** [ T[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], 9[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img], 7[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] ]
stickdude: bets $2.50
bum211: calls
*** TURN *** [ 9[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] ]
stickdude: bets $6
bum211: calls
*** RIVER *** [ 8[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] ]
stickdude: checks
bum211: bets $19.50
stickdude: calls
*** SHOW DOWN ***
bum211: shows [ K[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], 3[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] ] (Pair of Nines )
stickdude: shows [ T[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] ] (Two Pairs, Tens and Nines )
stickdude wins $55.60 with Two Pairs, Tens and Nines


Had this been my first hand at the table, it's an easy fold on the river. Against this particular player, though, I knew that his smooth calls of the flop and turn bets were almost certainly a flush draw - he would have raised me with a made hand. I also knew he was likely to take a stab with a busted FD if I checked, so it was a pretty easy call at the end. If he makes a much larger bet, I would have folded, but he just used the "bet pot" button - he's not thinking about what bet size would extract the most value with a made straight/full house.

[MrBump]

[ QUOTE ]
Pot control. You don't need to make pot sized bets all the time. You don't need to bet every street or raise all the time.

Save your big pots for your big hands. Protect two pair and trips and a set. Protect non-nut flushes and weaker straights. Play TPTK with finesse. If you are against TPWK, you are not going to get a whole lot from him so no need to hammer away. He will be happy calling a 1/2 pot bet once and checking the river and so should you.

Yes, you will lose to good draws once and awhile. But on the river, if you did your pot control job properly, then the bet you will be calling won't be a large one.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is excellent advice.

Overplaying TPTK used to be my biggest leak, and I now treat it as a flop hand. What I mean is, I play it pretty fast on the flop, but if I get too much resistance, I'm going for pot control and aiming for a (very) cheap showdown or I'm folding it.

Like another poster said, it can be very read-dependant as well. Here is an example of a hand vs 2 villains who were both pretty solid TAGS. (My limp preflop was to mix it up a bit - I had been very active in the last few hands)

It was so obvious to me that the flop action showed both villains had me crushed, and I simply folded and waited for a better spot.

A few weeks ago, I would have gone broke here:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1668223


GL !

[PrimogenitoX]

You're preflop play is bad. TPTK is best in HU pots...limp calling like that encouraged a huge multiway pot. If you have been very active recently, it's especially more profitable to pickup a premium hand since when you flop good, might get paid off due to your "active" image. Nevertheless, you were destined to lose money that hand, and it is a good thing you did not go broke!

[MrBump]

[ QUOTE ]
You're preflop play is bad.

[/ QUOTE ]

*Sigh*

If you take the HH in a vacuum, then yes it was bad for this particular hand, but like I said in my post, I was mixing things up here and the point of posting the HH was to help the OP making decisions on the flop with his TPTK....

[PrimogenitoX]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
You're preflop play is bad.

[/ QUOTE ]

*Sigh*

If you take the HH in a vacuum, then yes it was bad for this particular hand, but like I said in my post, I was mixing things up here and the point of posting the HH was to help the OP making decisions on the flop with his TPTK....

[/ QUOTE ]

That's fine..but you have to realize that preflop and flop play are not independent events. They are inextricably intertwined!

[stephx]

I had issues lately overcommiting myself in hands with TPTK. I now focus in applying pot control (as mentionned) to keep it small in most cases. This has helped me greatly and saved my butt on many occasions.