How it can be? what i am doing wrong?

[Benayoun]

I am playing home poker with friends, small blinds,
anyways.
I have read the book of phill gordon 4 times, and learnt every step there.
I am trying to follow the steps, and raising auto when i am talking first and etc.
Anyways he writes there, that when i have strong hand and i calculated all the hands i am facing against, and i still think i have the best hand i shall push big ammount to the pot.
anyways, i had situation yesterday in my home game which was:
i was head to head with someone, i had flash - high king, and i was sure the other have two pairs, (i focused his faces and more for all the game), so he said all in ( it was flop only), i had flash with king high as i said.
I went all in with him.
The turn was 7 [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] and the other was heart which made 4 cards on the table as heart and he holded the ace heart, and won me with flash higher.

Its not the first time it happens to me, when i go all in, what i am doing wrong? they always go for luck, i mean in our last 4 games they won me with all in with the river.
How can i predict it or what?
thanks in advance.

[metsandfinsfan]

pushing your flush is correct.

[Benayoun]

So why i did i loose?
it happend me 3 times, different players won me with river, its just luck 100%.
phil ogrdon say that it will might happen once but it wont happen again so soon...

[oddsock]

You lost because your hand was not a lock when you called an allin, your opponent outdrew you and you got unlucky in a game in which you can lose despite doing the correct thing. Enjoy being correct rather than lucky!

[LiveInPeace]

One of the toughest aspects of poker is taking a long term view. In the short term, good play can easily lead to bad results and bad play can easily lead to good results. The easiest way to take a long-term view is to have a long-term bankroll (ie play smaller games).

[Albert Moulton]

[ QUOTE ]
Its not the first time it happens to me, when i go all in, what i am doing wrong?

[/ QUOTE ]

If you get all your chips in with the best hand, then you are doing nothing wrong. Although, playing K-rag suited heads up is probably often a mistake unless there are extenuating circumstances (i.e. you're on the button, in the BB in an unraised pot with the SB, or you are in LP in a multi-way limped pot with passive players behind you and in the blinds).

[ QUOTE ]
they always go for luck, i mean in our last 4 games they won me with all in with the river. How can i predict it or what?

[/ QUOTE ]

You cannot predict when an opponent will suck out on you. Bad beats happen. Sometimes they seem to come in streaks. But it is just "variance." Any time you have random events, like flipping a coin, there will be times when you will flip heads 10 or 11 times in a row despite the odds of tails being 50% every time.

If you focus on making good decisions so that you are ahead in these all-in situations, then in the long run you will make more money than you lose. The results of any one hand are less important than making good decisions when the chips go into the pot. Don't be "results oriented."

[LiveInPeace]

>>>>If you get all your chips in with the best hand, then you are doing nothing wrong.

I disagree. This is one of the biggest myths in poker. It's possible to get all your chips in with the best hand by being very lucky, that doesn't mean the play was a good play. For example you have nine high only, no draws, come out bluffing on the flop and someone raises you all in with nothing but an eight high flush draw. By calling, you'd be getting all your chips in with the best hand, but IMO this call would be very bad play indeed.

[gedanken]

home games with friends can be very loose. When 3 or 4 people call your all-in, the chances of one of them sucking out are pretty good, even if you have the current nuts.

I play a regular game like this and do little better than break even. I figure I should be able to crush it: 5 loose bad players drinking, and me with my mad 2+2 skills. Here's what I can offer:



It helps to play hands that draw to the nuts or near nuts. It didn't help you this time, c'est la guerre.

Also, when you enter a hand, push hard to punish draws. If people will chase with any draw (typical), overbet the pot so you make lots of money when they don't hit. This is painful, though, because they call preflop with garbage and hit two-pair on you all the time, and you're giving good implied odds with your top-pair hands.

When you say small blinds, do you mean small in comparison to stacks? My friends don't adjust to stack size at all.

I find that playing insanely tight helps preserve my sanity and limit the downswings. Makes for a good joke at the table when I raise and 4 80/5's prove they actually do know how to fold! Next hand though, I raise and get 3 callers, go figure.

Be on the lookout for profitable draws. Setmining can be the most profitable thing you do. The guys I play against often offer pot odds to call with good draws (they don't have a clue what the pot actually is). This is why they're calling with a four-flush -- they've learned that it's generally profitable because the other players don't charge them enough.

This sort of game has extreme variance, you just have to roll with it. I find it very frustrating because they're also very slow and you don't play enough hands per night to average things out.


lucky I like my friends and have fun anyway.

If you figure out how to beat this game, let me know!

[gedanken]

Put another way: There's a lot more to winning money in this game than just the all-in hand where a K-high flush got beat by the A-high flush. If you're generally getting the best of it, the coolers won't ruin you.


(depending on stack sizes, his push may have been correct -- but of course your call was, too. Do you see why his push may have been good?)

[gotmarc]

[ QUOTE ]
lucky I like my friends and have fun anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

This sentence sums it all up. My friends rag on me all the time becaus I don't win every time. They think it's funny that they can "beat me" when I've read 35 books, play tournamments at casinos, play on the internet, post hands here et cetera.

The thing is a lot of it has to do with the structure. My friends play with 40 chip buy-ins. A $10 buy in, so every chip is worth 40 cents. It's winner take all and then they give second place thier money back. They have blinds that start out at 1-3. They raise them every 15 minutes. They sometimes call me and ask "does a straight beats three-of-a kind?"

If you raise 3x the BB like Phil Gordon suggests against a field that does not fold even an overcard on the flop and all you have is 40 chips you're not going to do well. A lot of your preflop strategy depends on stack sizes. You can't look at a book and say well it says to do this so that's what I'm doing no matter what.

If you have 10 Big blinds, you can't play like Phil Gordon would play with 300 Big blinds.

Just remember that they're your friends and it's ussually cheaper to play a $10-$20 poker game than it is to go to a bar.