Skilful 25 Jun 2015

UNIBETBUBBLE! Decision numero quatro!

Top of 'da morning ta ya! On a beautiful sunny Thursday morning!

I can't help but think how awesome it is that my life is moving towards the place I want it to be at finally! I am still working on my small business and have been working on a small piece of work for a customer this week, being self-employed right now I make my own hours which is pretty amazing. I may be earning less right now than I was before but it feels great. The independence, sense of being captain of your own ship, and passion I have for what i'm doing now more than makes up for it.

I worked on my business relatied stuff for 18 hours straight a day or so ago! Then had a good 9 hours sleep and am feeling fresh as a daisy right now :) It wasn't so long ago I'd be crammed into a packed train at this time of the morning on my way into a 9am-5pm job...

Instead I'm able to enjoy a sunny morning here in the UK, while I consider our actions for the next decision in UnibetBubble.

For anyone thinking of doing something similar ...

Here's some advice

On with the hand!

4th decision:

OK my usual strategy for these decisions is to try and get my head around what is going on in the hand!

(Seems like a fairly sensible plan right?!)

Thanks Oprah!

I find it helps if I get things down on paper - here's my map of what we've got going on

So at the top left of the page in a little rectangle we have the blinds (very important to consider the blinds in a tournmanet hand)

We are told in the hand that "The blinds are still 500/1000".

Second I like to look at our stack and position to immerse myself in the hand.

Which I do by figuring out where I would be at the table and what my stack is looking like, that's the circle i've put on the top right hand side of the page... so I'm in the big-blind.

Sitting in the blinds I am waiting for these guys to act and I have 34bbs! "You have.. 34BB. In the BB position,"

Next lets take a look at the action

Reading the page from top to bottom from 'prelop' down to the squigly border.

We have

UTG+1 (who has 30k stack) - and "likes to see alot of flops" Opens for 2.2k.

UTG+2 (who has 90k stack) - Calls 2.2k

ME! in the bb (who has 34k stack) - Calls (an additional 1.1k).

So just before we're going to the flop the pot looks like this...

So there's 7.1k out there.

How about we look at what's going on post flop

Post flop... UTG+1 bets 5k leaving him with 27.8k behind.

we have 32.9k left in our stack after our call pre-flop.

Which means... the UTG+1 guy has the effective stack here, which is the smaller of our two stacks (22.8k after his bet)

So with this handy bit of game-flow in mind and the maths put to bed:

POT = 12.1k ;

EFFECTIVE STACK = 22.8K

IMEDIATE POT ODDS = 12,100 / 5,000 = 2.42:1

Let's look at the the strength of our hand vs our villians possible holdings.

"You call with J♦8♦. "

FLOP:

10♠3♦Q♦

You check.

Villain UTG+1 bets 5,000 chips.

We are told that UTG+1 likes to see alot of flops. How do we convert this info into something that we can meaningfuly use? Well we have to make some assumptions (we are ALWAYS making assumptions when playing poker) but the important thing is that our assumptions are the best we can make with the data available to us.

So a regular guy or girl, would be opening tight UTG

AJ+ 22+ KQs, and this is if they are on the looser side of a 'regular' UTG open, some don't play anything worse than AK off UTG, and only raise medium pocket pairs plus 77+ish.

However our villian likes to see flops, lets open his range up a bit.

A2-A5S, AT+ ; 22+ TQs+ ; 89s+

So we've made an assumption as to his range but we are likely in the right direction.

Now let's look at the action and see if this tells us anything that we can use to refine our ranging. He's opened for 2.2k and with no previous history with this villian we can't read too much in to that, so our ranging is still the same. Post flop he's continued the story of having a decent hand by betting 5k into a 7.1k pot, after we checked to him being the pre-flop aggressor. This is a big bet almost 3/4 pot.

A2d-A5d are a possibilitty here (some players like playing their flush draws aggressively, and this would be a great spot for him to do just that). We'd expect AT to bet less that 3/4 pot with second pair after we check to him on this flop.

10♠3♦Q♦

22-JJ are unlikely to bet this flop anywhere near as strong as he has, because the only hands that call this bet are hands that beat those hands, orhave good equity vs them (flush/straight draws with an overcard sometimes for instance.) If he had a weaker draw I'd also expect him to bet less perhaps 2/3 or even a little over 1/2 pot.

So with this info in mind, lets refine our ranging a bit.

Drawing Hands: A2-A5s+ ; TQ+ ; TQ(d)s+, JK, KT(d)s+

Made hands: QQ OR TT (unliely but still a small possibility) ; AA, KK,

What do we have?

J♦8♦.

We have a gutshot and a flush draw. Giving us

9 outs to the flush ; and 3 outs to the gutshot, so 12 outs (being careful not to double count 9d as we've already counted it in our flush outs!).

Using the rule of 2 and 4 - we can estimate we'll hit our hand about 48% of the time by the time we get to the river. This is assuming we get to the river though, and we need to bear this in mind, if we face further aggression on the turn we may not get to the river. This is why position is so important we also have another reason to tread carefully here

We have Reverse Implied Odds to consider here.

Implied odds are odds we can give ourselves when we assume if we hit our hand our opponent will put more money into the pot than the immediate odds we are being granted. Reverse implied odds factor into our decision when there is a risk we can lose more than the price we are paying the pot on this street now to continue.

A jack high flush isn't great. We have to be careful if we continue here, as the hand plays out that we don't get it in with a jack high flush when our oponnent could well have a higher flush.

This is why playing out of position is...

So what do we do? Well we've flatted pre-flop getting a great price with a weak drawing hand 3way. We had just 34bbs pre-flop and were getting 6:1 on our call preflop with a 2gap SC. This was a close spot even though we were getting such a good price, because we are not deep. Not being deep has impacted us twice here.

First - if we hit post flop very strong, we were unlikely to win a very big pot (34bb effective stack preflop).

Second - the stack:pot ratio after the flop was going to be dangerously low, meaning we are commiting ourselves to the hand with every future street we see, and worse still doing this will be risking our tournament life.

Let's assume we make the call on the flop there will be 17.1k in the pot on the turn, and the effective stack will be just 22.8k. What do we do if he overbet shoves the turn? What if he even bets half pot on the turn? If we are faced with a bet on the turn, chances are we could find ourselves all in by the river. With just two players left to bust until the bubble!

For these reasons as nitty as it sounds with 13 outs here , given the reverse implied odds and the fact I'm out of position.

I FOLD!!!!!!!!!!

I think the only decent alternative here (given our villian likes to see alot of flops) is to raise big and never fold after that action. If we do this we risk getting it in with 30bbs for our tournament life with a jack high flush draw and a gutshot, here on the flop - or worse still on the turn. Perhaps not a terrible spot on the flop given this opponent and that we are this close to the bubble (assume we have alot of fold equity) but not a spot I like, I'm sure we'll get better spots.

So I FOLD!!!!!!