Monday morning! The start of a new week and ... week 2 of the #UnibetBubble decision!

Onwards and upwards with decision number 5 !

#Decision5 #UnibetBubble 

The blinds are still 500/1000.

 In UTG+1, a player who likes to see a lot of flops opens with 2.2BB. He has 30,000 chips in his stack.

UTG+2, with a 90BB stack, calls.

You have now 34BB. In the BB position, you call with J♦8♦.

FLOP:

10♠3♦Q♦

You check.

Villain UTG+1 bets 5,000 chips.

UTG+2 folds.

You call.

TURN:

6♥

You both check.

RIVER:

9♣

You are first to speak.

As we are now at the river and there's already a fair bit that's happened this hand, I'm getting a little bit...

So here's a quick recap!

So as we contemplate our action at this turn we are faced with a pot of 27,100 and we have 21,800 chips behind.

Our villian only has 17,800 chips behind, so his is the important stack relative to this pot. Wow are we fortunate to have hit this card on the river!

I mean that card was luckkky! right? I jump out of my seat when i see it, and as I do that the cleaner pulls the curtains back from the otherwise dark casino floor!

The opponent looks up at me and for a moment as the sun is beating it's way into the room and I am in mid-air, I think this was probabally a little bit too much of a tell

I manage to sit back down and do a crazy little jedi mind trick on him so he forgets everthing about it.

So I compose myself and get back to this hand.

When the villian checks the turn he gives us quite a bit of information about his hand, he's not super strong, we know this because the board is draw heavy on the turn there is a flush draw and a straight draw out there. However he chooses not to bet. If he had a strong hand you would expect him to bet for protection here and for value.

In this case it looks like our villian has

(a) a good but not great hand, good enough to lead into 2 players on the flop, on a draw heavy flop, but not good enough to stack off with on the turn unless he has too. i.e. a hand that has chosen to pot control the turn with. (9Q, KQ, a ten with a flush draw ATs, etc.)

(b) a hand that wants to see a river (a drawing hand, perhaps straight or flush draw or : AK, KJ)

So we are faced with a decision on the river. We knew when we started this hand that our stack relative to the pot would be shallow and this is why we are so fortunate to have hit this card on the river! But hit it we did!

There is a concept in poker called a 'negative freeroll' and this concept applies well to the hand in question here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_freeroll
Negative freeroll - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org

If we check here and the villian bets we will be forced to call his bet. He will be betting just 17.8k into a 27k pot. However he is unlikely to do this with a hand that we beat for value. With the obvious straight out there (and the fact he checked the turn so is unlikely to have a hand like top two pair on the turn) we can be reasonably confident he has a good but not great hand, that will check behind on the river, or a drawing hand that will also check behind on the river.

We have the 'idiot' end of a straight draw, but the only hand he can have that beats us here is KJ, and that is a tiny percentage of the hands that he takes this line with from pre-flop to turn.

However if we bet here, he may call us with a top pair type hand, that he was taking a pot controlling line with. Our perceived range could well include hands that are worse than top pair on the river (a second pair / flush draw type hand we've turned into a bluff) the only hand we bet for value here is the exact hand we've got, because we too checked the turn so as far as our villian is concerned it's unlikely for him, that we have a hand as good as 2 pair on the turn.

I bet 18k.

When you say 'all in' it has a psychological power that might just come into play here, so to minimise that (although it is a small factor but one we still have in our control) I choose to say 18k and put exactly 18k chips out there, we've still put him all in but we haven't announced 'all-in'.

If he has a top pair type hand he's going to be faced with a very difficult decision now, with the busted flush draw, and might kid himself just often enough that we are trying to abuse the bubble and put maximum pressure on him at the river here. Either way if we check, he checks behind far more often than he attempts to bluff us off our hand I would say.

I do my best to look like an aggressive Swedish pro.

for a moment i detect a little tell coming from my hands...

So i stop right away and take a sip of my orange juice.

and i say "c'mon man, just fold save your chips, tomorrow's another day"