Saturday, March 04, 2006

One hand in the offense: Bay 101

Variance has too many ways to show up, having too many second best hands and rarely being paid off when you have the best hand is just one way to do it. My WPT events have had a lot of this, seems like I'm always playing on the defensive side, I can't remember the last time I made a set, straight or flush in a WPT; less alone being paid off.
In the WPT Bay 101; the only hand I made and I was paid off was the following one:

Blinds 150-300 and 50 ante; I'm in the BB with AJ and a 21k stack; Edward Moncada with a 60k stack raises to 900 and I call. Edward and I have some history, we played together for 2 days in the WSOP $2k Pot Limit Holdem 2005; we both made the Final Table, I got 3rd and he won the tournament. I respect his game a lot; he's a very good player.

The flop came J35, and I decided to go for the check-raise; maybe this was a mistake because Edward has a good mix of doing continuation bets, this time he checked.

The card in the turn was a good one, an A, and now I lead the 2400 pot with a 2000 bet, he called fairly quick.

The river card was a 7, that does not scare me much, I was almost positive he had an A; so I decided to make a good value bet; the maximum he was willing to call, so I bet 5000, he called and I won with my 2 pairs; he showed AQ.

For me the best play I made in this hand was the last 5k bet, I think for a player like Edward it's pretty hard to get maximum value for your hand; and with the 2k bet in the turn and the 5k bet in the river I think I did it. A case can be made about a check raise in the turn or river, but he's folding for sure and I don't get maximum value.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

matt,
great post man. i agree with the tone that online poker is the wrong venue for trying to improve race relations. but anyways, you make a good points and well written.

Anonymous said...

Hi David,
Im a former WWF wrester from the 1980's. Im also mexican-american and I was just browsing the web and found your site. Im just getting the poker bug. But anyways, I just wanted to thank you for bringing awareness to racism and bigotry. We need more wonderful young men like yourself to help out our people. Keep it up, ARIBA!

Anonymous said...

the tito santana? dude u rock!! I am also mex-ameri and am glad us latinos r making names for ourselves. I always dream of being some sort of MLK jr or Quannel X for the latino community. If I ever get my poker winnings up. I plan on establishing a online portal for all latino men. Young and old, so we can feed off our ideas and at the same time recieve guidence from our elders. Sorry for the rant, but when i read good things of my raza me estimulo.

VIVA LA RAZA!!

and thanks for keeping us updated david

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