Monday 6 October 2008

Circus £30 freezeout

I tried the circus £30+3 double chance freezeout this saturday. Players get 3500 chips to start and a 2000 chip token which can be cashed at any point during the first 3 levels. It was my largest live field with 78 players.

I dealt for the opening 3 levels and although I gave myself AA once it didn't turn into many chips and I arrived at the break 500 chips down at 5k. Post-break I won a couple of pots but the rising blinds were eating away at my stack, so with around 6BB I pushed with AQ and got a call from a KK. The flop brought an A, and so did the turn, and so did the river! :) Thats twice with quad aces in just over a month. I took another pot with a re-steal and then our table was broken up.

On the final 2 tables I had around 16k chips with blinds of 800/1600 before my final hand. I'm kicking myself about how I played it still... :(

I was dealt 55 in early mid position. The blinds were about to hit me and the clock only had a few minutes to 1k/2k blinds so I knew I didn't have much time and opened with a raise to 5k. The player to my left with about the same chipcount as me pushed all-in and I called to see his AQ. The board came 9TJK.. and it was all over:(

I'm pretty sure I played this hand all wrong and will run some calculations to check. The raise to 5k was definitely a mistake.. a shove would probably have been best even though AQ may have called anyway. A min raise might have been better and I could probably have got away from he all-in. However, perhaps the correct play would be to fold? In such early position 55 is pretty weak with so many left to act and it being at that stage of the tournament. I've played against the guy who shoved a few times and I've seen him play 2 high cards far too strongly before. I put him on AK,AQ,AJ,KQ so realised it would be a race and probably not a great one. Part of the reason I called was the upcoming blinds and the end of the level (was just over 2 minutes at this point). My opening bet had commited a large chunk of my stack and with the blinds I decided to take my chances. I'm sure I was partly beating myself up over the initial raise and called to try and correct the mistake... tilting at its best!

2 comments:

Bazclef said...

Hand is an incredibly standard shove. Doing anything else is awful. If your m is under 10 you are push/fold. Your m is like 7, plus with the blinds going up it's a super easy shove.

A raise/fold in a spot like this is a huge error. You could get shoved on by someone with 2 overs and just be throwing money away when you fold often the best hand.

It's incredibly important to know how you're going to react to a raise before you make any bet in NLH, in a spot like this it's especially important. Here if you got shoved on, you'd snap call because of your pot odds vs. the opponents range, so we should be shoving to increase our fold equity.

Pretty good opportunity to plug this leak of raising instead of shoving when your stack is low. I'd read back over the chapter on Inflection Points in Harrington 2. It's really important and if very fundemental for SNGs too.

Holla

anomaly16 said...

Its not something I'd ever do online. I think my 2am tired brain mixed shove and survival and came up with something stupid.