Donkey Quiz Redux & Miscellaneous Ort

Due to some renewed 2+2 forum discussion, my Donkey Test analyses have received a fair amount of increased traffic. Yesterday alone, for instance, there were over 500 individual visitors to my Donkey Quiz overview web page (located: here). With that in mind, I took a little time at lunchtime to clean-up and reorganize the questions a bit, putting each individual question and its answer on a single individual page, and deleting all the extraneous non-Donkey stuff that crept into some of the posts.

Over the next few days, I'm also going to edit a couple of the quiz items that have received the most discussion and debate on 2+2. I think there were some good comments made in that thread, and I'd like to incorporate some of the discussion into the answers where appropriate.

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In other news, I played in my monthly live tournament last night. Recently, the organizer of the tourney has restructured the blinds, so I ran his new structure through my Patience Factor calculator to see how good (or bad) the tourney actually is now. Starting stacks are T10K, and initial blinds start at 100/200. For the first hour, blinds increase in 20 minute periods, then in the next hour they go up in 15 minutes intervals, then 10 minutes thereafter. Blinds are 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, 400/800, 500/1000, 600/1200, 800/1600, 1K/2K, 1.2K/2.4K. Based on this, the PF calculates out to be 4.3, which Snyder's books says is "very fast, good for learning speed play."

For fun, I played around a bit with the structure, and if the organizer didn't change the blind increase amounts, but instead just maintained a 20 minute blind level throughout, the PF jumps to 6.1, which would classify it as a "medium fast, requires more skill" tournament. Similarly, if he made the blind levels 30 minutes long, the PF would skyrocket to 13.8, which would make it a pretty serious tournament that highly favored skill over luck.

For the actual play itself last night,  five of us regular Gurettes showed up, plus the husband of one of my coworkers. Total field size was 37 players, and the organizer allowed limited rebuys during the first hour of play (depending on whether there was a dead stack already in play that the rebuyer could take over). Alas, none of us made the money, but it was fun overall.

I got lucky at one point, open-shoving a 10xBB stack playing blind (yes, without looking, as per advice from Snyder's book) from the button. I got called by the SB (Solar Ted) who turned over a legitimate hand. I had a true squawdoosh hand of J4o, but the board ran out with two Jacks and a Four, which doubled me up nicely.

Ah, but turnabout is fair play, and I got bad-beated out of the tourney myself 1 player before the final table was formed. Overall, I played a little too weak tight (bad news) but was also more patient than usual (good news). In the end, however, I let myself get too "stack thirsty" as Mr. Multi likes to say, so I ended up having to shove frequently at the end and risk my tourney life over and over. This actually helped my image a little, however, as being a reckless player. On my last hand of the night I got a call from someone I'd pushed around a lot with these shoves. This time, however, I had QQ, and he thought and thought and finally called my reshove with AJo. I spiked a third Q on flop, and of course started (prematurely) mentally counting my new stack. Alas, he went runner-runner for a straight, and I went walk-walk to my car for the ride home. Sigh.

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In other news, I posted another quiz of the day answer today. I enjoy doing this daily morning exercise, and I feel it's really good training if you want to work on hand analysis and/or get better at logically working through the REDi process. Today's question was:

My analysis of the hand was as follows:

Reads: A “very aggro” player opens UTG at a six-max table and then fires a continuation bet on the driest of flops? His preflop range is very, very wide, and we really can’t narrow it any postflop after his cbet. Let’s call his range any pocket pair and essentially all broadways. He’s putting you on a weakish pair and/or some kind of connector because your image is “a little tight” and you just called pre.

Estimate: We’re a huge favorite against his range at something like 80:20. Per Flopzilla he’s got an overpair to the board 28% of the time, ace-high 29%, and no made hand 37% of the time:

Decide: We’re crushing his range, so we have pure Value. We want to get as much money in the middle as possible.

Implement: The goal here is to maximize pot size, so you have to pick the course of action that on average results in the biggest pot in the middle. Against a normal player we’d want to raise. Against this aggro monkey and with our image, however, we might want to let him build the pot for us and not chase him away. I’d probably just call, and let him fire another bullet on the turn and/or river before I raised.

All-in for now...
-Bug