Poker Quiz Question #52

Here's the last official question of the quiz:

Q#52: You're in a $5/$10 NL cash game. Everyone has $1000 stacks. It's six-handed. You raise UTG with A♠-T♠. The big blind calls. He's loose-aggressive, but has been check-folding to your flop bets during the last few rotations. The flop is 2♥-9♥-J♣. Is this a good flop for you? What should you do?

1. Good Flop, Bet
2. Bad Flop, Check
3. Good Flop, Check
4. Bad Flop, Bet

---


A#52: Reads: A LAg flat called your UTG raise from the big blind. Given the stakes of the game, let's assume he's a competent player. He is probably putting you on hands like AT+, A8s+, 22+, and a bunch of broadways and/or big SCs. He knows he'll be OOP in the hand, he doesn't reraise, and he's normally aggressive. WIth all this in mind, his range looks and smells like a small to medium pair to me, plus maybe some other random suited connectors. Call it 99-22,QJs,JTs,T9s,98s

Estimate: The problem didn't explicitly state this, but I assume that he checks to you on the flop of 2♥-9♥-J♣. This is a moderately wettish flop, and/but it missed you completely. Against his range on this board, you're a dog at something like 25:75. Said another way: bad flop for you.

Decide: The problem statement says that he has a propensity to check-fold to your flop cbets. The board is wettish, and has either hit him (in which case he's coming along) or it missed (in which case he's probably going to fold to a cbet). In other words, I think you can probably bluff here and get him to fold out many of his small, non-set pairs and most of his SCs that are of the wrong suit/flavor. Our line is therefore a Bluff.

Implement: Bet, but fold to a reraise and/or shut it down on the turn if the villain doesn't go away.

Answer: Bad Flop, Bet

------------------------------------------------------

And now what do I do now that the quiz series has run its course? It's been almost a year since I started work on analyzing and discussing all 52 Donkey Test "Quiz Questions" within this blog-- and now I'm finished. Whew.

Seriously, I really enjoyed doing this exercise, and in fact plan on continuing from time to time with my own questions, hands-of-the-day from other websites, reader-submitted hands, and interesting poker questions I see in the forums. I've received a lot of really useful and positive feedback on my analyses from various folks reading this blog, so I'd like to keep some type of regular quiz going.

When I first started out with Q#1, I admit I didn't really do a great job analyzing some of the hand situations in a formal, logical process. In fact, I think made some mistakes. That's the bad news. The good news is that knowing I was flailing away to get to an answer on each quiz helped in part to lead me to creating REDi (initially called "RED-M," and proposed on or about the time I tackled Q#16). After some evolution and tweaking, I now honestly believe REDi represents a pretty good approach to breaking down a poker hand situation and arriving at a well-reasoned and defensible answer. The more I use REDi, the stronger I think it is in analyzing both simple and complex poker questions alike.

In any case, I hope you guys and gals enjoyed reading my quiz question analyses as much as I did puzzling over them and writing down my thoughts. If you've missed any of the questions, or want to go back and reread any of the posts, I've created a separate page (found at the top of my blog home page, as well as here) that provides a hyper-linked table of contents that will get you to each of the 52 individual questions and answers. Thanks for your indulgence...

All-in for now...
-Bug

Poker Quiz Question #51

Q#51: You're in a $50/$100 NL 4-handed cash game. Everyone has $50,000 stacks. You are a tight-aggressive mid-stakes pro taking a shot at the big game. You have your entire bankroll on the table. You're on the button with A♣-9♣. You raise to $500 and the expert pro player (one of the best players in New York, and who is very tricky and aggressive) in the big blind calls. Flop is A♠-9♠-8♣. The BB checks and you bet $2,000. He thinks and calls. The turn is 9♦. He checks, you check behind. The river is 2♠.

He leads for $15,000 into the $5,000 pot. You have $49,000 left. You think he has rivered the flush. What should you do? (Pretend you don't know what he actually has if you've seen the movie.)

• Call
• Raise All-in
• Fold

---


A#51: Reads: Hmmmm.... When I first read this question, I was a little confused (and yes, I've seen the movie, but I'm trying hard to pretend I haven't). Specifically, what confused me was the statement "you think he has rivered the flush." If this is truly your read, then you've got him crushed with your boat, so the only question is whether to raise less than all-in, or jam, right?

Well, no, not so fast. We'll get to the whole issue of bankroll management (BRM) in a moment, but first we need to figure out whether a flush actually makes sense or not. He was getting just 1.5:1 on the flop in pot odds, which means he probably was not chasing a vanilla flush draw. But yet he still calls. And then on the river, if he just has the flush, he has to realize that the board paired. So why risk chasing us off our weaker hands with such a big overbet, but commit himself if we have him beat? Something smells fishy with the flush draw idea.

There are obviously other hands besides flushes in the villain's range, such as lower full houses. All of these we beat. There is one specific hand that beats us, however, which of course is A-A. Now, 99% of players would not call with rockets OOP preflop heads-up, nor would they slow play it this soft on all the streets after flopping top set, nor would they lead so big on the river.... ah, but this is Teddy KGB, er, I mean an "expert pro player (one of the best players in New York, and who is very tricky and aggressive)" that we're talking about. He knows that you know that he knows... and so on. He obviously sees that the board has paired and that the river front-door flushed the board. He has absolutely put you on a range of hands, and is factoring that into how he's playing his own hand. He also is certainly aware that you know this, and knows that you very well might think he has rivered the flush, yet he still overbets on fifth street. And he knows that you know that he knows this. And so on...

The bottom line is he's most likely holding something like 99, 88, JsTs, and maybe even JsQs or 89s. He also might have AA. He might even have total air, because he knows you have your entire life savings on the table and have to be worried about losing it all.

Estimate: We're ahead of almost all of his range. Only one hand beats us. We're not pot committed.

Decide: We've got a ton of value. If this were a smaller ring game, where my entire bankroll wasn't involved, I'd move all-in for sure..... ah, but we've ignored BRM so far in our considerations. Said another way: we're gambling with our entire life on this hand. If we lose, we're done with poker. Kaput. Fini. We'll be driving Knish's truck and forced to grind our way through law school. We won't be playing poker ever again. The (admittedly gorgeous) Gretchen Mol will have us by the balls, and we'll be firmly on the path to 9-to-5 drudgery, a white picket fence, kids...

...but what is the possibility that Teddy has the pocket rockets? Its pretty small, right?

...ah, it may be small, but it is finite. And it's just the type of hand that he might play this way if we were capable of slowing down and thinking.

In a sense, if we lose this hand, it's just a cooler.... but our life savings are on the line, so the ramifications of being coolered are HUGE.

To quote the fictional hero in this hand, Mike McDermott states, "I want him to think that I am pondering a call, but all I'm really thinkin' about is Vegas and the fuckin' Mirage." What he should have been thinking about instead was his f***in' bankroll...

I say that even though we have tons of value, we're gonna be cautious and put ourselves on a showdown line that we will probably win.

Implement: just call.

Answer: Call

All-in for now...
-Bug