Tuesday, March 16, 2010

HOTD: Kings full of aces, not as great as it sounds

I limp in on the button with K3K6. Flop comes AAK, good and bad. Now in NLHE this would be a moderately great flop but in Omaha this is the purest of trap hands. The BB has me well covered and leads out for pot. Folds around to me and I pot him back since I do not give him credit for being able to lead out with aces full of kings there from early position since any ace will bet for him and he can afford to let pocket pairs boat up first. Likewise I take him off of quad aces. So now we know he has one ace, no kings, and three other cards. Villain is very deep stacked and I give him credit for being a competent player. He likewise probably does not give me credit for aces full of kings either or I would likely flat call. He flat calls my raise. Turn is a Th which happens to make a royal possible too. I was really preferring not to see any other broadway cards come out but in reality no card is safe since he was in the BB. He checks to me and I'm just too short stacked to worry about having to make any really tough decisions. I commit the rest of my chips and hope for the best. He calls and shows AJ62. So far so good. Turn is an 8 and I drag the pot.

Underboats are a terrible place to be and I was fortunate that I didn't have to be put to the test if we were both really deep stacked. I was also lucky to be in position in the hand because I would have led out and villain may well have just flat called to be conservative though it looks exactly the same as slow playing AK and I would have been in a real bind then. This particular hand didn't really tax me due to my stack but the hand analysis would be identical to having a full buy at risk.

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