Thursday, April 1, 2010

HOTD: How to play against a monster draw

I was involved in a hand today where I wonder how it could have played out differently. In this case I won but I want to figure out what villain could have done differently. .02/.05 stakes and I'm sitting on $1.48. Min-raise ahead of me and I call with QQJTds. Three of us see a flop of J92 with two of my suits so I have a non-nut flush draw, top pair, and an open ender. I lead out for .15 into a .35 pot. Hijack raises to .80, cutoff calls and it's .65 more for me to call getting about 3:1. He had me covered and the cutoff had us both outchipped. It occurs to me that I could be in really bad shape in a three handed pot if one or the other has a better flush draw and/or same or better straight draw, basically I could be possibly drawing to a chop at best. Nonetheless, I call. Turn brings a blank. I check, hijack shoves the rest of his stack, cutoff folds and now I have just .58 behind and getting almost 6:1 on a call which I do. River completes my flush without pairing the board and villain shows top set with nothing really else. Now assuming that all my draws were good I feel like I played it right but the question is what the guy with top set could have done. The first thought for me was that he could have flat called the flop bet then hammered the turn when a blank came since he still had the nuts at that point. If a dangerous card comes then he can slow down and reassess to see if he should try to boat up based on the betting. Or he could speed up if he wants to rep the nut straight or the nut flush. Or with the amount of presumed outs that I had I could have just kept my foot to the floor assuming that I was favored against whatever was out there and I will obviously get action from top set. Maybe it's just one of those hands where nobody is going anywhere and the chips will all end up in the middle but this scenario is not at all uncommon in Omaha and I want to have options sussed out for next time regardless of which side of the hand I'm on.

1 comment:

  1. All the money goes in regardless with these stack sizes

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