Oh well, I got to The Vic and straight into a game just before 2am.
I felt really fresh, rested, but very sore. I had joined Su for the Body Pump session at the gym earlier. My fucking god it was a tough workout.
Body Pump is a group session, where you follow the instructor and work out pretty much every muscle in your body over a 60 minute period. As I write this now, literally my whole body is in pain! Su insists this is a good sign! I can’t even wash my hair because lifting my arms is too painful!
So I get my money from the cage and settle down to a decent looking game. Rosh is there, I also recognise some Finish dude who I have played with over the weekend, Doctor G is also in the game (upon request his identity shall be kept anonymous), and a couple of Chinese degenerates waiting for a flush draw to jam their bowls in.
Rob “The Horse” Angood is around too. It’s really nice to see him; I genuinely miss his presence around the card room these days. He tells me he has got the “lot” again in the £2-£5; must be nice eh?
Just when I was wondering why he was wearing a sexy Oxford shirt (as opposed to his lucky Adidas poker hood), Rosh confirms some cunt is in town and Rob is entertaining her. Fair enough. Good luck with that one.
The game is flowing nicely, plenty of action, but not crazy. The Finish guy keeps wondering off, which is kind of disturbing the game because it seems along with me, Rosh, and Doctor G, the table have identified him as somewhat of the “action player” and are just passively passing chips around until he returns.
He does indeed return to spice shit up. He buys the button, Rosh and I limp along with couple of others. I have 88.
The Finish guy pops it up to £14, everyone calls.
The flop comes down queen high. The Finish guy leads for £35ish, Rosh slowly and deliberately cuts out a raise to £90ish with about £100 behind.
The action snap folds around to the Finish guy, who has Rosh well covered, he begins to tank, and does so for a while.
The tanking is a great sign. The guy is competent enough to know (after asking Rosh how much he has behind) that his opponent is committed to the pot. So with his bet Rosh has put this guy to a decision for stacks, and when you tank you rarely have a strong enough hand to play for stacks.
I would not raise out of the blinds in that spot with anything less than QQ+, not even AK, because you are not going to fold out the limpers for a reasonable price and there is absolutely no value in playing a raised multi-way pot out of position.
But that is me. This guy will and has a much broader range; consisting of any pocket pair, KQ, AJ, AQ, AK and sometimes even junk.
Rosh’s early position limp calling range here is heavily consisted of pocket pairs, though occasionally he will limp some broad way cards along with suited aces, but will very rarely call the raise.
His raise screams strength to me. He must have a set. The board is dry, there are no viable draws out there, and so this Finish guy has to put Rosh on either a complete bluff or a set.
It’s that simple, no need to tank. But he does and eventually puts Rosh in for the rest of his stack, who reluctantly but nevertheless snaps.
By Rosh’s reaction I know he doesn’t have much. The board runs out and Finish guy tables KQ off.
Rosh mucks his cards, and leaves. At least he doesn’t have to take the night bus I suppose.
I haven’t spoken to him about this hand let, and I don’t really know for certain what he had, and I think for the most part it’s irrelevant.
You see Rosh calls and plays a wide range pre flop, not only in this particular hand but in general because of his superior post flop ability.
He is prepared and comfortable playing post flop, and is able to take away many pots when he senses weakness. He trusts his hand reading ability, and has the heart to go with his reads.
He will set up multi street plays, and put his opponents to very hard decisions, forcing them into “infliction points”.
Though this is a term primary used in tournament poker, in cash games it basically means the point of no going back, the point of commitment. You can push your opponent to this point, with the illusion of you being there too but not really being there.
Imagine you are pushing some guy to the edge of a cliff, he is pushing you back, but he is for some reason is standing on a skate board, so even though he is trying to push you back, he is failing to make up any ground, and you continue to push him back towards the edge of the cliff.
You get to the edge of the cliff, and although you are right there with this guy / your opponent, he is at the infliction point first, you are there together right? In fact you are the one moving forwards the edge of the cliff / you are heading towards the infliction point. But this guy has to decide first, he can stop, get off the skate board, and concede / fold, or he can decide to breach the infliction point and go off the edge of the cliff.
But you see if this guy falls off the side of the cliff, you can still change your mind. If he doesn’t fold, you still can.
In no limit this is so powerful I can’t even begin to explain, stronger than the force of fold equity.
But you need heart, conviction, immense hand reading skills and a great deal of intelligence to utilise it. Yogi (Rosh) has this in his arsenal and frequently uses it.
Moral of the story, this Finish guy sucks donkey cock.
As a new feature (and to add some colour) I am going to try and post random photos captured during my journeys on London’s public transport. Here is a fresh “tag” done while I was on the tube to kick things off, I only wish I had the bottle to capture the guy while he was doing it!
Yigit out!
4 comments:
You see this hand much the same way I do.
If I'm making this play I need some equity in the hand, just in case I'm pushed all in. I had 5 live outs and a couple of backdoor draws. Not much, I know, but enough to go to war with in this case where, as you say, the hands are largely irrelevent - the whole play is based around the perceived strength of my hand and I expect to take this down a large proportion of the time.
I can't make this move with air as I would be unable to commit if shoved on and it is too large a proportion of my stack to raise/fold.
The outs, of course, are only a contingency plan. Even though I'm committing to the play I am, as you point out, putting him to the decision for all his chips. Even with a Queen and decent kicker it's difficult for him to commit his stack here. And he doesn't always rate to have a hand like this.
But it's a good analysis man - especially given I hadn't told you what I had or discussed the hand with you at that point!
BTW - I liked your analogy on "infliction points". Very good :)
playing a lot of seshs with u rosh recently has made me realise u are one tricky mofo and is capable of sum crazy ass shit!
but dnt u think some of ur lines are too complicated for the standard abc tard at vic to understand? alot of the times they are jus gna reluctantly call u down...? and then u end up regretting if only u actually had the hand u tried to rep! (thats how i feel anyway when it happens to me)
harry
Mate, you're not wrong....a move like this isn't appropriate against many of the players at £1/2. I do try to pick my spots though and I really felt like this was a decent spot (with a sizeable enough pot) to try something like this.
This guy wasn't just some random donk. I mean, I wouldn't credit him with a very deep thought process but he was clued up enough to understand the strength that my raise here indicated.
We could talk for days and days about spots like this (and I'm sure we will) but I don't want to drag this thread on.
What I would say though is that I don't regret making a play that I feel is correct, even if I get looked up and lose money. When you're making moves like this you are going to get caught a certain percentage of the time and you've gotta know that going into it and be able to take it on the chin when that happens.
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