State of Confusion
"I don't know what you have, so I'm all in," John Juanda says in ESPN's televised Harrah's WSOP Circuit event in New Orleans.
It sounds an awful lot like the $1/2 PL hold'em cash game that Mark and I once attended at the Atlanta Poker Club. I had top pair with KQs and wasn't sure where I was at, so I told the flop caller, "I've got to see what you have. I'm all in."
A few TV clicks away, on GSN's High Stakes Poker, Daniel Negreanu puzzles over a near 1/2 pot bet on the river with a board of xxJTK.
It's interesting to see the pros in this state -- they get their reads right more often than others, but there are still times when they don't know where they are at in a hand.
In the Negreanu hand, he had AA, and when he was raised on the turn by a tricky Eli Elezra, he didn't go around raising for information. He just called. On the river, he also played through the hand aloud (like Howard Lederer does) and subtly fished for information, chips in hand, saying his cards, to try to elicit information.
Making the right reads in the fog of war is a big part of the game and separates you from the weak-tight, which in Ed Miller and David Sklansky's No Limit Hold'em book describes as players who fold to a large bet without thinking about the hand or its circumstances at all.
You won't be right all the time -- Dan Herrington warns in his No-limit books that no one is right all the time, but you'll be right enough to never have to say, as John in the old Emory game said once to my raise for information "I have to fold because I don't have the nuts."
LOL.
It sounds an awful lot like the $1/2 PL hold'em cash game that Mark and I once attended at the Atlanta Poker Club. I had top pair with KQs and wasn't sure where I was at, so I told the flop caller, "I've got to see what you have. I'm all in."
A few TV clicks away, on GSN's High Stakes Poker, Daniel Negreanu puzzles over a near 1/2 pot bet on the river with a board of xxJTK.
It's interesting to see the pros in this state -- they get their reads right more often than others, but there are still times when they don't know where they are at in a hand.
In the Negreanu hand, he had AA, and when he was raised on the turn by a tricky Eli Elezra, he didn't go around raising for information. He just called. On the river, he also played through the hand aloud (like Howard Lederer does) and subtly fished for information, chips in hand, saying his cards, to try to elicit information.
Making the right reads in the fog of war is a big part of the game and separates you from the weak-tight, which in Ed Miller and David Sklansky's No Limit Hold'em book describes as players who fold to a large bet without thinking about the hand or its circumstances at all.
You won't be right all the time -- Dan Herrington warns in his No-limit books that no one is right all the time, but you'll be right enough to never have to say, as John in the old Emory game said once to my raise for information "I have to fold because I don't have the nuts."
LOL.
posted by kurokitty at
10:12 AM
4 Comments:
Juanda's move was along the lines of "the way you played this hand doesn't make sense; I can't see someone with any hand that's beating me playing it that way." Harrington discusses this line of thought in HoHE1. I'm guessing the reasoning at the Atlanta Poker Club wasn't as sophisticated as this.
Negreanu's river decision was different. He ran through some of Elezra's likely holdings based on Elezra's flop check-call, turn check-raise, & river 2/3 pot-bet, and came up with enough that AA beat (KJ, KQ, etc.) to outweigh those that beat AA (Q9, JJ, etc.) -- at least at 2.5-to-1 odds.
By
Sean Landis, at 12:21 PM
At the same time, the APC decision was based on confidence that TP, good kicker was the best hand.
In citing Negreanu's case, I was more talking about how he really didn't have an inkling that of all of the hands he was weighing, that a pure bluff with A9 was the actual hand.
By
kurokitty, at 1:52 PM
Oops, I misread your post, thinking that the APC flop caller told you "I've got to see what you have," and not the other way around.
By
Sean Landis, at 2:04 PM
It's tough -- players have such unlikely holdings sometimes, and you can't always call.
By
Mark, at 3:07 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home