Thoughts on Tight Games, and My Line from Friday

In a fit of boredom this weekend, I spent some time playing the .10/.25 and .25/.50 NLHE cash games on Full Tilt. It's generally a bad idea for me to play when I'm bored, as it leads to poor decisions, but I managed to limit my donking off of chips to approximately $10-$15.

Every single table that I set at was super ridiculously tight. Finding a stone stober AlCantHang during a 3-day jaunt to Vegas would be easier than trying to get action out of these people when they're not holding a monster. Upping the pre-flop aggression wasn't the answer, either. I must have been raising damn near 25-30% of my hands (including such monsters as J9s, T5s and of course 72o), showing them down when nobody called preflop, and still I couldn't get any action. When I did get called, the action after the flop was even worse.

Part of the problem is that seemingly EVERYone at these Full Tilt small-stakes NLHE tables buys in short. A full buy-in is 100 BBs. I would say that anywhere from 50-70% buy in for 40 BBs, and another 10-15% buy in for 20 BBs. This almost ensures that these people aren't going to put any money in without a good starting hand and/or good chunk of the flop.

These games don't really suit my style, because my style is predicated on playing tight (though nowhere near as tight as these people) and making the occassional move. With everyone buying in short and standard preflop raises of 4 BBs, there isn't much room to "make moves" because you lose most of your folding equity if the hand goes past the flop. The result is that: (a) you get little action on your premium hands; (b) you win a bunch of small to tiny pots and lose the occassional medium pot when you get action past the flop; and (c) major, doubling-up type pots are practically non-existent.

The only real move you have in a game like that is to check-raise the flop, because most of the incredibly tight-weak players that populate these games will lay down anything short of top two pair to the check-raise. The danger is that the flop will check through, because the players are so tight-weak, and bam, you've just given a free card.

For me, the experiment ended when a guy slowrolled quad 8s on me. You might ask how it's possible to be slowrolled online, but it goes like this: Me: 46s in the SB. Half-price flop of 8-8-5 checks through 4-handed. Turn 4 puts two hearts out, I bet pot to see where things are, two folds, one call. River is an offsuit queen and my opponent has a touch less than the pot left in his stack because he is one of the aforementioned short buyers (bought in for 20 BBs, has 12 left). The alarm bells were ringing in my head that such a player wouldn't call the turn on a draw without the 8, but I was bored so I put him in. He then took his time to ponder the call, typed "hmmmmmmm" into the chat, waited a few more seconds then called and showed 88 for flopped quads, ending with a "lol" in the chat. I typed back "slowrolling is bush league" and he answered with "blah blah blah". That was enough for me!

The moral of this story is that if I intend to continue to play NLHE cash games online (not likely, as I still find it incredibly boring), I might be better served by moving some money back to Party Poker.

--

Friday, I posted the following:

NLHE cash game. You have 150BBs. Opponent has 100.

UTG, you catch AKo. This is your third premium hand in an orbit. The other two were KK and AA. Each time, you raised to 4xBB. Each time Opponent was the only caller and folded to a pot bet on a queen-high rainbow flop. Each time, you showed your hand to the table.

You raise to 4xBB and once again Opponent is the only caller. The flop is A-5h-6h. You pot it (8BBs into an 8BB pot), and opponent comes alive with a minimum-raise to 16BBs. Your move?

One critical piece of information that I intentionally left out was that this was a .10/.25 table. Thus, I generally expect the quality of the play not to be as high. In my mind, this looked like Opponent called with Ax and hit the ace. The question then became how to extract the maximum value from the hand, because as long as he doesn't have hearts, I most likely have him crushed (there is the two pair possibility, of course, but the 5 and 6 look like decent cards to me) as I'm ahead approximately 4-to-1 most of the time.

I decided upon the following line: call. Against this player, this will almost always elicit a big bet on the turn, which I can then profitably check-raise. Unfortunately for me, the 4h hit the turn and I had to reconsider. I didn't want to risk giving him a free draw to a flush, and I thought the heart might scare off my action anyway, so I went with the stop-and-go and came out for the pot again. When he raised me all-in for his last 40 BBs ($10), I was pretty sure I was screwed. I called anyway (this is the boredom call - very rare that I would stack off here with just top pair to raises on two streets and a threatening board) and he turned over Ah7h to prove to me that I was drawing dead. I guess it was perhaps unfortunate that, heads up, he had the exact draw that hit the board. To me, the only mistake was calling the turn raise, and I knew it was a mistake but let myself do it out of boredom and the fact that I was playing far below my usual stakes.

Donkey poker at it's finest.