Minggu, 10 Januari 2010

PCA Heads Up

I lost to my first opponent of the PCA $1100 heads up tournament. In the best of three format, I lost the first match, won the second, and had a solid lead before this hand came up in the third match:

Blinds 50-100. He has about 3700 and I have about 6300. I limped the button with QJo. There were reasons I limped rather than raised here but they are complicated and I won't get into them here. He checked his option. Flop J43 rainbow. He bet 150 and I raised to 400. He quickly called. Turn 3c, second club. He bet 650, I dwelled for a bit and called. River 2 he bet 1400. I thought a very long time.

Here are some of the things I know about him at this point:
  1. He is a good player, but I thought I was a little better
  2. He has not launched a big multi-street bluff throughout the match
  3. He is fairly nitty
  4. I believed my image to be a little looser and more aggressive than his, but nowhere near wild. In other words, I would expect him to give me some credit for a hand when I raised his flop bet
  5. Nothing physical other than the quickness of his flop call
I put him on one of three hands: 6-5, 5-2, or a full house. When he bet the turn I thought he could have a jack, but the more I thought about this player and his tendencies the more I felt he would have checked a jack to me on the turn. At first I was pretty sure I was calling because many good players could be value/block betting a jack-ten or jack-nine here, but I grew increasingly convinced he would check-call all of his jacks on the turn.

I did think he was tricky enough to bet out with two pair and call a raise, then bet out with a boat on the turn.

6-5 dominated all the other holdings. Everything about the way he played the hand, based on general poker strategy along with this player's unique tendencies, screamed 6-5. I told myself if he had 6-5, that would be precisely how he would play it.

5-2 is only slightly different from the 6-5. The biggest difference is that 5-2 makes bottom pair on the end where 6-5 makes the straight. Often players will check a pair on the end after bluffing their draw, but here a pair of deuces is very unlikely to be the best hand.

After tanking about all this for a couple minutes I resisted the urge to call and threw away my hand. I think my analysis was sound. What do you guys think?

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