Thursday, October 13, 2011

Blogging is Getting Hard

Like, I just don't feel like I have that much to talk about these days. I do the same thing, over and over and over again, and some days I win and some days I lose but on the whole not that much interesting happens. I have the sense that I may be playing kind of badly, at least on occasion, but that's probably because I'm actually trying to make some drastic adjustments to some of the unique characters I deal with on a day to day basis. For one thing today I tried to work on playing hands out of rhythm when the situation dictated it. MikeL impressed this on me one day when we were playing Stud Eight....I said something to the effect of "there's a lot of donking in this game" and he said "it's not donking...there is no flow here...it just...is" He probably said it a little more elegantly than that, but the point was made. So there are some guys I play with who tend to have monstrous pre flop ranges, and this ends up creating a lot of big multiway pots against people who basically don't have anything. These guys are animals preflop, but they aren't idiots; they aren't going to cbet the 76o they just 3 bet on the QT4 flop after 4 people check to them; they're going to take a free card and see if they can catch a straight draw, pair, or some other conceivable reason to make it to showdown. So you end up doing a lot of shit that just feels flat dumb. I've been calling way more hands in the small blind when these guys raise in late position (I try to keep them on my right, so this comes up again and again) and then have to realize that they aren't going to bet the flop nearly as often as I'm accustomed to, since they have so many shitty hands in their ranges. So like 3 times yesterday I found myself donking in a 5 way pot from the small blind with a hand that normally shouldn't have even taken a flop.

I've seen some hilarious stuff the last few days, but I just don't have the engery/desire to blog about it. My KJ chopped with 72 on an AAJ flop, where my opponent c/3-bet the flop. This same guy immediately challenged me to step outside when I laughed at his assertion that I should never have called him down with "that hand" after he "make(s) that play" which IMR how the fuck am I not supposed to laugh hysterically that's high comedy the only reason I called him down instead of re-raising wasn't the fear of an ace (which is like zero) but the fear that he'd stop barreling off and I wouldn't collect the full value. When the final board read AAJ-A-J I also started to laugh out loud. Maybe I should laugh less.

Today is a freelance day, and I think I'm going to head to commerce since that's the only place that will have any games at this early hour. So once more into the breach with me.

3 comments:

Razor RC said...

The reason stud has so much "donking" is because the game state changes so much street to street. In LHE, rarely does the next street actually affect your opponent's holdings relative to your own. Which is why nits love HE so much, because AA doesn't really care much what the next card is.

Or to put it another way, imagine playing LHE where all 7 cards are in your hand facedown and there's no board. Then every street you have to reveal one at random. If you suddenly are showing AAA, it's not like you can check and expect your opponent to bet... :-) That's stud in a nutshell.

Fiato Forte said...

I hope you can find the interest to continue blogging. Yours is the most realistic LHE blog around and it seems there are still aspects of poker that you have yet to journey. That is not meant as an insult or condescending. Don't quit.

jesse8888 said...

Captain you're spot on, and the reason there is/needs to be so much donking in some of the LHE games I play is that the guy putting in the last bet on the previous street (preflop or the flop) is basically doing it for a free card, or just to gamble. In a nutshell, he never has it.