Ipoker $100r Tuesday

100/200 no ante.

Hero (btn): 7800
Villain (bb): 13500

The villain in the hand is Schappuska – regular across all sites, aggro thinking player, plays all the high buy ins on stars. No direct history on this nick, and I’d be surprised if he has any other read on me than “competent”.

Folds to me and I make it 500 with AJo, sb folds he calls.

Flop: T 7 4 rb

Check/625/Call

Turn: A rb still.

Villain checks.

At this stage in the hand most regulars will choose to check back with AJ in order to pot control and also because they don’t see the villain continuing with many hands they beat. They will check back and then attempt value on the river. In my opinion this stutter step move screams value. If you were bluffing on the flop surely you would continue on such a good barrel card? If you check at this juncture, any thinking player is going to think you have showdown value – either Tx, JJ-KK or Ax, then when you go for value on the river it allows them off lightly. There is also another negative point that I will get to later.

I elected to bet, as the villain will know I continue with my bluff range – and considering I raised the button it has to be pretty wide. The villain may also believe my value range is pretty small considering a large number of regs check back Ax on the turn.

I bet 1150 into 2k, he called.

River 3x.

He checks.

There is 4.5k in the middle and we have 5.8k back.

We now obviously have an option to get three streets. By checking the turn we rule out this possibility, which is what I was referring to on the turn.

I think we’re good here practically all of the time. I think he’s raised a flopped set by now – most likely on the flop and I don’t think he’s the type to defend A7 or A4. AT is a possibility, and also he could have called pre and on the flop with AQ, but I think he will often 3b AQ pre, and will almost certainly 3b AK.

I think he likely has a mid pocket pair or Tx, ie T9/JT/QT/KT. The question now is, “How much if anything will he call with these hands?” The “if anything” part is important, because even if we think we’re good it doesn’t always mean we should bet. He has to have a range that he calls with.

If we bet 2k I think we get called some of the time by that range, but just under half pot for 1/3 of our remaining stack as a third barrel looks particularly like value to me.

We should consider betting really small – say 500, but in this instance I don’t believe that would be optimal as it would have to be called twelve times more often than a shove.

That brings me to the final betting option – shoving….

When choosing our bet sizes we have to compute how often we think we will get called betting different amounts and choose the optimal number based on incomplete information, guess work and maths. But these are not the only factors, as often a bigger bet will look weaker than a half pot bet and be called more often.

If we go back through the hand and analyse my range in his eyes:

Preflop: I’m reasonably wide on the button
Flop: My cbet range is likely close to 100%
Turn: He will expect me to continue with all bluffs and pot control some Ax and Tx therefore largely weighting me to bluffs.

So If now he is faced by a bet of 5800 into 4500 on the river he’s going to wonder how I now supposedly have the nuts when my range was (in his eyes) heavily weighted towards bluffs on the turn.

I decided that not only would my shove get called more than half as much as betting half my stack (or a little less if I bet half pot), but it would actually look weaker and get more calls without needing to consider the other factors.

I shoved and after a little bit of thought he called with 88.

When you miss bets on one street it often means you can miss value on later ones too. If I had checked the turn, I wouldn’t have been able to size my river bet as big, and that’s without considering that he may have made the fold due to a bet/check/bet line looking more like value.

It is also important to note that this hand – particularly the river were opponent dependent. Against a random fish I doubt I would be able to shove the river for value very often.

Continue the discussion for poker-allies forum members here:

http://www.poker-allies.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=390

It is alleged that these sites created phony companies in order to ease the flow of funds to and from player accounts and get round the problems created by the UIGEA in 2006. The US Department of Justice claims that these sites disguised payments for online poker as jewellery and golf ball purchases.

In addition to US players being banned, their funds were also frozen. This posed another serious problem to thousands of poker players with money being tied up. This problem now appears to be easing as yesterday Pokerstars and Full Tilt announced that funds would be available to be withdrawn. In addition to this, the “dot com” domain names were also released for use outside of the United States.

With Pokerstars and Full Tilt out of the picture for Americans, many players have turned to the Cake Network who still continue to serve the American market. The network have not broken any rules and have vowed to continue to allow Americans to deposit and play for real money.

PPN.com – Poker Pros Network are one of the sites who look to have benefited from the withdrawal of the big 3. Fresh from signing Jamie Gold to captain their team of Pros they have announced they will continue to serve the US Market and are reporting thousands of new signups.

Outside of the USA the effects have been felt by the sites that chose to pull out of the American market after the 2006 UIGEA. Party gaming, who with Pokerstars were the major players in the middle of the last decade experienced a 9% increase in the last week, while PKR a site that focuses on animated poker graphics experienced a huge 21% increase in its traffic. (Both according to pokerscout.com)

On the stock exchange, Monday saw a 35% increase in BwinParty shares. Bwin and Party merged in the first quarter of this year but have continued operating separately in the poker industry.

One of the main concepts to take away from this book is Magriel’s M and how to apply it.

“The most important single number that governs your play towards the end of tournaments is M, which is simply the ratio of your stack to the current total of blinds and antes”.

The vast majority of poker players will have heard of “M” and most will be able to tell you what it is and how to calculate it. However, it seems to be increasingly common for tournament players to be discussing hands in terms of “bbs”. If there was an industry standard for structures this would be fine, but there are even subtle differences in the size of antes on Full Tilt and Poker Stars.

If we delve deeper and look at the structures on the European friendly sites the differences are staggering; Party Poker’s antes are almost negligible and appear almost as an afterthought whereas ipoker’s antes can add up to 50% more than the bb. The size of antes in live play also differs dramatically from casino to casino, some still not using antes at all but others having enormous antes, often due to the size of chips available and dealers’ eagerness to colour up the chips at the earliest point they can.

The standard size of an ante is around 10% of the big blind. Therefore an M of 5 for example usually = 12-13bbs. But as discussed, there is actually no industry standard.

To use an extreme example let’s compare ipoker and Party, and look at a specific situation where using the number of bbs you have to determine your play can be disastrous.

At the 300/600 level in the ipoker daily rebuys the ante is 100. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 1900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 9500 chips = 15.83 bbs

At the 800/1600 level on Party the ante is 50. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 2900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 14500 chips = 9.06 bbs.

The difference is clearly huge. Shoving the button with 9bbs on Party nets you the same gain as shoving the button with 16bbs on ipoker at this level.

If we were using 12bbs as being an M of 5, we’d actually be shoving an M of 6.6 on Party and an M of 3.8 on ipoker.

On Pokerxfactor.com Sheets has put up a very handy tool for calculating what hands you need to have for shoving particular M’s from particular positions based on the Nash Equilibrium¹

It’s great as a guideline, but be aware that just because something is +ev it may not be optimal. Ie shoving with an M of 10 on Party could be shoving 32bbs so a plethora of other options are available.

Also calling ranges will differ from site to site, it’s easy to see why the bb’s calling range of a 9bb shove on Party will be different from the bb’s calling range of a 16bb shove on ipoker.

Using the number of big blinds you have to determine your shoving range can be a massive leak, taking a second or two to calculate your M will benefit your game greatly.

That Harrington fella knew what he was talking about.