Sooted Connectors Hand -- Conclusion

Last Thursday I had posted some screen shots and asked some questions about how readers like to play a standard sooted connectors hand very early in a large MTT. It was the nightly pokerstars 25k guaranteed with a $27.50 buyin at 8pm ET, just the first couple of orbits. UTG limped, a few folds, and then I limped behind with 87s in clubs. We saw a five-way flop of 962 with one club, giving me an oesd, and when the action checked around to me, I bet 90 chips into the 110-chip pot. Just one player in late position called my bet, and we saw a heads-up turn card:



So, I just made my nut straight on the turn. And I picked up a flush draw. And an open-ended straight flush draw. There's 290 chips in the pot, and both myself and my opponent each have around 10x that still behind. I've now switched from win-a-small-pot mode to full chip extraction mode, and the question I posed is how would you play the hand now to give yourself the best chance to win and win big?

In a nutshell, you bet! That was the answer that mostly every commenter suggested, and I have to agree with that approach. There's two main reasons why I think a bet is almost mandatory here. First and foremost, I do not want to lose this pot at this point. Not giving this pot away after the hand I have amassed on the turn card is more important even that extracting my opponent's stack. And giving the entire pot away could very easily happen if I give this guy a free card to draw to another club that could give him a higher flush with the lone Jack, Queen, King or Ace of clubs in his hand. So I need to bet here, and the most important point is that my bet size be enough to clearly price him out of making a call with a lone high club in his hand. That' a little more than 4 to 1 against hitting on the river, so I need to bet more than a quarter of the pot to ensure that if he calls with just the one-card flush draw, that call is by definition profitable for me over the long term.

The other reason I think to bet here is one that was alluded to by a few of the commenters, and it has to do with extracting the most chips from my opponent. If I want to have a chance to get his whole stack, an all-in bet at this point would be for ten times the current pot, would look totally ridiculous, and is not going to be called by my opponent. Even a bet of twice the pot can't possibly be called really, unless the guy is holding the Ace♣ and is a total jackmonkey. But, I'm going to have that exact same problem on the river if I check here and my opponent checks behind. There's basically no way I can make a credible, callable bet on the river for most or all of my opponent's stack, unless I bet first on the turn here and get called, which will make the odds much more in favor of a sizable river bet if that's what seems like the most profitable move for me after the river card falls.

So I've got to bet this here to both maximize my chance of winning big and to minimize my chance of losing the whole pot on the river:



210 into 290. If he's got the Ace♣ and wants to call that bet, I sincerely hope he does. Because he is paying me free chips over the long haul by making this call, and because I know I can and will lay this down to almost any real action on the river if a fourth club hits. Unless it makes me a straight flush of course, in which case I probably move it all in and hope he's got the nut flush in there.

Cue the pokerstarsy river card:



Not a good card for me. There were two diamonds on the flop, and the guy called (not raised) two (not one) roughly 2/3-the-pot bets from me on the flop and the turn. Definitely the kind of play someone would make with a flush draw on the flop that did not fill on the turn, huh? And of course there's also the fact that the turn and river now made a higher runner-runner straight than the one I have, not that I am particular concerned about that longshot play but it's pokerstars, you never know. Would you lead out here, small maybe and try the blocking bet route? Or just check and hope to see a free showdown?

For me, he just played his hand so transparently like a flush draw that I dont' want to bet here. I check, and of course my opponent bets out:



Ugh. 200 chips into 910 in the pot. If that's not a suck bet, then I don't know what is. But then, it's only another 200 chips. Who's calling here, and who's folding?





Once you've decided what you would do, you can click here to see what I did.
[Edit: Link has been fixed]

NFL Pick 5 -- Week 10

Disclaimer: For those of you here to see the follow-up from yesterday's Actual Poker Post(TM), sorry but you will have to wait until Monday. That was not my intent but it's just the way things have to be for me today. On Monday I promise I will recap the action from Thursday's post and will get to the conclusion of the hand. As always thanks for everyone's thoughts and comments.

So, Week 10 of the NFL is already upon us, with the Thursday night games starting last night with one of the worst football games in recent memory, pitting the four-losses-in-a-row 49ers against the 1-3-in-their-last-four Chicago Bears in a game that did not disappoint those looking to see two inept teams banging heads until one was declared the winner. In the end, San Francisco, who was flat out unable to do anything on offense at home against the lackluster Bears defense, took advantage of one of Jay Cutler five interceptions (at least two of them in the red zone, including one on the 49ers' 1-yard line) to score the only touchdown of the day on their way to an overpowering 10-6 win in front of the home town fans. Fortunately, my read on the Bears' ineptitude on offense away from their home field was just enough to get a cover for the 49ers -3 points and bring us to 1-0 to start the Week 10 season. This is a nice start after last week's 2-3 performance, which brings my overall record so far this season to 26-15 counting last night's win with the Niners. Here's to some more winners this week, where a couple of games really stand out to me as having lines that are just off enough to create some good value for bettors. Here's the Week 10 picks, once again in no particular order:

1. San Francisco 49ers -3 vs. the Chicago Bears. Winner!

2. Detroit Lions +16.5 at Minnesota Vikings. Obviously, the Vikings are a far better team than the shitful Lions, about that there is no debate and no doubt. But are they two touchdowns and a field goal better? I just don't see it. This is the biggest line I've seen on an NFL game so far this season, at a time when most of the huge lines have been coming down a few points over the past few weeks of games when even the best of teams have been unable to cover the spread over the past few weekends. And the thing is, as good as Minnesota has been on both offense and defense this year, they just aren't going out and winning their games by 17 points. Yes, Detroit is horrible, but so are Cleveland and St. Louis, and so was Detroit the first time these teams met back in Week 2, and in only one of those games did the Vikes win by more than 16 points (38-10 over the Rams in Week 5). What's more, the Vikings have actually played better outside of the dome this year than inside, with their three home games so far coming in as wins of 3, 7 and 2 points, albeit against mostly better teams than the Lions. And lastly, the Lions seem to play the Vikings and Brett Favre fairly well over recent history, including causing Favre to have his worst performance of the year in Week 2 with just 155 yards in the air. In 2008 when these two teams met in Minnesota, the Vikings won by just two points, and the teams split their matchups in 2007 as well. And the word is that Favre is injured, so much so that he might not play the whole game, and if he does that he will be affected by the injury to some extent. All of this leads me to think that there is significant value on the Lions + 16.5 points this Sunday afternoon in Minnesota.

3. Kansas City Chiefs +2 at the Oakland Raiders. Wait, the Raiders are actually favored in a game this year? What an insult to Kansas City and first-year coach Todd Haley, especially given that the Raiders are averaging a smart 5.5 points per game over their last six outings. JaMarcus Russell is so far beyond being an NFL quarterback that awards are given in honor of his badness. Six of their eight opponents have scored at least 23 points against the Raiders this season, including their most recent home game which was a 38-0 shellacking by the New York Jets. Oakland actually won at KC earlier this year -- a 3-point victory, 13-10 -- but both of the Raiders' wins this year came when they themselves scored just 13 points, a strong offensive output for them given their performance this season. The Chiefs have at least shown they can score a little bit, breaking 20 points three times this season including twice on the road, and in their only other game against the NFL's shitpile teams (other than the game against the Raiders in Week 2), the Chiefs nabbed their first win of the season against the Redskins in Week 6. All this is a long way of saying that I think the Chiefs are likely to win this game outright and avoid being swept on the season by the lowly Raiders, and getting 2 points to boot against an awful Oakland team is just too much to pass up here.

4. Green Bay Packers +3 vs. the Dallas Cowboys. Here's another game where I can't believe the underdog is getting the points it is getting to cover. Green Bay, an absolutely desperate team at 4-4 at this point in the season, coming off their worst loss of the year so far last week at winless Tampa Bay, returns home on Sunday afternoon to face the hot Dallas Cowboys who are fresh off their huge win at division rival Philadelphia last Sunday night. So it's a bit of a short week for Dallas, they are likely facing a letdown game in between matchups against their two biggest division rivals in Philly and Washington, and we all know the troubles the Cowboys have had in general winning big road games in the second half of the season, which we are now officially in to. And let's not forget how horrible the coaching staff is in Dallas as well. Four wins in a row is more than enough for this Cowboys squad, and I think Green Bay has a good chance of winning this game outright at home in a matchup that they absolutely, positively have to win. Oh, and the Pack is actually getting three points as well? Definite value on the Packers here.

5. Denver Broncos -3.5 at Washington Redskins. I wrote earlier this week about how Denver has been exposed a bit over the past two games, at least as not being nearly as good as their 6-0 record indicated a few weeks back. That said, even though I've been at the top of the "not as good as their record" bandwagon with the Broncos all season, this line just seems wrong to me. The Redskins have played the worst schedule in NFL history so far in 2009, including games against the Rams, the Lions, the Buccaneers, the Panthers and the Chiefs, and yet still the team is only 2-6 in its first eight games, beating the Rams by two and the Bucs by three. Although the Redskins' defense has played reasonably well this year, their last two games have seen them give up 27 points in a loss to the Eagles, followed by 31 in another loss at Atlanta last weekend. In fact, the Redskins have held four of the shitpiler teams they've played to under 20 points, but their three reasonable opponents this season have scored 23 (NYG), 27 and 31 points, and there is no reason to expect Denver not to follow suit, albeit probably to a lesser degree. Denver's defense is basically the best in the NFL, however, and they're facing a totally hapless Skins offense that has averaged just over 14 points per game this year and has failed to break 17 points even one time in eight games this year, mostly against the worst competition the NFL has to offer. Denver should bounce back and beat a truly terrible Washington team this weekend, and although I wish the line were under 3, I'll still give the 3.5 and expect to win a close one here on Sunday afternoon.

Playing Those Sooted Connectors, Plus an NFL Pick

Wow. I write a little bit about poker one day and I must have had 15 people tell me to do it more yesterday. You wanted another poker post? Well here comes another poker post.

But first, I will get on the record right now and pick the San Francisco 49ers -3 vs. the Chicago Bears on Thursday night on the NFL Network. I will pick my other four of my Pick 5 NFL picks on Friday as usual, but with Thursday Night Football starting up this week I will try to get in a pick on the Thursday night game wherever it makes sense for me, and that means it will have to go up a day earlier than the other picks. Thursday night's matchup is a battle of the losers in a sense, with the 49ers having lost four in a row heading into Week 10 while the Bears have chipped in losing three of their last four as well. Both teams started the season off hot but have since really cooled, although their problems are kind of opposite of each other. The Bears can't stop anyone right now -- they've allowed 45 to the Bungles and 41 to the Falcons in their last two games against NFL-worthy opponents. Meanwhile, in San Francisco the problem is that, after scoring an average of nearly 26 points per game over their first four outings of 2009, the team has now managed to scrape together just 18 points per game over their last four, and they've lost three games in a row by a touchdown or less as a result. I don't love how the 49ers are playing right now, but the bottom line is that, especially at home, I have more confidence in Mike Singletary and the 49ers finding their footing tonight than I do in Jay Cutler and the Bears. At Candlestick Park this season, the 49ers have scored in the 20's three times, and that's roughly where I expect them to end up tonight against the porous Bears' defense. But on the road, Jay Cutler has led his team to four separate subpar offensive outputs, including games with 15, 14, 10 and 21 points. If the Niners can run it up to the mid-20s like I think they will, that ought to be enough to cover against the reeling Bears who will then have to face the Eagles next Sunday night in Chicago to try to right their own ship.

OK, so with that out of the way, you wanted some poker. As I've gotten back into playing a little bit these past couple of weeks, I've started dipping my toe back into the mtt pool, something I really haven't done almost any of since my big score out at the Venetian last summer in Vegas. I was kinda burned out on tournament poker for a while after that magical weekend in the desert, and then the baby came, and before I knew it it'd been basically three or four months of very little mtt play for me. But as I've started playing again I've really been enjoy anew the process of building a stack from scratch in the earlygoing in these things. Especially online, where even the "slow" tournament structures are still actually super duper fast in reality, where the whole time you have to "build a stack" amounts to maybe a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days of poker in most live events. After some time away, I'm finding myself amazed at how easy it is to just slide right back into it and play the same aggressive way I've always played ever since I first learned the game. I've always been someone who tries to stir up action -- rather than avoid it -- early in most of the mtt's I play, again especially when it's online. I like to see a lot of cheap flops when the blinds are small relative to the stacks, try to flop a big hand and then figure out the best way to extract the most chips from the most players when I do. I don't want to sit around the starting stack for 90 minutes and then hope to pick up AA or to win a race with AJ vs 88. I want to force the action with lots of spec hands for cheap early anid try to turn one of them into a big big pot for me and get myself up to full chip utility as early as possible whenever I can.

Recently I was playing in the nightly 25k guaranteed tournament on pokerstars at 8pm ET. It has a $27.50 buyin and typically attracts between 1100-1500 runners or so, with four-digit payouts usually going to the top 5 or 6 spots, and a top prize somewhere in the 5k range. It's about as small of a payout tournament as I will generally play in the no-limit context at 25k guaranteed, as I generally prefer larger prizes for the final table to even make it worth bothering trying to wade through the level of donkery one must always survive to make a run like this. I think nothing would piss me off more than to outlast 1500 other shitheads in a $1 buyin tournament, just to end up in third place when my AK goes down to JJ and get paid a total of $500. For me that's just not worth the effort, and the luck, really, that it takes to last through a huge field of players like that, so I typically try to play 30k guaranteed or larger events only whenever I can. This way I can at least be assured that if tonight's going to be another magical run for me, I know I can win more than 5k or at least in the few thousand range for a top-few-spots finish.

So anyways, it's very early (first round) in the pokerstars 25k, and the UTG player limps for 20 chips. The next guy at our full 9-person table folds, and then the action is to me. I am holding 87s.

What do you do here?

I actually love to raise with sooted connectors in early position. In fact, as I've written here many times, when you raise preflop as aggressively as I do, it's basically a requirement to raise with these hands as well, just for balance if nothing else. From what I've seen and read, it seems like mostly all of the big tournament pros raise sooted connectors from early position as well, again in particular when the stacks are deep early in a tournament. However, in this particular spot, with one limper already in the pot, and him seated under the gun at that, I opt to check. To clarify my earlier statement, I like to open-raise with sooted connectors from early position. When the pot's already been opened for a limp from early position, now with a hand like 87s I am looking at a good possibility of a multiway pot if I just limp behind, which actually is my best pure math strategy for this kind of a hand. So where someone else has made the decision for me by open-limping ahead of me, and there is a decent chance of a multiway pot developing if I just limp as well, I will usually limp with connectors in this situation:



Two other players in late position limp in as well, as does the big blind, so we end up seeing a 5-way flop which is exactly perfect for what I'm holding. The flop comes down 962, with one of my suit, giving me the open-ended straight draw. The big blind checks, as does the UTG player, and the action is to me:



What do you do?

My answer is this: try to either take down the 110 chips in the pot now, or, if I end up building a little bit of a pot here, that's ok as well as long as I control the size of that pot such that I can profitably see at least one more card. Nobody has shown any strength yet before the flop here, and the flop is raggy enough that even most limpers should not really have connected with it in some huge way. More than that, the way I play I like to take a lot of little stabs at flops when the pots are still small, and this is a perfect opportunity to start creating that image of an active flop bettor so that the next time I am holding TPTK and of course decide to bet the flop, I will actually have created more action for myself by betting at flops like these as well. And, at this point in the hand, the pot is still super small relative to our stacks, so unlike at some point later in the tournament possibly, right now I have plenty of chips to make a move and still fold to a huge reraise or even to a turn bet or raise from my opponent. So I decided to make the exact same type and size of bet as I would make if I were holding top pair, or an overpair, on most flops:



90 chips into the 110-chip pot. In a pot with four other players, all of whom limped in and thus could be holding the middling-sort of cards that could have connected in some way with this flop, and with the flush draw on the board, I want to make sure I am forcing my opponents to make a poor call odds-wise at whatever they're drawing at. Remember, my game here is to play this flop exactly like I would if I were holding TPTK or something, because I know I'm going to be getting out there and betting at a lot of flops just exactly like that over the next hour or so here.

The late position player called my 90-chip bet here, while the big blind and UTG both folded their hands. So we saw a turn heads-up, and I was first to act:



Boom! I just made my nut straight on the turn. And I picked up a flush draw. And an open-ended straight flush draw. There's 290 chips in the pot, and both myself and my opponent each have around 10x that still behind. I'm thinking this is my chance to hopefully extract some serious chippage from this guy early on in an mtt and get some much-needed chip utility early, as the big blind will move from 20 to 50 over the next 20 minutes or so and I will soon be well below that magical utility level of 100 big blinds.

How do you play this hand now? If you bet, how much? If you check, why?

Back tomorrow with the conclusion.

Super Turbo Heads Up SNGs

That's right, folks. As I've gradually started getting back in to online poker as my son has started sleeping a good portion of the night, I noticed something brand new last night that I had not noticed before on full tilt -- the presence of heads-up sitngos in a super turbo format. Now, for those of you who don't konw, the super turbos are the satellites that start each player with just 300 chips, and 15-30 blinds, and the blinds escalate every three minutes. Basically, the structure in super turbo formats more or less forces you to play allin preflop poker almost every single time a flop is seen, certainly in the early part of the tournament. If you think you can bump the 30-chip big blind to 90 chips with a preflop raise, but then fold when reraised from late position, you're nuts because with 90 chips already invested, you have already committed around 30% of your stack in a tournament with very quick blind escalation. So it's either allin-or-fold right from the getgo in these things, and it's been well documented among several bloggers over the past year or so since the super turbo format first appeared in limited instances on full tilt that playing in the large super turbo's is basically just a crapshoot, at any level of buyin.

So it would stand to reason, then, that the heads-up flavor of these things would also be a total and complete crapshoot, right?

Not so fast. As I have written about here myself, and as I recall some others have chipped in as well, there actually is some strategy that can be used in the super turbo structure. Ultimately, there is little you can do to prevent yourself from taking your AQs up against someone else's 77 in the third hand of the tournament for all of your respective stacks, but there is a general way of approaching these hyper-quick tournament structures that can give you an advantage over others at your table who don't get it. And what I found last night is that, in the heads-up context, if you can get up against someone who doesn't have the same feel for the super-turbo game as you do, you can actually make some decent, albeit extremely high-variance, profits.

I was lucky last night. I ran into a guy sitting at one of these $160 + $4 super turbo heads-up sitngos who really had no clue how to play them. And more than that, either he was some sick points whore or he had wayyyyyyy too much money for his own good, because whether he won or lost, the guy immediately accepted a rematch offer within seconds of the last sng ending. Although I stopped counting maybe around 20, we must have played at least 25 of these super-turbo heads-up sngs, and in the end I think I won maybe five more than I lost by the time this guy had finally had enough. And more than that, net of any suckouts I foisted on my opponent during the session, he won three or four of our battles on hardcore dominated suckouts, situations where we got allin preflop with my AJ vs. his QJ, or my K9 vs his 97, etc. Plus he won another two or so on what I would call mild suckouts, like allin preflop my AK vs his T9 and hands like that where my preflop odds were probably not more than 60% but where I still had a nice lead when all the money went into the middle.

How did I play this such that I ended up +5 in sngs won, plus another 5 or so where my opponent sucked out but where really I was the odds-on favorite to win maybe 2/3 of the super-turbo contests we played? Given the speed, there are really just a few tricks I employed:

1. Push! Whenever I get relatively short and I am first to act preflop. With any two cards. So when he won the first couple of pots and the chip stacks were 390 for him to 210 for me, I would push in preflop automatically with my 30-chip big blind and his 15 already in the pot, even if I'm holding 34o, a hand I pushed with many a time through our 30- or 40-sng session last night. Almost every time he folded, and the couple of times he does call, I am generally only a 55-60% dog or so, which means I am winning more than 4 times out of 10 in any event even when he does call.

2. Read! My opponent. Yes it is hard to read too much into my opponent's actions when we are playing super-turbo which by definition forces the action quite a bit as it is. But there are still variations in the players who get mixed up in these things, and generally speaking you only have a few short minutes to figure out which kind of guy you are up against. Is he, like me, a push-n-pray guy every time he gets a little short, so that when he is short and moves in before the flop I do not necessarily have to fear being up against a monster. Or, is he one of these guys who only auto-pushes with any Ace or with any two face cards? Will he move in with that 34o if he is first to act and has already put big blind money into the pot, or will he try to wait for a better spot? Does a pause before he bets generally indicate that he has a big hand and wants to bait me into calling, or that he has a horrible hand and needs to psyche himself up into raising with it? These are the things I attune myself to right away in the super turbo structure tournaments, and in heads-up play it becomes significantly more important given that you're up against the same guy every single hand for all the marbles.

3. Know! My preflop pushing odds. This is the last key I used last night in abusing this guy in the super-turbo heads up sngs, and it really goes hand in hand with item #2 above. Once I can put some reasonable limitation on his hand range when he moves in in a given spot at a given speed, I need to know whether it makes sense for me to call given my own hole cards. So, for example, once I determined in our first 10 matches or so that this guy was pushing in with any two cards on the first hand of every tournament, then suddenly that K7o I was dealt becomes a calling hand and not a folding hand. And when I know for sure that this guy autopushes with any Ace or any King at all, that A6 or A7 I am holding once again becomes a caller instead of a possible folder. The key is understanding the math behind the allin preflop decisions, at least on a categorical level, for any reasonable two-card hands he and I might be holding.

Still, in the end as I mentioned above, the variance on these super-turbo badboys is more than anyone should have to deal with in trying to amass some quality results. As I pointed out, although I did end the 40-sng-or-so session 4 or 5 wins ahead of my opponent, these results did include a good 5 or 6 net suckouts on my opponent's part that severely hampered my ability to really lay a smackdown on him, but the fact remains that I got in good position to win his $160 buyin in a good two-thirds of the sngs we played simply by following the three keys above and executing my game plan without making rash calls or bad plays. I'm not sure I want to make a habit of playing heads-up super-turbo poker, but when a profitable situation presents itself I feel good knowing I am prepared with a plan that should work against most lesser-experienced opponents.