Profiting From Formulaic Cash Play, and Lost

No time today for a typical long post as it is "Bring Your Children to Work" Day and I've packing all the Hammer girls into the car and driving 'em down to my office to get a taste of what Daddy does during his allegedly "real" job, the one I do when it's actually light out, when I actually wear something other than boxers, the one where I actually get paid regardless of how I perform or how any luck factors in day in and day out.

Instead today I will show you a couple of new cash hands from last night's play, which I think show how comforable I'm getting in my $200 nl 6-max play (despite losing about 1 1/2 buyins overall last night on two horrible moves by me). Both of these plays are examples of what I would say is the single biggest weakness among the 1-2 players that has led to the vast majority of my profits at this game -- a formulaic style of play that I would estimate more than 75% of the players use which sees them always open-raising the pot in position preflop, and then almost always continuation-betting the flop regardless of what three cards happen to fall, or their connection to the players' starting hands. In my experience you really can make money by just coming into these games, folding your weak hands, and otherwise playing a very robotic, reactive game. You'll be put to the test with a tough kind of decision once or twice an hour, and how you fare in those hands will determine whether you're down $20, up $60 or up $150 for the session. But otherwise you can just come in, play good starting cards, raise and reraise aggressively when you believe you're ahead, and otherwise let the robots do their robotic moves, and take advantage of those moves in a very robotic way yourself.

First, this is me getting a little bit floaty on a preflop raiser whom I just didn't think hit whatever he was raising with preflop, because of the position he robotically raised from every single time he was in that situation. He pot-raised before the flop from middle position, and I called with A2s. Not my strongest move, but I had seen this guy raise enough to know that he was basically raising the pot with any Ace, any two high cards as well as some other unknown hands as well. When the flop came 9-high, he c-bet a little less than the pot, following the exact formula that I find the majority of 1-2 6max cash players play, and I just did not think that the 9-high flop was likely to have connected with his hand. So I smooth called:



fully planning on taking this pot away on a later street. I had also made third pair on the flop, but I wasn't really giving much value to that pair unless a third two happened to fall on the turn or river here. So, the turn brings an offsuit Jack, which I also did not necessarily see hitting this player's hand, and I figured now is the time to take this raggy-boarded pot down, knowing from having watched this player that he was going to check behind if I checked here on the turn. So I bet out, again a little under the size of the pot:



and he folded:



winning me a small pot in the process. Now as I review the screenshots, to any experienced cash player this is just about the most boring hand in the world. But to those of you who wonder who I play at the cash tables or who don't play at the 200 nl stakes, this might have some interest for you, in that this is how the majorty of the pots I win tend to go. The biggest pots I win have me holding a stronger hand that fourth pair top kicker as I did in this case -- although I'm fairly sure I was ahead here as well -- but it's the large number of little pots like this that help me to build slowly but surely almost every time I sit down to the 1-2 tables.

Following is another fun example of sticking with my read and putting my money where my mouth is, and it's another move that I do with some regularity to much success at the 1-2 6-max tables.

Cutoff+1 raises the pot preflop, a spot I had observed him and noted him raising from with trash such as medium offsuit connectors and Ax before in this session, so I opt to call heads-up out of the big blind with JTs. Again not necessarily my strongest starting hand, but I'm confident enough that I can get away from this hand if I don't hit the flop that I'm willing to take a shot with a hand that can make a lot of top pair decent kickers, straights and flushes:



I make top pair on the flop, which I have every reason to believe is ahead right now. But, I act first here, and I also have every reason to believe that my opponent will once again follow the highly formulaic, pot-raise-then-c-bet strategy that the majority of 200nl 6-max players seem to play these days. So I'm going to check it and let him come to me a bit. I check it:



and he bets $12 into the $15 pot. How perfectly formulaic so far. This time since I actually have top pair and good reason to believe I'm ahead, I'm going to take this thing down right now before an overcard falls and takes away my pot:



My opponent smooth calls my raise, which is strange at first blush. But the thing is, part of the formula that most of these players seem to play is to occasionally call this kind of raise, putting me on a steal attempt in reaction to his formulaic play. I am heartened by the fact that he did not reraise me there on the flop, which discounts greatly in my mind the chance that he holds an overpair or a higher Ten. When the turn comes a raggy offsuit 5, this time I'm checking to see what my opponent has to say:



When he checks behind, now I am fairly sure I'm ahead. Maybe he has a middle pocket pair, or maybe a small piece of the board, but I don't think he has top pair decent kicker. So when the river is an evern raggier 3, I make a bet that I actually don't mind if he calls. And, more than that, it's designed to elicit a fold because I know he's going to know that this bet wants a call because it's a little under half the pot. Since I think I'm ahead but am not 100% sure, I'd like to see him fold here, so my smallish bet accomplishes both keeping the pot small with just one pair, and also giving the appearance that I want him to fold:



He folds, sensing he is in fact behind:



and I take down a 3/8 of a buyin pot. All once again attributable really to my opponent's formulaic play on all streets. Reacting to this sort of formulaic strategy in my opponents, one which I'm sure is not present at the higher levels, has single-handedly helped me to be a profitable cash game player over the past month while I continue to learn the ropes of basic cash play.

OK before I sign off for the day, I wanted to chat briefly about Lost from last night. Let me just say this -- the episode as a whole was somewhat boring to me. It is an interesting surprise that Mikhail is alive and well once again -- I'm sure there is a good story to that but I don't know what it is, probably related somehow to the regenerative properties that the island apparently has. Nonetheless, the big kicker to Wednesday night's episode was the Portuguese girl at the end telling Hurley that their flight crashed, the authorities had found the plane and the all the bodies and that there had been no survivors. That was definitely not something I was expecting, and I think it only leaves a couple of realitic explanations (assuming she is telling the truth, which admittedly is no guarantee on this show):

First, as Goat suggested to me this morning, the Others (or someone else entirely, for that matter) could have staged the entire other airplane fuselage that was found, and staged all the dead bodies, in fact staged the entire crash, just to move the Losties' bodies over to this island in a situation where no one would possibly come looking for them since they thought they'd found the plane and all its passengers' bodies already. This seems a little farfetched, but first of all, saying that about just about anything on Lost seems kinda silly if you think about it. And, it certainly does match up with the way everyone woke up in the very first episode of the series, how they were outside of the plane, lying down, in Jack's case off in the woods even, and all pretty much not injured at all. In some cases (Locke), even healthier than they were before the crash. So, I think this is a possbility, and an interesting one though I think that kinda takes the show in a different direction from where they've been heading, since they specifically showed the Others watching in surprise as the Losties' plane crashed 90 show-days ago.

The second option, one which I do not really like in terms of the story but which I had basically already discussed last week in a post, is that the Losties are somehow in another dimension, or maybe even an alternative universe of some kind. As I said I don't personally love them to be taking the show in this direction either, but something just tells me that their plane maybe really did crash and burn, and they really were all found, dead, in the "real" universe. The one we live in now, in our own time. However, Desmond's failing to push the button in the hatch, the event that caused the plane to crash in the first place, could have somehow opened up a "hole" or whatever to transport from the universe we all live in to this alternative dimension, where the plane did crash, but some of the passengers lived, maybe due to the regenerative properties of the island. I don't know the specifics, but something just tells me that this is where the producers are taking the show as we head into the last few episodes of the third season. What this means will happen in the future is beyond me, and frankly I admit that I hope I'm wrong about this plot line because I'm not entirely in to it to be honest, but that was the first thing that jumped into my head when the chica told Hurley they had found the plane and all the passengers' bodies had been ID'd as fatalities. Interesting stuff.

Just don't let it be that the Losties are really just dead and in purgatory or something here, as has been suggested by some of the more religious types from the very beginning of this show. That would be such a disgustingly stoopid outcome to me that I'm really hoping that's not it.

Tell me something though, can anybody even wait until next week's episode now? Dam those writers are good.