Bayne Cashes Big, and Playing Cash Against Aggro Raisers

First off, some big time blogger ups to dish out today. Due to my vacation this past weekend, I am remiss to have only seen yesterday that Maigrey cashed in 28th place in FTOPS Event #2 in HORSE. I left for the beach on Thursday night while FTOPS was just starting, and I didn't read a blog the whole time I was gone. In fact, I've been so busy working since I got back from vacay that I still have only gotten about 1/4 of the way down my normal daily list. So all you big time blog readers out there, check out how jealous you are of me today -- my schedule at work is a bit slower on Wednesday, meaning I should have time to catch up on 4 or 5 days of reading most of my favorite blogs out there. I can't wait for that.

Anyways, so congrats out to Heather for a huge finish in FTOPS #2. What else can you say, Heather really excels at all forms of limit poker. I've seen her win stud events and omaha events, and place big in multiple occasions in all kinds of HORSE tournaments, and I'm sure much more. But 28th place out of over 1000 entrants in a game as frustrating as I know limit HORSE can be is no fluke in this case for sure.

But the big news of the day has got to be Bayne, making I believe his first ever big time poker tournament score with a 9th place finish in Tuesday night's FTOPS Event #8 in O8. There I was, forced to eat my words after telling another blogger in the girly chat just two days ago that I did not think Bayne was that great of an O8 player. I was sure to IM back near the beginning of Bayne's tremendous late-night run on Tuesday evening to officially eat my words and admit that Bayne really knows his shit in this game. I mean, I watched the man play for maybe a total of around two hours out of his first four hours in the tournament, and he made a lot of good plays. Most of all, Bayne mixed up his play -- sometimes checkraising with good hands, sometimes betting out, making it nearly impossible to get a solid read on his holdings until at least the turn in most cases. In short, Bayne was awesome. And he is now rewarded with what I believe might be his biggest ever cash payout (not counting satellite wins where I believe Bayne won his way into the Aussie Millions a year or two ago), which I believe was something like $3400 and change. That my friend is a domination, and I was more than impressed with your play. Congratulations to you.

I, like the smart bankrolly guy I have been lately, opted not to buy in direct to FTOPS #8. Despite knowing that I am good at the game and having final tabled several satellites to this event, I also don't feel particularly like I could really win the thing. And let me tell you, that is not a common occurrence or an enjoyable feeling for me. In the end I'm thinking now why the F would I drop $216 to play a game that I don't realistically think I can win? I mean believe me -- it is really hard for a pompous ass like me to accept that I am not the best player at any brand of poker. I have had success in all the games and I have read and played a ton at each of them, and that in addition to my generally pompass nature, it is a rare and uncomfortable thing for me to face the fact that I'm not the best out there at any kind of poker. But it's true. Just like I am not KOD in large-field nlh tournaments, I am not the equal of some of the really good O8 players out there. It's just true. So, no $200 buyin for me, no $216 loss to my bankroll, and I am a happier man for it I guarantee you that.

So what did I do last night while I wasn't in FTOPS #8 and Bayne was going on his sickass run?

Cash games. My old new friend. After a huge run at 2-4 6max nl, I went on a month-long cooler that basically saw me lose much of my profit from my first 7000 hands or so at this limit. Then about a month ago, all that changed, I stopped getting drawn out on in 85% of my races and 65% of my 2-to-1 favorites. I started hitting some effing draws again, at least once in a while. Call it, with a full half the regularity that the odds would otherwise suggest, which for me is as good as it gets. And of course I've been playing better with a little confidence and a little luck coming my way.

I thought I would show you a few hands I did play on Tuesday night that I think illustrate some fun or interesting strategies for no limit cash play. Plus, I have to admit I effing love putting myself out there with what are usually very correct cash game strategies and then watching the loserdonks post negative things about the way I play these hands. Don't ever stop with that, guys, please.

So anyways, the first thing I have started focusing on more of late is adapting my nl cash game play to the huge aggrodonks who inevitably show up at your table at some point, raising before the flop basically every single time the action folds around to them unopened in any position. Sure they'll win a few hands before anyone realizes what is happening, but much sooner than later people catch on that this guy is just playing aggromonkey poker. So what do you do about this kind of a guy sitting at your table? Well, let's turn to the literature shall we? In Sklansky's great no-limit holdem book, he advocates loosening your reraising standards against these raise-with-anything types as the best way to counteract the advantages that such aggropoker may provide. A similar strategy has been suggested by Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth (reraising megalomaniacs) as well as some other poker authors who are evading my mind right now. But the point is, when someone is raising with anything, reraising him not only sends the message that you cannot be raised indiscriminately out of pots, but you actually get yourself an edge in a larger pot when you push back with some of the better non-raising hands against a normal opponent.

Now, to be sure this is a hard thing to do, as it involves you reraising, thereby putting at risk a bunch of chips, with a hand that you might otherwise fold for fear of being behind (if not dominated). But, the bottom line is, against this kind of an aggromonkey, those very same hands that I readily fold against raises for fear of being dominated (hands like AT, KQ, QJ etc.) can become very strong because they can at least represent overcards if not be the dominators instead of the dominatees against a guy who is raising with basically any two not-horrible cards. So, for example, after identifying this guy across the table from me as an aggromonkey, when he open-raised from the button, I pot-reraised him with A3o and he thought for a while before folding. Rounds 1 and 2 to him when I folded to his relentless steal attempts, but here, Round 3 goes to me. And as I pointed out in my recent posts on stealing and restealing, a resteal is worth a lot more than a regular steal. Assuming all raises are the size of the pot, at 2-4 in most instances a steal-raise from outside the blinds is to $14, winning the stealer $6 in blinds for every successful steal pulled off. But, once the stealer raises the two blinds to $14, reraising the pot from a blind is roughly to $44 or so, so when that resteal works at the cash table, you win $20 in blinds and in the stealer's raise, rather than the $6 won from just a regular steal attempt. So, you will note that one successful resteal at 2-4 nlh 6-max is worth more dollars than three successful blind steals. So this resteal here got me back above where I was before this reckless monkeyraiser ever sat down at my table to begin with.

Just a very few hands later, I was faced with this situation, where the dude at the bottom is the aggromonkey raise-with-anything guy I am writing about above:



KTo. Normally an easy fold even at 6max, on the thinking that this guy probably has an Ace or a pair, or could easily have two paint cards in which case I am in bad shape with that Ten in my hand. But in this case, I am loosening up my reraising standards against this raiseclown, and KT is just the kind of hand that is likely ahead of his nearly ATC range:



That's right you monkey -- $52, more that the size of the pot.



Within 5 minutes, this player had up and left the table, leaving us back to play some actual poker instead of dealing with an aggromonkey raising it up from any position every single time the action was unopened when it got to him preflop. All this is to say that so far, reraising the hyperaggroclowns with strong but not the strongest hands has in fact proven to be a winning strategy so far for me. Is this guy maybe wrong that restealing is -EV in cash games? I will have to keep thinking about that as I continue to refine my game and play based on my reads of other players at the nlh cash tables on full tilt.

Tonight is FTOPS Event #9, which is a $300 rebuy 6-max nlh tournament. Of course I love 6-max play, but how the hike am I going to play in a $300 rebuy event? This was probably the dumbest FTOPS event on the entire slate; I have to give full tilt the definite thumbs down on this one. The attendance will have to be low in this event, and the number of rebuys and addons will be far below what is normal for a rebuy tournament due to the large number of satellites present into this event. It's one thing to run satellites into a $20 or even a $50 rebuy tournament, because people may want to play the events and be willing to rebuy a few times if needed, as is basically always the case in large rebuy mtts. But you award a satellite buyin into a $300 FTOPS rebuy tournament, and who do we know who is going to be willing to rebuy in this thing? Sure you can find some of the richer players among the full tilt client base, but in general as far as an FTOPS event, Wednesday night is a dumb idea and I can only assume this will be the least-attended of all the nlh events in the series. I personally refused to play any of the very winnable satellites into Event #9 for this very reason, and I never even considered playing in this event this evening. And you know if I of all people am refusing to play in a solid buyin 6-max rebuy mtt as part of the FTOPS, then full tilt has really screwed up somewhere. So kudos to full tilt on the FTOPS in general, but a bad job with Wednesday night's tournament.

So tonight instead, definitely come play in the Mookie at 10pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "vegas1"). I will be there and most of your blogger and non-blogger friends will be as well, with Miami Don the defending champ after Don won his third Mookie title of the year last week with a dominating performance replete with the necessary trash talk that only a tilty Don can produce. With no reasonable FTOPS alternative, I sincerely hope all of you donkeys out there will find your way into the Mookie for the most fun time with a large group of bloggers every week. Hopefully Buddy will be back on the radio for the tournament as well, where you will get to listen live to my domination on my way to my first Mookie title ever. Ha ha yeah right. Never happen. Ever.

Avatar Race, and More on the Resteal

So Tuesday night was the first Avatar Race on full tilt, which again this year awards buyins to 13 of the 14 FTOPS events coming up in early- to mid-August plus an entry to a super sat for the 14th and largest buyin event. If you recall I had satellited about 5/6 of the way in by winning $240 cash on the bubble of Monday night's $75 satellite, so I put up the last 60 big ones and gave it a shot last night.

Things started off badly. Very badly. I pushed hard against a guy whom I've already noted as someone who resteals effectively against me and seems to have a good read on me generally. He's eliminated me from the big buyin full tilt mtts before, and I remember his name well. Long story short, he got me again. I had pocket Aces, the flop came something like Q66. He check-called my potbet on the flop. Then he checkraised me allin when then turn came a King. I folded my Aces to a big loss of probably close to a third of my stack. Note btw that my Aces streak is still alive and well, as it only pertained to cash games. Right now btw, it is either 31 for 31 or 32 for 32, I don't remember which, but there have been one or two more pocket rocket cash wins since my 30-win streak announcement. But this is tournament land, where I am free to lose with my Aces from time to time, and in that hand I did.

A few hands later was even worse. The flop came KK8 and I decided to represent a King and bet about 3/4 the pot, which that same opponent called after some pause. Then the turn ragged off and I checked, intending on checkraising, and my opponent responded with a bet of about half the pot. I checkraised him 3 times his bet, figuring for sure he lays down anything but a King in his hand here. He re-reraises me allin, putting my last 900 or so chips in jeopardy, so I fold meekly with my tail between my legs. My nemesis rakes the huge pot and shows me AK. Nice timing, Hoy.

But I perservered. I don't even remember the couple of big hands I had to get back in it, but I do know that I made some great plays and basically got back up over 6000 chips and went into the first break in around 36th of 110 or so remaining. In a good sign of things to come, Tuesday night's first Avatar Race of the season had a whopping 160 entrants, far more than in any other Avatar Race I can recall for the other FTOPSes, which meant that the top 10 spots would each receive what is a huge, $4500 prize package. 1 in 16. It means you have to play well, very well even, but there is also some chance for not being the best guy at the table on the night and still being able to persist to victory.

With about ten minutes left in the 2nd hour, with me in approximately 40th place of 70 players left, this big hand went down, once again against my nemesis, a guy named "tiltedpony":

Full Tilt Poker Game #2979428768: FTOPS Avatar Race (22499547), Table 17 - 80/160 - No Limit Hold'em - 22:48:08 ET - 2007/07/17

Seat 1: QT1 (4,655)

Seat 2: AJKHoosier1 (3,626)

Seat 3: vetiver (5,405), is sitting out

Seat 4: padirk165 (6,380)

Seat 5: zestfulyclean (5,415)

Seat 6: hoyazo (6,010)

Seat 7: ISPEWCHIPS (2,370)

Seat 8: tiltedpony (7,127)

Seat 9: Lord Admiral (3,710)

hoyazo posts the small blind of 80

ISPEWCHIPS posts the big blind of 160

The button is in seat #5

*** HOLE CARDS ***

Dealt to hoyazo [7c Kc]

tiltedpony calls 160

Lord Admiral folds

QT1 folds

AJKHoosier1 folds

vetiver folds

padirk165 folds

zestfulyclean folds

vetiver has returned

hoyazo calls 80 So it's folded around to me in the small blind with just the utg player limping. There is 400 in the pot, I have K7 sooted in clubs and it's just 80 more to me to call into a 3-way pot. Obviously I call.

ISPEWCHIPS checks

*** FLOP *** [Jc 4c 9d] Pot is $480.

hoyazo has 15 seconds left to act

hoyazo bets 420 Here I'm thinking I have flopped the 2nd-nut flush draw plus an overcard, against one utg limper (must be careful of that!) and a big blind who just checked. Unless someone else has hit a Jack here or maybe flopped an oesd, they should fold to my aggression here. I will do the usual and bet somewhere under the size of the pot.

ISPEWCHIPS folds Good.

tiltedpony calls 420 Not necessarily bad. This guy has floated against me before, and he could have 2nd or 3rd pair or a draw, or I of course have a 35% of hitting my flush draw in the next two cards and maybe winning some real chips from this guy.

*** TURN *** [Jc 4c 9d] [6h] Pot is $1320.

hoyazo has 15 seconds left to act

hoyazo bets 1,060 Well, I bet on the flop and got called by a guy who is a known floater. The offsuit raggy turn cannot reasonably possibly have helped either of us. I just don't read this guy for being ahead of me right now. This player limp-called from utg before the flop, and although sometimes that means Aces, he has played this hand so unbelievably passively that I cannot possibly believe he would be butchering pocket Aces this badly. He's a good player. Thus, I have to put him on either a low pair, a low Ace or low suited connectors. Maybe 98 or A4 to have called on this flop. Maybe he still has a draw which clearly missed on the turn. With any of these hands I see him folding here to a properly-sized bet. With the 1060 bet I have set my opponent's pot odds right where I want them to prevent flush and straight draws from calling anywhere near their roughly 1-in-5 chances of filling, and also far more than anything other than top pair can call in the hopes of hitting his kicker.

tiltedpony calls 1,060 Oops.

*** RIVER *** [Jc 4c 9d 6h] [9c] Pot is $3440.

hoyazo has 15 seconds left to act Bingo!!! I actually hit a draw and nailed my flush on the river. It did pair the 2nd card on the flop, but that's actually a good thing for me, since I've been betting the whole way, I know this guy can't possibly put me on a made flush here. This means that he will have to think his trip 9s are good if he just made that. So what do I do to get the most chips from this guy? Well, he's called me on two streets, and I suspect he might have just made trips with the river 9, or perhaps two pairs or something like that, surely something that loses to my rivered flush. Since I think he might be strong, and he's already called progressively larger bets from me on two streets, I'm just going allin, which is actually only about 34% bigger than the current pot size anyways. If I double up I'm in the top 4 players in the tournament with 70 remaining, and the top 10 getting seats. It's go time.

hoyazo bets 4,370, and is all in

tiltedpony has 15 seconds left to act He is delaying. He obviously doesn't have anything strong. Time to try to elicit the call.

hoyazo: FOLD

hoyazo: you can do it

tiltedpony calls 4,370 Haha what an effing donkey to have fallen for that!

*** SHOW DOWN ***

hoyazo shows [7c Kc] a flush, King high Read it n weep, dickhead!

tiltedpony shows [Qc Ac] a flush, Ace high Uh...Whaa???????

tiltedpony wins the pot (12,180) with a flush, Ace high

hoyazo stands up Dazed. Did he just call 1060 into a 2380 pot with just a flush draw? And please don't quote me the two overcards. With the way I bet this hand, only a donkass counts on 6 more outs with the Aces and Queens. And I won't even point out that he still doesn't have the right odds even adding 6 overcards as outs. Did that just happen?

*** SUMMARY ***

Total pot 12,180 | Rake 0

Board: [Jc 4c 9d 6h 9c]

Seat 1: QT1 didn't bet (folded)

Seat 2: AJKHoosier1 didn't bet (folded)

Seat 3: vetiver didn't bet (folded)

Seat 4: padirk165 didn't bet (folded)

Seat 5: zestfulyclean (button) didn't bet (folded)

Seat 6: hoyazo (small blind) showed [7c Kc] and lost with a flush, King high

Seat 7: ISPEWCHIPS (big blind) folded on the Flop

Seat 8: tiltedpony showed [Qc Ac] and won (12,180) with a flush, Ace high

Seat 9: Lord Admiral didn't bet (folded)


So that's how I didn't win the Avatar Race in my first attempt.

I have the worst fucking luck ever with flushes. Let me put it this way -- for you poker tracker guys n gals out there, my lifetime stats over more than 10,000 hands now are that I have lost over $1300 with flushes overall. No that's not a typo -- I have actually managed to lose over $1300 when I have made flushes on the hand. Now, lest you starting thinking the worst about me, let me clarify a few things. I reviewed all 19 of my flushes where I've gone to showdown (I have won 11 and lost 8). In only one instance did I make the flush with just one of my hole cards, a hand which I went on to win anyways. So in 18 separate hands since I started running pokertracker, I've made two-card flushes, and I've somehow lost 8 of them! And again before you get all Sherlock Holmes and try to figure this out, let me also clarify that in not a single one of these instances did I lose to a full house (or better). Not one. So I'm not betting with just one-card 8-high flushes and losing to another high one-card flush. And I'm not at all that guy betting the flush as hard as possible when the board is paired. Nope, instead, I have taken 18 two-card flushes to showdown, and lost 8 of those 18 to higher two-card flushes. On two occasions these flushes were even backdoor flushes made on the turn and river. Still lost to a higher backdoor flush. Twice in 10,000 hands! So even though I am well positive with trips / set and obviously with full house or better, in the middle of all that is me down over 1300 bucks with made fucking two-card non-paired-board flushes. Flush over flush is the bane of my cash existence right now, and last night that spilled over into my tournament game to combine with a horrifically poor call by a longtime nemesis of mine to eliminate me from what would have been awesome position in the first Avatar Race on full tilt. F flush-over-flush. I hope flush over flush gets AIDS. Please.

OK so I wanted to talk a little bit more today about stealing and restealing, which was the topic of my post from this past Monday. I got a lot of good comments to that post, and I thought I would address some of those comments specifically, in addition to giving my own thoughts on some concepts introduced in those comments, because I do have some more to say about the topic overall. The resteal is one of my favorite moves, after all.

Schaubs left a comment to Monday's post where he wanted to know do I still apply these same general rules on restealing regardless of the size of the tournament I am in? Generally speaking, yes. I mean, in a blonkament that is only 20-70 people or so, the chip stacks never get real big, and there just isn't the long (two hours or more, somtimes) period near the end when the Ms are low basically across the board where stealing and especially restealing become so important. But once you get up into the several hundreds of players, and on to as large as any tournament I've ever played in, I'm stealing and restealing like this near the end all the time. I almost never resteal early in a tournament because the blinds and antes don't make you, but in any largeish event, by definition just because of the structure itself there's going to be a looooong time where stealing is just about all you'll be doing if you want to stay ahead of the blinds.

And yes, Schaubs, I do use a similar strategy during bubble play, although obviously you have to be more careful because you don't want to endanger your own position vis a vis the bubble. In other words, if I'm a prohibitively huge stack with 15 players left in an mtt satellite where 14 players win the seat, I am not likely to steal or resteal much. Why bother? Why take the risk with an abjectly huge stack when I can probably just sit around and wait for someone to bust and then win my seat? Generally I would only steal and certainly only resteal if I thought there was some chance I might actually need those chips for later in the tournament. Otherwise it's often not worth the risk.

Blinders, thanks for weighing in with the ubertight view. Suffice it to say, not only is restealing a +EV move if it is executed correctly, but it is the only way to have any chance of winning a large mtt. I would estimate you probably need to resteal several times in the last few hours of any big mtt if you are to win it, period. I don't think there's any other way as the blinds and antes get huge and the tables get shorthanded so those blinds are coming around faster and faster. You'd have to be Astinthe luckiest guy in the world to get enough good cards to wait without ever making moves with nothing great in that situation. And don't get me wrong, as I mentioned in my original post, you will surely donk yourself right out of a number of these mtts with less than strong hands against guys who were raising with actual good cards. No doubt you will, so to that extent in any individual tournament, of course the resteal can be a -EV move. But overall it is an absolutely key piece of any really deep mtt run, in particular online where the structures are sufficiently fast to basically ensure low Ms for most of the players through most of the last few hours of the event.

Blinders and a number of the other commenters to Monday's post also raised a few more factors that clearly do weigh on the decision of whether or not to resteal. Blinders correctly mentions things like "position of the raiser, your position, stack sizes, raisers image, your image", all of which weigh no doubt. As a poker player late in an mtt you are screwing up if you're not using every single bit of information that is available to you when making every single decision. I did not mention position of the raiser or my own position in the analysis in my original post, but of course those do go into the equation. I didn't mention them because for me they are almost always the same in the situations where I might consider a move like a resteal. In other words, you're almost never in early or middle position to do a resteal. I'm not limping into hardly any pots very late in an mtt, so the only time I would ever resteal is from late position. Similarly, restealing from an utg raiser is something I'm almost never doing late in an mtt, unless I have personally observed the guy raising utg so often that I know he must be stealing with those hands, and even then it is almost too risky of a move to get too involved in doing against an utg raiser. So, almost all the time where the resteals happen -- at least for me in the big mtts -- is when I am on the button or in one of the blinds, and when the stealing player is in the cutoff, the button, or maybe in the small blind vs. my big blind. So I might take into account the relative positions of the players involved, but in mostly every case it is basically the same for me because I try not to get myself into positions where I am restealing from an utg guy who probably has a strong hand to begin with.

The other factor Blinders mentioned are the relative images of the players involved (he mentioned stack sizes too, but I wrote a great deal about that already on Monday). But Blinders is totally correct, the raiser's image plays heavily in this decision. This is why I wrote the other day about targeting players whom I have seen open-raising quite a bit from late position already at the table. These are the guys who you know like to steal with less than premium cards in the right spots -- the guys with the stealy, loose-late images -- so these are the guys I like to do most of my resteal attempts from. Similarly, my own image clearly plays into the resteal decision as well. I didn't mention this specifically in my post because if you've ever watched me late in an mtt, you know that I raise all the time. Nobody can really get much of a read on me because I have raised, and I even reraise people enough -- with some good hands and some bad ones -- that my own image is usually basically the same by the time we are down to the final few tables in any big mtt. But it's certainly something you have to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to resteal -- i.e., if you've just been caught twice in a row trying to resteal from a late-position open-raiser and having to show shiat cards, then a third resteal attempt is not nearly as likely to be met with the fold that you so desperately want. That is basic poker psychology, but something you certainly need to think about in late-stage mtt play if you are to truly take advantage of all the available information out there.

DaSwam, whom I think is a first-time commenter on my blog, asked on Monday how much I typically bet when I steal and when I resteal. Good questions. Anyone who has played a lot with me will know that I am a very standard raise amount kind of a guy. In other words, I tend to raise around 3x with any kind of a hand, from any position, until the antes are big. Once the antes are big enough late enough into a large mtt, I will increase my standard raise amount to something more like 4x or even 5x the big blind, to make sure I am giving any kind of soooted connector or whatever poor odds to take a flop and try to bust me. So if there's already 5000 in the pot but the big blind is only 2400 (because there are $200 antes from all 7 people around the table), I'm not going to just bump it up to 3x the 2400 or 7200 to do a late-position steal attempt. If there's already 5000 in the pot, a raise to 7200 is going to give a lot of hands a lot of odds to make the call. In that spot I will want to probably close to double what's already in the pot, which is 4x the big blind or more, as a result of the big portion of the pot created by the antes.

For restealing, I tend to have a similar approach. Remember, with a true resteal, your objective is clearly to get your opponent to fold the hand he just open-raised with from late position. You don't typically want a call, or else it's not really a re-steal, but rather a regular re-raise with a strong hand that you don't mind if he calls you with. But for a resteal, my objective is generally to reraise enough so that the guy has to fold anything but his strongest hands. So, let's take my example above again here. 7-handed table, 1200-2400 blinds and a 200 ante. There's 5000 in the pot before the hand even begins, and it folds around to the button, a guy I have observed steal-raising several times already in the past half hour or so, who bumps the bet up to 10k, just more than 4 times the big blind. Say he has 100,000 chips in his stack after the 10k bet here. Here I will want to reraise him up to something like 30k or 40k. I will amost always raise at least 3 times his steal-raise, because that's the kind of bet that it's going to take to get him to lay down his Q9 or 76s that he is stealing with here. And if he wants to call me for that huge of a reraise with a hand like Q9 or 76s, then I'm going to have ample opportunity to get him out of this pot on the flop or after. But again, remember the idea is to get this guy out of the pot when you're restealing, so a 2x reraise to me is not designed to get him to fold.

I also try to look at how many chips I will have left after I put in this big resteal raise here. If the amount I have left compared to the amount already in the pot will likely pot-commit me, then so be it and then I'm just going to move allin. Similarly, if I look at my stealing opponent's stack and think that even a 3x or 4x reraise of his steal raise will not likely be enough to get him to fold what is an otherwise large stack, but I think that an allin re-reraise by me is big enough to get him to fold, I might move in there as well instead of just the normal 3x or 4x reraise. But to me the allin decisions are basically made with reference to either my stack size and/or my opponent's stack size, and not at all with reference to the cards I'm holding.

And DaSwam made one other important question/point at the end of his comment on Monday as well: it is absolutely crucial, at least for my game, that I do not betray the strength of my cards at all by the sizing of any of these steals or resteals. In other words, if I have pocket Aces in the big blind, and the button puts in an obvious 4x steal-raise, I will reraise him the exact same 3x or 4x that I would raise if I had shiat for cards but was just sure he was stealing. The bottom line fact is that, while I cannot speak for the quality of play or experience of any individual at any final table that you might happen to be playing at, in general the good, experienced, sophisticated players at any poker table will easily figure you out if your idea is to always push in when you have a super strong hand on a reraise, or just reraise 3x with the weaker holdings, or vice versa. As those of you who play with me often will know, my game is about raising, raising with a lot of preflop holdings and a lot of flops and turns, etc., so the entire focus of my game relies on my making the exact same moves with my lesser raising hands as I do with my Aces and Kings and big slicks. I suggest that other newer players follow that same approach, but I also am well aware that there are a number of winning styles of poker that people can play. If yours involves you trapping a lot with big cards, more power to you. That ain't me. I don't like letting in lesser hands with my pocket premiums and then losing to those hands. I'd rather take those pots down early with my monsters, and let the big pots take care of themselves during any mtt.

Alan asked a good question the other day as far as how do I counter a resteal. Being someone who loves the resteal in late-stage mtt play as much as I do, I loved this question. The answer is, there is no really good strategy for "countering" a resteal. The best move is usually to fold, which is why the resteal is such a great move. And if you actually happen to have a hand, this is a situation where I find the most usefulness for my read of a particular player and a particular situation. The example Alan gave was just about one of the toughest decisions you're going to run into late in an mtt -- he had AJ, open-raised from late position before the flop, and another player reraised him allin. What do you do with a hand like AJ? There's just no good answer, other than to say you dig deep, use everything you've ever seen about your opponent and his play, how many players are at the table, the relative stack sizes and if that might make it more or less likely for someone to be pushing in light here or more likely that they would have to have a big big hand to be playing back like that, etc. You just have to look at your cards and look at all those factors involved, and decide if you think your AJ is best. Generally speaking, I would be inclined to fold the JackAce, because generally speaking the JackAce is complete and utter shit against an allin reraise, even shorthanded, but it's certainly the case that most of the blonkeys don't know this fact, so who knows what I would've done in your situation. One of the real beauties of the resteal is that it puts your opponent to a lot of tough decisions like this. What if he has AJ like Alan had here? To me I am likely to fold that hand, all other things being equal. Similarly what if he has 77? Are you going to call an allin reraise with 77? All things equal, I don't want to call there where I have to figure I am likely at best a 51% favorite. Restealing can be very effective for this reason, even against players who are not actively stealing with ATC but rather are waiting only for, say, the top 50% or even less of hands to make stealy moves.

I think I mentioned this earlier already, but to answer LJ's question, I am generally not even thinking about restealing from anyone early in tournaments, only rather when the blinds and antes get sufficiently big, and the M's get sufficiently small, to warrant taking on the risk that you take every time you resteal with less than a premium hand. In general, restealing early in tournaments is a recipe for not lasting the first hour. Especially in blonkaments, you have to start off tight (not weak, just tight) and you can't be risking bluffing off half your stack with nothing at the beginning too many times, or you're gonna get burned. I've been there more times than I can count, I would know.

I liked Astin's comment to my Monday post as well, in that it raised another interesting factor that I didn't get into in my post on Monday, which is the relative bet size of your opponent. In other words, you have to pay attention to which opponents tend to make their steal-raised all 3x the big blind, or which guys tend to go bigger whenever they are raising without much of a hand. I specifically ommitted this from my earlier post because, frankly, this tell is so easily faked by any kind of a sophisticated player, so there is not much usefulness of it standing-alone in my own game, but I'd be lying if I said I never use relative bet sizing (relative to the person's other similar bets under different circumstances) to aid in steal-resteal decisions. Just be careful of jumping all over somebody with a resteal just because they only min-raised from the button into an unopened pot. Minraising can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and just because someone isn't stealing with a huge raise relative to the blinds, that doesn't meant that they aren't playing a strong hand a little bit slow to try to drum up some action.

Lastly, anybody have any clue what this "DP" character was getting at in his comment on Monday? I assume maybe he is just on drugs or something, as the comment he left hardly makes English sense. Any ideas are welcome.

Ha ha.

See you tonight at 10pm ET at the Mookie. Same thing as with the MATH this past Monday (I'm talking to you, emptyman) -- anyone and everyone is welcome to join in, whether you've played in this event before or not, whether you have a blog or not, and even whether you have even played poker before or not. The Mookie buyin is $11 on full tilt, it is at 10pm ET every Wednesday night, and the password is always "vegas1". It's the largest weekly gathering of bloggers and non-bloggers in a private tournament setting, and I cannot possibly win the tournament due to a curse laid upon my ancestors about a thousand years ago, so I come to donate to the cause week-in and week-out. Tonight is your night to be there too.

MATH Pimp, and Stealing & Restealing Late in Tournaments

Well it's Monday again and that can mean only one thing:



Last week we had 38 players in the weekly Monday night MATH tournament on full tilt, the largest ever non-BBT gathering for the MATH, and I look forward to more of the same this week as well. So come on out to Mondays at the Hoy tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "hammer") and try your mettle against the worstbest and brightestdonkiest that the poker blogging world has to offer in a good old-fashioned no-limit holdem tournament. And to clarify something that has been asked here and on other blogs many times over the past several months, there are absolutely no requirements or prerequisites for anyone out there to be able to play in the MATH, or the Wednesday night Mookie or biweekly Thursday night Riverchasers events -- all you have to do is have (or get) a funded online poker account at full tilt, and that's it Then you just need to look under the "Tournaments" tab in the full tilt lobby, under the "Private" sub-tab, and find Monday night's Mondays at the Hoy tournament at 22:00 with a $26 buyin. Use the password "hammer" to sign up, and that's all it takes. One thing about the MATH is that we love new players here, and that can include new poker players entirely, people who've played poker before but not so much online, or experienced online poker players who have simply never been manly enough to try to face the bloggers head-to-head like this. Several first-time players have cashed and even won the MATH tournament over the past year or so, so tonight is as good a night as any to get started in the weekly phenomenon known as Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt.

Today I wanted to write briefly on a topic about which I have been asked numerous times, and something which seems to come up in my blog comments, and in personal email / girly chat conversations fairly often. I really can't count how many times I've been asked over the past few years something along the lines of "How do you steal the blinds?" or "How do you resteal?" or, a bit more specifically, "How do you know when is a good time to resteal?" Obviously (at least I think this is obvious, as is probably apparent to you if you're an avid reader of this or the KOD's blog), stealing the blinds and antes is an absolutely critical skill for anyone who hopes to make a deep run in one of the large online mtt's. I would go so far as to say that I think it is truly impossible to win a, say, 1000+ person nlh tournament without stealing the blinds. I think it is very easy to avoid all blind steals for the first few rounds of an online mtt, maybe even through the first hour or two if you are particularly afraid of getting caught red-handed when making this move, but as the blinds keep going up and up and up, and especially once the antes kick in and they themselves start to really get up there, it is practically impossible to stay alive through just waiting for good cards. There's just not enough of them to stay ahead of the ever-increasing blinds and antes, especially once the tables start to get short-handed as you get down to the final 4 or 5 tables in a big mtt.

Thus, you have to steal. And more than that, you also have to resteal. That is, there is so much stealing going on in the late, well ITM stages of these big mtts, that quite often the late-position preflop raiser doesn't actually have anything worth playing, certainly nothing worth playing to an appropriately-sized reraise. And the thing about restealing is, it is worth way more in terms of chips won than any kind of a regular blinds-and-antes steal, so that makes it all the more important to a long-term survival strategy in the low-M late stages of mostly all online mtts. By way of example to show how much more worthwhile restealing can be than regular stealing, imagine you are down to the last 4 or 5 tables in a 1000-person mtt, and the tables are currently playing 7-handed. Blinds at this point in the tournament are likely to be in the neighborhood of 4000-8000 with an ante of 1000 chips. So imagine the action folds around to you on the button, and you raise the big blind up 3x (to 24,000 chips total) and take down the pot on a run-of-the-mill steal opportunity. In that case, you have just won the 4000 from the small blind, 8000 from the big blind, and 1000 in antes x 7 players to ante, for a total of 4k + 8k + 7k or 19k. That is 19,000 chips straight into your stack, at a time when the average stack in the tournament could easily be somewhere around 100k. Not a bad haul at all considering that you might have had nothing playable at all in your hand.

But now look at how great a resteal is for your same average 100k stack. Now you're in the big blind, and the action folds to the cutoff, who raises it up to 24k on a steal attempt. Sitting on the button, you sense weakness in the cutoff's move, and so you move allin over the top for your entire 100k stack, the blinds fold and the cutoff folds his naked steal. Now look what you've just won. The same 4k and 8k in blinds, plus the same 7k in antes, but now you throw in an additional 24k representing the steal-bet made by the preflop stealer. Now that is 43k added to your stack, and when you're only sitting on 100k in total tournament chips, that 43k is a huge thing to have happen to you. That's why the resteal is so important to make a part of your general tournament strategy if you wish to last to the very end of the big online mtts: it is just too profitable of an opportunity -- and too often that late position preflop raisers are in fact just stealing without a raise-callable hand -- to pass up. In a game where it becomes all about survival at the end, to pass up the many possible opportunities to add 50% to your stack basically regardless of what two cards you have been dealt, especially where the other players you are likely competing against near the end of these big mtts will be taking advantage of such restealing opportunities, you are putting yourself at such a significant disadvantage as compared to your peers that it will turn the difficult enough task of late-stage mtt survival into almost a virtual impossibility.

OK so then the question becomes: when do you steal, and more importantly, when do you resteal? What kinds of things should one look for when comtemplating executing a resteal that could either end your tournament run right there (if you happen to resteal into pocket Aces, for example, as has happened to me many times) or get you right back into contention more or less right away? This is of course the key to the whole issue, and all I can say is that mostly for me this is dependent on feel. Sometimes I just get a read from another player that they are stealing, and the best advice I can give is that you have to go with your instincts. You need to understand and accept that anytime you do a steal, or more commonly a resteal, in the very late stages of a big mtt, you are putting your tournament life on the line. That's the way it works, and sometimes you're going to make a mistake because no one's reads are perfect 100% of the time. But this is a risk that you simply have to internalize and be willing to accept if you want to make it all the way in the big online mtts. Nobody ever wins these things without ever stealing blinds, and restealing blinds and steal-raises from restealers.

So what sorts of factors enter into my equation when contemplating a steal or a resteal late in a large mtt? Here is a non-exhaustive list:

1. The first general advice I like to follow when contemplaing late-stage steals and resteals is the stack sizes involved. Generally speaking, I try not to steal from small stacks, because #1 they've already made the money so they are going to be less likely to just fold to hang on than they would be, say, on the bubble of this tournaments, and #2 the pot odds alone often dictate that they call many steals or resteals with their small relative stacks size. And as far as I'm concerned, the biggest mistake you can make late in an mtt is to steal into a guy who feels pot committed and "has" to call you when you are in fact holding two shitty cards. So you have to pay attention to the stack sizes of your steal and resteal targets to make sure they're not so small that they are likely to call you with ATC (any two cards) just based on pot odds.

Similarly, I generally try to avoid restealing from the biggest stacks in the tournament. First, these guys have so many chips that they might be willing to call with a lesser hand and just see if they can make a pair or something else on the flop and try to chase you down. Secondly and probably more importantly for the particularly aggressive players, stealing or even restealing from a monster stack opens up the possibility that he could re-steal (vs. your steal), or re-resteal (vs. your resteal) with ATC if he senses weakness in you. So you're opening yourself up to a potential folding situation where you put in a big raise against a guy who has the chips to make another larger move right back at you. Generally speaking I prefer to avoid these potential situations entirely to the extent that I can, which is why I say you really want to target the middle stacks -- those players who are not feeling the extreme blinds crunch yet, the guys who are not so huge that they can call or even reraise you with a very wide playing range, nor so small that they almost have to call whenever they have committed any money to the pot, either from a blind, an ante or having bet at the pot so far.

One of the first things I do when I get moved to a new table in the late ITM stages of a big mtt is to look at the stack sizes of all the players around my table. Obviously a bunch of big stacks at my table can be troubling for a lot of reasons, and dealing with the small stacks can pose its own set of problems, but what I'm really looking for is a bunch of guys who have medium sized stacks to be able to best take advantage. These are the guys who have enough chips that they're not yet feeling the pressure of the blinds and antes threatening to force them into playing one of the next few hands they are dealt, guys who still feel like with a little bit of luck they can play their way right back into the top 10 of remaining players in the tournament, and yet guys who have enough chips that they can lay down to your steal, or more importantly even if you re-steal their steal, and still have sufficient chips left over to keep playing their game and get right back into the thick of things. So for example, in the situation I gave above where the blinds are 4k-8k and antes are 1k, and the average stack size in the event is 100k, I am looking for the guys in the 80k-120k range or so from whom to execute most of my steals. The guy with 50k in chips left is likely to feel priced in after putting in 24k on a steal-raise, such that if I re-steal from him he might just call based purely on pot odds alone. Similarly, the guy in 3rd place with 380k in chips might be willing to re-steal from me when I open-raise it up to 24k from the button, which would require him to commit maybe 75k in chips to a reraise, an amount which he could afford to lose even if he has to fold to an allin re-reraise from me if that's what happens. So these are the guys I want to avoid restealing from, instead focusing on the middle stacks who have the most to lose by losing a big pot to me, and yet still have enough chips to be restealable against because they can post the big blind, and/or make a steal-raise, and still get away from the hand with a sufficient stack to play another day.

2. Closely related to point #1 is that I prefer to steal and resteal against players I have seen lay down to this sort of play before. Like much of poker, paying attention to the action -- in particular when you are not in the hand -- is paramount when it comes to this point, but you simply have to be paying attention as you get into late-stage ITM play in mtts to which players make the kind of plays that you are likely to be able to take advantage of. In particular, I am looking for two types of patterns to target with my raises and steal-raises. First, people who I observe laying down their blinds to late-position raises without a fight. There are lots of people like this, even lateish in big mtts, and it's important that you key on which of those players do not like to put up a fight, and do not like to resteal, when they don't have anything. Not only will this help you to isolate the players who are not likely to push back at you when you try to steal their blinds, but it will also come in handy when that player does come over the top when you try to steal from him, such that you can more readily put him on a real hand and consider laying down your hand as a result. Secondly, I am looking especially hard for the players who seem to be putting in an inordinate amount of steal-raises themselves. While any player can pick up any two cards on any one given hand, it is highly unlikely that someone is always raising strong when I have personally observed them steal the blinds from late position on, say, 4 or 5 occasions in an hour. While anything is possible of course, under such circumstances it is just far more likely that they've been steal-raising quite a bit, and that is just the kind of player that I tend to target with my resteals, one of the most profitable late-stage mtt moves. Ideally I am looking for a guy who is on a medium-sized stack, and someone whom I have observed making multiple steal-raises in the past. When a guy like this puts a move from the button on me in one of the blinds, I am fixing to come over the top of that man with many of my possible holdings in that spot.

3. This leads to my final point about stealing and restealing -- to some degree it does depend on the cards you hold in your hand. In other words, if I have a strong enough read on someone, I might go for a resteal with ATC. I've stolen pots with 52o, 74o, J2o, you name it and I've stolen with it. But generally speaking, since there is of course always the chance that you're actually running into a hand and/or that the other player might just call even without a great hand because he or she feels pot committed at that point, it is always nice to have the kind of a hand that you might be able to win a showdown with if necessary. This has a couple of implications that I try to follow when planning my steals and resteals late in big mtts. First, despite what I just mentioned above, generally I don't like to steal with two low cards like 52o. The problem here is that even if my opponent has a shitty hand, he might call and flip up Q8, 97, etc. -- two overcards to my two cards which in most cases will give my opponent a greater than 60% chance against me hot and cold. And "hot and cold" -- that is, playing two hands heads-up against each other seeing all five cards -- is basically what I concern myself with here since most of the time in these late-stage steal-resteal mtt situations, one of the players gets allin so you turn 'em up and see the board through the river to decide the winner. So generally you don't want to steal or resteal with two low cards without a very strong read, or you're looking at a 30-something percent chance to win once the cards and turned up.

Similarly, I try to avoid big resteals even with just one very low card -- say a 2, 3 or 4, because this also leaves your odds of winning not in great shape. Say I try to steal or resteal a big pot with Q2, and a guy calls me with ATC. Assuming he is not also holding a 2 -- a very good assumption, mathematically speaking and especially since he is calling my steal raise here -- then whatever two cards he has are going to basically leave me with not great odds of winning. If he has one card above my Queen, then both of his cards are above both of my corresponding cards, and once again I'm looking at a 40% dog or slightly worse hot-and-cold in most of those situations. And even if neither of his cards are as high as my Queen -- say he is sitting on 98 or something like that -- then his two middle cards (98) vs. my top-and-bottom unpaired cards (Q2) will still make him only about a 44% underdog to my hand. Low cards -- even very low pairs like 22, 33 and 44 -- can be the kiss of death in these restealing situations sometimes, because you are either going to be a significant dog if the other player actually has a hand, or at best a very slight favorite against most ATC holdings that your opponent might call with.

So I've described a bit what kinds of cards I don't like to steal with. Now, what kinds of cards do I like to have when I do a steal? First, I am looking for cards that have some likelihood of being a favorite, which generally means two high cards of some kind. So, folded around to me on the button, I might raise it up with QT. With these two high cards, even if my opponent happens to have a King and a low card, making him the favorite in the hand if he calls me allin, now I'm the one with the two middle cards who is only a 44% dog in the hand. And QT is ahead of many hands that my opponent might conceivably call my allin with given the low Ms involved near the end of most of the big mtts -- hands like Q9, JT, T9, T8, 98, 87, and not to mention all the low pairs that would likely call as well which leave me as only a 48 or 49% dog overall, easily more than made up for by the pot odds after just the blinds and antes are in the pot.

Even if I don't feel like my cards are especially likely to be the favorite, there are still a number of favorable options that may not contain the highest card in any of the players' starting hands (and are thus not the preflop favorite) but still present a number of ways for me to make a big hand and win. For example, I will steal readily in the right spot with a hand like JTs or T9s. Usually, either of my hole cards pairing should win this sort of pot, and in addition any straight or any flush are likely winners as well. Against any reasonable holdings for my opponent, a suited connector like this is going to have pretty solid odds -- usually at least in the low 40s percentage-wise, to win the hand heads-up through the river, so that's where I want to be. The only kind of hand I tend to try to avoid in this spot is an easily-dominated hand like A4 or K6. While often pushing with any Ace or any King can work to your advantage, there is simply nothing worse odds-wise than pushing allin on a resteal, getting called and finding out that you are dominated. Stealing with KTs is one thing -- a hand that would be pure shit early in a tournament against a preflop raiser, but which, in the late stages against late-position open-raisers who are just as likely to be making a move with ATC as they are with two high cards -- but stealing with K5 or K4 can be the end of your run when your opponent calls and flips up that KT or K8s. Generally speaking, low cards are death in hot-and-cold situations, which is what you're dealing with late ITM in these big mtts. Yes the low cards tend to be live, but all things considered I would rather avoid the whole issue of needing two live cards by avoiding making moves with hands that are easily dominated, in particular by the very hands that are likely to call my allin steal-raise to begin with. So don't try to steal with A2 or A3 if you can help it -- you will often find that the hands most likely to call you are other Aces, in which case you are basically at least 3-to-1 against winning, or maybe the two-face-card hands which themselves are only very slight dogs to your Axo hand.

Hopefully this has helped clarify somewhat some of the things I think about when considering stealing and restealing in the late-stage ITM mtt context. If I ever get the time I plan to do a nice writeup of my back-to-back final tables in last week's 50-50 tournaments on full tilt, which I assure you were chock full of almost nothing but steals and resteals, to help drive this point home. But even if I never get around to that post, hopefully this will be at least somewhat helpful to some of you out there striving to improve your end game in the big online mtts.

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!