Hand 1, $500 Multi-table

{Addendum to the last post -- I never made the straight or flush and was beaten in the hand.}

 

The people signing up for the tournament have been assigned tables in their order of their signing up, and this means that people who know each other are sitting at the table.

 

This table is primarily made of Italians, one of them being the guy who put me out in the satellite day before yesterday.  He's a good, not great, player -- but I'm still not particularly pleased to see him.

 

From the start play is very aggressive, with big bets being made and people showing both big bluffs and big hands.  I get a couple of small pots, nothing worth writing about and everything automatic until this hand ...

 

Blinds are 25/25 and I'm in second position with Ad Jd.  I make a 5x raise to 125.  All players fold to the small blind -- the most aggressive of all the players at the table, who flat calls.

 

The flop is:

 

10c 8d 5d

 

Without hesitation, the small blind pushes all-in and he has me well covered.

 

I sit and look at the hand.  If he is truly over me here -- meaning if he has a pair of any type, the correct play is for me to fold.  It means I'd have more-or-less a coin flip and I can almost certainly beat him by long flat-out play.

 

But.

 

If he's bluffing, this hand is a chance for me to double my stack early.  Something that is always advantageous, but even more so against a table like this.

 

Harrington says you should always rate any player as having a minimum 10% chance they're bluffing ... Seeing as how the last two hands this guy showed (the last two he was in) were both bluffs, I'd say the odds here are higher ... He knows that I've mostly been just sitting back.

 

However, this feels like a medium pair play to me ... He's already double-stacked and this might give him a chance to just get more.  8's.  Something like that.  He's playing 8-9 off and wants to just shut things down right now. 

 

I'm at a slight disadvantage to a pair of 8's -- something like 45/55, but if you factor in the bbluffing part, I'm probably a favorite.

 

I call.

 

He turns over Qd 10d and now the play makes perfect sense ... he has a strong flush draw with with top pair ... It's almost a semi-bluff. 

 

The queen being between my ace and jack is a little unsettling -- more so, though, is that his diamonds are two of the cards I was needing for my draw.

 

The turn and the river are both unproductive and I'm out in about 20 minutes of tournament play.  One of the very first people out in the tournament.

 

I think about this hand for a long, long time after the tournament as I walk the grounds of the hotel ...

 

His play was certainly an amateur move -- a classic sort of online player move.  But mine was no better.  In moments of immediate opposition calling is never better than betting.  My play makes a certain amount of sense, and in a perfect math theory world might even be correct (or I could argue it up to a point where you would believe it to be correct).  In the bigger sense, though, this wasn't right -- I shouldn't be so willing to coin flip on a moment's notice. 

 

It's an unusual play for me to make -- a style and type that I don't normally do.  I need to remember this and I need to play better.

 

Tomorrow there's more.