Hand. Of. The. Week.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I get a kick out of Oddjack’s babelfish conversions of hand history text.  So in that light, I have some hand analysis for them to send through their scrambler.

It’s a 50NL table on FullTilt, 6-handed.  I’m dealt pocket 8’s, da snowmen, in MP and call the BB.  An LP player with a stack roughly equal to mine raises to $2.50 and it’s folded around back to me.  Obviously I’m not getting pot-odds to call, but as the freshly-back-from-Aruba DoubleAs says, sets are gold.  I call.

The flop comes QQ5 rainbow and I check.  From my position, whether I have a Q or not, a check doesn’t give anything away about my hand.  Right now, all my opponent knows about my hand is that I limp-called his raise.

LP bets out a pot-sized bet of $6.  Now from my perspective, I know he pre-flop raised, but if he’s holding a Q, he’s sure as hell not betting here.  His bet screams out to me “I don’t have a Q!!”

Based on the bet, I put him on overcards and check-raise to $12 surely expecting him to fold right now.  He doesn’t.  He comes over-the-top all in for $33 more.  Now what do I do?  Fold?

The all-in does represent something here, but what that is may be difficult to say.  I did consider folding for a second, but I remembered something else:  a previous hand.  In that previous hand, the same player was able to push me off a hand when I held just top pair.  In fact, he overbet the pot in a huge way.  He may be thinking he can do the same thing on this hand.

I wasn’t 100% sure I was good, but with the combination of all the evidence, I felt a call was in order.  So I did.

He showed 57s and didn’t improve.  I IM’d G-Rob immediately to tell him what a rockstar I was.

****

To address a couple of comments from the previous post:

To Chris:  Thanks for stopping by and the kind words.  I’m thinking of doing the same here in G-Vegas, a HU tourney as part of the BadBlood series of tournaments.

To Gamecock:  Dude, when you coming back to the homegames???

To SparkyR:  I don’t consider myself in the same league as the “journalists”, but thank you for saying.

To EasyCure:  I think a “good” ratio is one where you are at least profitable, so based on a 5% juice, you’d need to have a winning percentage of better than 52.5% to break even.  A “great” ratio?  I think anything over 65% would be amazing, that’s nearly equivalent to winning 2 out of every 3 HU matches.  I would only consider sample sizes in the hundreds however, anything less is not enough.  And yes, the GUNZ are doing fine.  I’m flexing right now.  Shazam!

To Trip-Jax:  That HU challenge sounds interesting, I’ll keep an eye out for the next competition.