Played some more poker this week, I am starting to find some more time although Christmas is going to get in the way so last night may have been my last session for a while. I was playing heads at NL400 which is about the lowest level that motivates me when heads up.
I had been playing this guy for a while and I knew from Poker Office that he liked to min raise on the button and make half pot bets. He hadn’t done this for about six hands or so but I didn’t feel that he was strong at all. I had the 8s-5s and was seriously thinking about three betting after he raised to $10 but I didn’t do that because I had made a three bet just two hands earlier and I didn’t want to get four bet light holding 8-5.
So I call and the flop comes Kd-Jc-5h giving me bottom pair. I didn’t like leading out as I felt that this guy was shaping up to be one of those types who think that they are a “player” if you know what I mean. They like seeing flops and mixing things up and then think that they can outplay everybody post flop.
He may have been right in this instance and he may have been better than me but my Poker Office data suggested otherwise. I got the feeling that he might float me if i bet. I hadn’t check-raised the flop since the second hand and felt that he could respect that.
So I checked but they check it back so we see the turn which is another jack and the Jh to be precise. They bet $10 into a $20 pot. The way that I see things is that they didn’t have a king. His line of thinking would have been to either start a pot going by betting the flop or checking the turn trying to extract some value on the river. He would surely get more value from his king by betting more or checking trying to induce me to bet the river.
It’s possible that his king may not be good so he isn’t going to want to build a big pot with just a king with a pair of jacks on board. If he has a jack then that is a monster heads up so he needs to start building the pot but yet he chose not to do so.
Of course all this assumes that they are thinking logically and there is certainly no guarantee of that. I didn’t want to put myself into an awkward situation by check-raising the turn as a good player would know that they induced this by choosing a weak line and a three bet or call now becomes more likely. Would a player with a king or a jack for that matter check-raise the turn like that anyway?
But then I didn’t want to end up paying off successive bets of a hand that was stronger than mine as that would make his bets great value bets. I still didn’t think that this player was strong and he didn’t impress me with his thought patterns either. So I decided that even though my check-raise looks like it has been induced by weak play that under the time pressure, he wouldn’t conclude that so I made a pot sized raise…….they almost time out before folding.
I ended up winning two full buy-ins from this guy before he left the game, its been a while since I had a losing session which is most definitely unlike me 
Carl “The Dean” Sampson at poker loco
