CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

Alexdb's Poker Blog

April 20, 2009

Haven't played online much, only 5000 hands winning about £3500. Quite a lot of that was at €2/€4 PLO. I've also played 4 or 5 days of live poker at the Empire, but as its only £1/£2 the expected winrate isn't really material (its 1/3 the stakes on 1/4 the tables at 1/3 the speed, so about 36 times smaller), I've considered it recreation and practising the live game with the intention of playing higher stakes later on.

Went to Brighton last weekend for the £500 festival event, and played fine but was elimanted when the average stack was under 20 blinds, so not really much play left. I went out on a hand that I thought might be close at the time, and I think that most live tournament players think it would be close or bad - with about 15k and blinds of 500/1000 with 75 ante I pushed all in from the small blind with K5o. The big blind thought for a while then made an excuse before calling and revealing he'd been slow-rolling ATs.

At the time I thought the shove was borderline but now I don't think it is. There's 2k in the pot, and with, probably, 30% equity when called, I'm risking 40% of my stack when I'm bluffing. That's risking 6000 to win 2000, so if the button passes more than 75% of the time it's profitable. There are only 29% of hands that are actually ahead of K5o, and if he calls with all of those my equity would actually be 33%. If more realistically he calls with something like 66+,A8s+,KJs+,A7o+,KQo, then he is only calling 13.7% of the time and I improve my stack by an average of 900. I think a lot of people at that table would actually call even less often than that.