You called with what though?

Why are the $10 games so beatable, Dr Zen?

Well, let me show you.


PokerStars Game #22632892190: Tournament #124960302, $10+$1 Hold'em No Limit - Level III (25/50) - 2008/12/04 23:23:39 ET
Table '124960302 1' 9-max Seat #9 is the button
Seat 1: lsprice (265 in chips)
Seat 2: Ethos_Kid (1145 in chips)
Seat 3: undoface (1130 in chips)
Seat 4: supabaked (3845 in chips)
Seat 6: FR Vessant (1510 in chips)
Seat 8: El_Viejito (2515 in chips)
Seat 9: Tiagostuve (3090 in chips)
lsprice: posts small blind 25
Ethos_Kid: posts big blind 50
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to FR Vessant [Kh Qh]
undoface: folds
supabaked: folds
FR Vessant: raises 100 to 150

Standard open raise. Some players will fold this but that's a bit too tight. No one has been insanely loose so far and tiagostuve and El Viejito have been reasonably tight. I've played with tiaogstuve before, actually, and I don't recall him doing much insane ever, so I'm pretty safe here. This would be the bottom end for me though, and I might not raise it on a table that was a bit wilder.

El_Viejito: folds
Tiagostuve: folds
lsprice: folds
Ethos_Kid: calls 100
*** FLOP *** [4c 5h 4h]

Not the best flop, but if I'm behind a pair, I'm still in decent shape.

Ethos_Kid: checks
FR Vessant: bets 250

So I cbet fairly confidently.

Ethos_Kid: raises 745 to 995 and is all-in

Okay. He has to have a pair, surely? That's his most likely hand preflop. It's a bad call preflop (actually, there aren't many hands that would be good to call with preflop). So if he has been fucking with me with AA/KK, I have eight or nine outs to suck out, and if he has any other pair, I have 15 outs, so I'm a decent favourite. So I'm obviously not folding.

FR Vessant: calls 745

He has 74s.

WTF? Okay, once in a blue moon, you're going to stack a player like me by calling with your suited shit, but there are at least two bad things that can happen to you.

The first bad thing is that you just miss the flop. Then I bet, you fold.
The next bad thing is that you hit the flop. You flop a flush draw and two out of three times you get stacked. That's assuming that I don't have two of the same suit, in which case you get stacked every time. Worse can happen even. You might hit a pair of 7s. On a board like T73, that looks good to go. But say I have a big pair, which I will a decent amount of the time (I don't raise much at t50, and my range for the raise from the hijack is still pretty tight) or even, as I do here, a hand with enough equity vs your pair to make me favourite.

So yeah, sometimes you are going to get very lucky. But you're paying 100 of your 1100 chips to do it. And even when you are, as here, very lucky, you're still getting stacked sometimes.

Well, not this time. He rivered a fourth 4, which shows that the guy who controls the doomswitch has a nice sense of humour.

So these things happen, but Ethos_Kid will be a donator in his time at the $10s, and you can't get that pissed off that people will do rubbish things like that. If they didn't, it would be that much harder to win.