A Hand From My Home Game
Here is a hand from a home game that I played in recently. We we’re playing $1/$2 no limit and I was one seat away from the button when everyone folded to me. I looked down and saw the A-9 of clubs so I decided to raise it up to $7. The guy to my left made is $22 to see the flop and I decided to call him down.
I wasn’t thrilled about my hand at this point, I figured that he probably had a pair or a better ace, but I wasn’t about to fold this hand for $15. It’s possible he had a couple of high cards and he just wanted to get aggressive because he was in position. The guy had a wide enough range of hands that he would raise with on the button for me to make the call here.
The flop came down J-9-3 with 1 club, so I was pretty sure that if he had re-raised me with A-K or A-Q I was now in great shape. In the back of my head I was looking out for the Ace-Jack, but I was pretty comfortable with this flop. I check called $35 on the flop, and the turn brought the Q of clubs.
This was a terrible card for me in my mind. This seemed to improve most of the hands that I thought I could still beat on the flop with the exception of A-K. The Q did give me a flush draw, so if I was against a dominant hand, I was at least going to have a chance to draw out on my opponent. Since it’s likely that he has me in bad shape here or he is just on a complete bluff, I decided to check to him again.
My opponent bet out $55 which reassured me that I was probably behind here. I imagined some hands that I could still beat, but I felt like I was stretching it when trying to convince myself that I was ahead. In theory it was a pretty poor decision for me to call the turn here, but I had a feeling in my gut that my opponent was not as strong as he wanted me to think he was.
The river brought an off-suit King making the board 3-9-J-Q-K. Right about then my instincts kicked in and I realized how bad my call was on the turn. While realizing how many hands my opponent could have held on the turn which were beating me, I realized that hardly any of those hands would be able to call me on the river here unless he had a 10 in his hand.
I made the decision to push my chips in within about 2 seconds. I had about $75 left, which was about what I would have bet anyway if I had made the straight.
I was pretty sure that my opponent was laying down an extremely wide range of hands here…everything up to top set. One of the reasons that it was an easy bluff to sell was that I was just calling him down from out of position the whole way. This isn’t typically the way that people go about trying to bluff someone. So when I led into him on the river when there was 4 cards to a straight, it looked like I had genuinely drawn out on him.
He started laughing and said “Sorry man, I can’t call all of that.” He begged me a couple of times to show him my cards so I flipped up my A-9 and he did the same, flipping up the exact same hand.
So as it turns out, I actually made a pretty sick call on the turn, and an even sicker bet on the river. My instincts got the better of me there. It’s still pretty fair to say that I made what would normally be a bad call on the turn.
In all likelihood, we would have checked it down and split the pot. Had he decided to bet on the river, I don’t think there is any way that I could have called him.
Related posts:
- Vomitous Home Game Poker Antics
- Cash Game Poker at Seneca Niagara Casino
- You Can’t Win if You’re Not Invited
- A Pot Limit Omaha High/Low Hand
- Biggest Mistakes in Micro Stakes Poker
Categories: Home Games
