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Is this bad beat my fault?
| Player | Action | Cards | Amount | Pot | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| makapaka | Small blind | £0.04 | £0.04 | £4.28 | |
| bayliner | Big blind | £0.08 | £0.12 | £9.69 | |
| Your hole cards |
| ||||
| 15479 | Call | £0.08 | £0.20 | £3.10 | |
| archwiz28 | Fold | ||||
| tealy10 | Call | £0.08 | £0.28 | £9.29 | |
| ganzs88 | Call | £0.08 | £0.36 | £11.77 | |
| makapaka | Fold | ||||
| bayliner | Raise | £0.08 | £0.44 | £9.61 | |
| 15479 | Call | £0.08 | £0.52 | £3.02 | |
| tealy10 | Call | £0.08 | £0.60 | £9.21 | |
| ganzs88 | Call | £0.08 | £0.68 | £11.69 | |
| Flop | |||||
| |||||
| bayliner | Check | ||||
| 15479 | Bet | £0.40 | £1.08 | £2.62 | |
| tealy10 | Fold | ||||
| ganzs88 | Call | £0.40 | £1.48 | £11.29 | |
| bayliner | Call | £0.40 | £1.88 | £9.21 | |
| Turn | |||||
| |||||
| bayliner | Check | ||||
| 15479 | Bet | £0.48 | £2.36 | £2.14 | |
| ganzs88 | Call | £0.48 | £2.84 | £10.81 | |
| bayliner | Call | £0.48 | £3.32 | £8.73 | |
| River | |||||
| |||||
| bayliner | Check | ||||
| 15479 | Bet | £0.96 | £4.28 | £1.18 | |
| ganzs88 | Raise | £1.92 | £6.20 | £8.89 | |
| bayliner | Raise | £2.88 | £9.08 | £5.85 | |
| 15479 | All-in | £1.18 | £10.26 | £0.00 | |
| ganzs88 | All-in | £8.89 | £19.15 | £0.00 | |
| bayliner | All-in | £5.85 | £25.00 | £0.00 | |
| ganzs88 | Unmatched bet | £2.08 | £22.92 | £2.08 | |
| bayliner | Show |
| |||
| 15479 | Show |
| |||
| ganzs88 | Show |
| |||
| ganzs88 | Win | Four 9s | £21.52 | £23.60 | |
Comments
You were always going to lose your stack in this hand. It's what's called a cooler - Two massive hands clash with each other and somebody has to lose.
With that said, you didn't play the hand very well. I'll go through it in more detail later, as I'm playing now, but I think your bet-sizing was too small pre-flop and check-calling on the turn and then checking the river were both huge mistakes in my opinion.
I'll ellaborate later but I'm sure others will have their say before me.
I'm going to base my reply on the hand as it played out sequentially, so your point about pre-flop first: JJ is the fourth best hand in hold 'em. When people talk about it not being that great a hand, they mean that it's not the sort of hand that you should want to put 100 Big Blinds into the pot with before the flop. That's because the only hands that other people will want to put their entire stack in with are going to be AA, KK, QQ and perhaps AK. Against those hands, JJ is in bad shape. (Note that this applies only to deepstack play. In a tournament with 30BB or fewer, you should want to get your stack in the middle on most occassions.)
So before the flop you don't want to get all of your stack in the middle. However, you should still raise as JJ is a big hand and the chances of AA, KK or QQ being dealt to one of the other players are slim. In this hand it's even less likely as all of your opponents have limped. If they had these big pairs or AK, you would expect them to have raised it themselves.
So it's good that you did raise, however your bet-size is too small. By making a minimum raise, you're not asking your opponents to put much money into the pot to see the flop and after they've limped for 8p, they're guaranteed to call for just another 8p. This is bad for a few reasons:
1) Since we don't think any of them have strong hands we want them to put as much money as possible into the middle while we have the best hand. If we do that throughout our poker career we guarantee that we make money in the long-term. So we want to charge them a bigger price.
2) With JJ, there is roughly a 50% chance that the flop will bring at least one overcard to our pair. If there is just one overcard, the fewer opponents we have in the hand the less likely they are to have that overcard. Obviously sometimes they will have it and we lose but if there are four opponents in the hand it's very likely that at least one of them will have that overcard. So with big pairs like JJ we want to play most of our flops against one opponent (heads-up), meaning that we need to raise enough to make some of our opponents fold.
3) We are out of position: This is going to make our hand alot more difficult to play. When we have the best hand it's more difficult for us to get value from our opponents. When we have the worst hand it's more difficult for us to figure that out and when the flop comes with scare-cards for us it's much easier for our opponents to bluff us off our hand, even when our JJ are still good. All of this means that we want to play our hand fast before the flop: We get more money in the middle, so get more value when our hand is good. We look alot stronger to our opponents (we also probably have fewer opponents, as mentioned) so it's less likely that they will try to bluff us. This means that we can have alot more faith in our decisions on later cards: If they're raising us, it's more likely to be with a genuinely strong hand.
4) If we had AA or KK, we would want to raise alot more than the minimum. With AA we are certain to have the best hand before the flop but we're also very likely to have the best hand on the flop. So with the AA, we will play our hand with the greatest confidence and will always, always, always raise big pre-flop to get as much value as possible from our opponents. Knowing this makes it important that we also play other hands in the same way: If we make our pre-flop raise up to 3BB + 1BB per limper with AA, but only make a minimum raise with JJ and other hands, our opponents are going to figure that out. That makes us really easy to play against. By making the same size of raise with various types of hands we disguise what type of hand we have, making us alot harder to play against. - This is known as balancing our range and is more important than most new players realise.
Pre-flop here, I would make it 48p as sighcall suggested. At the start of our poker lives, it's best to stick to the 3+1 per limper rule for our pre-flop raises.
If one of our opponents does have a single 9 on this board, it's very unlikely that they will fold if we bet. However that doesn't mean that we should bet. We know that if they have a 9 they will call or raise our bet and if they have neither a 9 or a J or a draw such as QT, they will fold. If we check here, we can't make any of our opponents fold but we allow them the opportunity to bet their hands if they have one or to bluff if they don't have one. Keeping these bluffs in the hand is good for us and exactly what we should want, as they're putting money into the pot when they can't win and can't make us fold.
Frequently you will hear people saying "Bet your big hands" and alot of the time that's the best thing to do. This usually works because our opponents don't give us credit for having that big hand. They will call us with a pair or a draw and we get more value this way. However, on this board I think checking is the best option: This is only because it's really difficult for any of our opponents to have anything. We have three Jacks, so there's only one more that our opponents can have and there are two 9's on the flop so it's difficult for them to have one of those, too. Because the flop is three cards of different suits (rainbow board) we know that nobody can be holding a flush draw so the only likely drawing hand that anyone can have is QT. If we bet on this flop, most of the time we will lose all of our customers and that's going to be horrible for us.
I like your check-call on this flop. You should be absolutely delighted when one of your opponents bets and another one calls. This looks like the perfect situation for us. We're calling that bet ourselves because there is virtually no card that can come on the turn that will scare us but we don't want to raise and scare away anyone bluffing or playing a weak pair like J6 or 77. You played the flop as well as possible, I think.
If we just call the bet here and a Queen or a Ten comes on the river, our opponents holding a 9 or a King might not want to put the rest of their money in. With a board of J99KQ any Ten makes a straight and our opponents know that. It's not a card that beats us but it will make it harder for us to get value. So we have to try to get as much money in on the turn as we can.
The best thing about check-raising on the turn is that now our opponents have shown strength on two streets. This means we can be confident that they both have some sort of hand and we will know it's very likely that our raise will be called or even re-raised (3-bet).
If we want to get all the money into the middle (which we do with this hand) then we need to build a bigger pot on the turn. When we only call that bet on the turn, the pot is now only £3.32 and one of our opponents has more than £10 behind (although we can only win £8.73 of that). It's going to be really hard to get him to put £8.73 in on any river with just a King. So if we want to get all of that money, we need to raise now.
On the turn I think I would check-raise this 48p bet to about £3. That's a fairly big raise and it is designed to allow us to move all-in on the river without it looking strange.
Also, check-call, check-call, check-raise on this board looks like supreme strength, particularly after we raised pre-flop, and a good player will know that. This is probably the only way that our opponent can fold a hand such as QT or 9T on this river. (Although they would have to be a really good player)
So after you've played the hand up to the river the way you have, you really should bet the river yourself and bet it quite big - I think £3.32 (Full-pot) is good here. You can get called by a King and may be raised by a 9. You'll very likely get the full stack of your opponent if he has a straight or weaker full-house.
The way that I think this hand should have played out is that:
You see all the limpers pre-flop and raise to 48p. The player with 99 would almost certainly call.
On the flop, you check because your opponent is unlikely to have anything and you don't want to make them fold. They likely bet and you call.
On the turn, the King hits and you check to give your opponent the chance to bet again. He bets and you now make a significant raise. Either your opponent 3-bets here and you move all-in, or they call to allow you to bet again on the river...
If the money isn't all-in already, you move all-in on the river and your opponent calls. You lose the pot but you've played it correctly.
It's incredibly important to remember that there is no way you could avoid losing your stack in this hand. If you had folded at any stage it would have been a horrible mistake. As you say yourself, you were a huge favourite to be winning this hand on the flop and by the river the only hands that are beating us are 99 and KK. We know that KK would almost certainly have raised pre-flop so only 99 is realistic. Far, far more often our opponents will be holding a Jack, a King, bare-9, a straight or just a bluff. The 99 is only a tiny portion of the range they could be holding, so folding in fear of it is going to cost us alot of money in the long-run.
The way to think of it is that if we play this exact hand out many, many times and each time we get all the money in, we're going to win all that money a great deal more often than we lose. Since our opponents could play the hand in the same way with lots of different hands, we just have to accept that sometimes they will have 99 and we'll lose.
flop is ok
c/r turn or lead turn big say 1.50
get money in - unlucky - nice hand sir !
nothing you could do its something in poker thats called a cooler.
a cooler is when 2 players or more get hands they wont get away from so just a sigh and move onto next hand im afraid
I won't be getting in top of the posts for this. It's only the 8th and they decide on the 30th. I expect lots of new, very helpful posters to show up sometime around the 27th, lol.