Damning the River

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggonnit, the cards don’t hate me.

One thing I am reasonably happy with from today’s play was my sticking to Ed Miller’s principles re: raising with hands like AJs, ATs, KJs.  I used to get cute with these hands and not raise. My poker-playing grandmother and others at the tables have told me that you shouldn’t raise because you’re not going to push anyone out and you’ll just build a pot for them.  To quote Ed Miller, “This argument ignores the mistake that your opponents have already made by entering the pot.  Your strong hand clearly has an edge in pot equity before the flop.  You should expect to win signficantly more often than your fair share of seventeen percent with five opponents [in this example].  If you have a pot equity edge, at least one, and probably several of your opponents must have a pot equity deficit.”  I only got cute once, UTG, with AQ, considering a possible raiser directly to the left of me – that was a mistake, I still won the pot, and I should have won a bigger pot.  I wonder if the subconscious reason for this play was all the times where I followed Ed’s advice and completely missed the flop or really did just build a big pot that made it correct for others to draw out on me. 

In any case, I’m still fairly proud of myself for following through 99% of the time.  I think that generally speaking my post-flop play was good enough to follow through with this strategy.  I need to work on playing with overcards, which occurred numerous times in these situations.  But I generally followed his advice properly against ragged flops (sometimes with backdoor draws), trying to winnow the field on the flop and folding on the turn.  Given the amount of players calling and the turn cards, I generally made the decision to drop correctly on 4th street.  Still need plenty of work there, but it’s better than I’ve played before.

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