$1-3 NL – One Hand To Break Even

I think you played the hand fine. You smashed the flop, you planned to raise flop until V2 did. Maybe a bit of a loose call pre-flop (should be calling with more suited cards here), but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. If you know your opponent is going to continue with their big pairs, I think you can get paid off here enough for this to make sense.

I’m not sure what leak you’re talking about here. You mention position in the hand. Don’t be afraid to ask for a table change or even a seat change.

If you’re in seat 5, and all of the big stacks are in seats 6, 7, & 8, you don’t need to move to seat 9 to take advantage of position. Right now, you only have position on them for 1 hand – when you have your button. But if you move to seat 3, you’re still out of position to them for the majority of hands, but now you have position on them for 3 hands instead of 1.

Han what leak are you referring to? Everyone gets card dead and flop dead at some point. The trick is just to not lose much when this happens.

Pre flop the only issue I see is that your cards aren’t suited. 78 suited is fine as a call, 78 off is a stretch from the cutoff. If you called with that in the BB to defend that would be fine I think.

Post flop I don’t see anything wrong. Call to keep his bluffs in and when you boat up no worries. You block 88 so there really isn’t anything to be worried about. That’s very disciplined of V1 to fold AA there.

Odds Calculator

That’s the odds calculator that I use. I plugged in AA vs 78o and AA vs 78s – 78s has almost 4% more equity. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but in this case it means you win the hand about 1 in 5 times for 78 offsuit and closer to 1 in 4 for the suited variety.

As for being a bad player, I don’t think so. You’ve already shown some growth in your decisions. Being good at poker is limiting your mistakes and making as many good decisions as possible and reducing the poor ones.

It can be hard to beat 1/2 or 1/3 consistently for a few reasons. First and foremost, the rake is very high compared to the pots you win. Once you add in a tip, you could be losing 5-10% of your winnings to the casino.

Second, these low level games tend to have a lot more multiway pots. That means you lose equity for every additional player in the hand. Use that calculator above, put pocket aces in one hand, and start adding hands like suited connectors, broadway cards, and low pairs. Once you get to 4 or 5 handed, AA actually loses more than half of the time. Even taking AA 3 way you lose 10-20% of your equity. This doesn’t sound like a ton, but all this little bit of equity adds up. Part of it is the nature of the game, you just have to practice making the best decisions possible and your win rate will go up. Little things like this is what separates the good players from the great ones from the elite ones.

And third, at this level, players just do goofy things. When someone calls your raise with 64 suited and rivers makes a straight – that doesn’t make you a bad player.

So when you end a session, look at your big hands – both winning and losing – and reflect on those. Did you make a bad decision? Did you just get lucky or unlucky? Look at your other hands – are you using position effectively, are you raising when you should be, are you noticing what type of player is raising from what position? If you start to see that you played a lot of hands badly, then you may be a bad player. But if you honestly feel like you made good decisions and just lost, it happens.

I do that with pretty much every session. I lost $400 yesterday. There were a few hands that I feel I could have played differently. One I ran a bluff with the Ace of spades (paired board, 2 spades on the turn). I check raised turn, jammed river when the 3rd spade came. The player turned a pair with a flush draw but tanked by my, and of course he called with the flush. I don’t think it was a terrible play, but it could have been better.

Outside of that, I called with some draws I maybe shouldn’t have, but overall I don’t think I had any terrible plays. I just couldn’t catch a draw to save my life. Hit one straight (a gut-shot) in about 8 hours of play. Made a few flushes but only one in a big pot (king-high flush draw + pair on the flop, I bet he re-raised I jammed, hit my flush on the turn). Made one set in 8 hours (set of aces, got value on flop and nothing else). The whole day was up and down. I would run my stack up with aggression, then miss all of my draws. I ran into flopped quad queens twice (both times the players limped, and one hand I made a full house on the turn, lost the minimum on both). It definitely wasn’t the best session I’ve ever played, but I don’t think it was bad. And I still lost. That’s poker.