When action got around to me, I could do one of three things: call, re-raise, or push. Each option has its merits. If I call, it allows me to get away without losing much if I miss the flop. If I reraise, he not only may fold but would most likely check most of the time to me when we take a flop. And finally, the advantage of pushing is that I won't have to play a flop and I have great folding equity. I opted to go for the re-raise because that is what I would do with AA-KK, and that's what I wanted villian to think I had. I sensed that he could open-raise in LMP with a large range of hands and thus wasn't too worried about being beat at this point.
When he pushed, I still didn't put him on AA or KK. More often than not I see people getting cute with those two hands at this stage of the tourney, and a standard raise followed by a overbet push definately didn't seem like AA-KK. I was pretty sure that he either had AK or QQ-TT. Knowing it was a gamble, I figured I had to call since I was getting better than 1.5-1 odds. He had 99 and flopped a set for good measure.
His push is absolutely terrible, but aside from that, it's easy to see why I busted out earlier than I should have here. My re-raise preflop isn't necessarily bad - but a good percentage of the time it's gonna lead to me going all-in preflop. If you want to cut down on the variance it's probably a good idea to play even monsters like AKs safe when you have a decent stack to work with.Statistics: Posted by Mad Genius — Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:58 pm
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