Hi,

Been lurking a bit after first coming here for excessions PT articles(which are great!). I started playing poker 7 months ago, been playing mostly SNG's with a ROI of about 20%. After playing some NL waiting for a tourney start I got totally bitten by the bug and have been playing NL since then. So only been playing NL cash a good month.

So far I've mostly played on a crypto site, full table ($0.5-1), here's my stats:
Hands: 1,187
VP$IP: 25
PFR%: 6.5
WtSD: 24
BB/100 (PT): 12.42

Here's the hand:

I got dealt in the BB. I have villain covered.

4 limpers then LP raises to 3$ (he's LAP so I don't take his raise too seriously)
SB calls, I raise to 5$ (which I realize now probably was a mistake, how big raise here?)

Goes to the flop with 4 (!) calling my reraise. Flop:

I make it $10 (pot $23-too weak?) , villain (UTG+1) calls. LP calls, BB folds.

Pot is now $53 and 2 people calling me. At this point I can't figure out what they have, should this make me step on the brakes? The Turn is a Still thinking I'm ahead I make a half pot bet of $25. Villain reraises to $50 (going allin) LP folds. And I'm left with the decision to call his allin laying down another $25 in the pot. At this point I'm smelling a set, but I have a really hard time folding after putting so much in the pot and still having a hand. And the way some people play here I wouldn't be too surprised to see him holding AJ.

Well, I call ... River is helping neither of us as he is already holding and made his set on the flop.

Bring it on

What put you in the bad situation that you were in th entire hand was your perflop play.
I would either just call the raise (depending on the player), or reraise much bigger to isolate him.
If I wanted to isolate him, or just win it now, I would raise to about $10.

Yeah that small reraise isn't going to do much for you, as you saw. You have to put in a bigger reraise, epecsially in this spot, because you are out of position. Position is such a huge thing in NL, I can't stress that enough.

How the hand happened, your bet on the flop should have been more in the $15 range...If you still had two callers it's time to slow down. It's hard not to lose all your money against a set though, it takes a lot of experience. I do believe a bigger preflop raise might have saved you.

Also...why are you only buying in for around $50? I always recommend going in for a big stack to take full advantage of the other players. That $25 dollar raise would be a lot easier to get away from if you had more money in front of you. I promise, it's true! I'm sure Ice would back me up on these two points.

Better luck man!

Getting so much response on a hand from a new poster really testifies to the exceptionally good forum you got going here.

>Also...why are you only buying in for around $50?
I buy in for the maximum, which is $100. Just lost a hand, and had not rebought any chips yet.

>Every hand is gonna call for $2 more preflop after investing $3 already
Only the player before me had raised to $3, the other ones had only $1 invested, so I thought $5 was enough for them to fold.

On a sidenote, I had upped my preflop aggressiveness today which earned me a bald eagle icon, but still ended up beeing my worst day yet loosing just below $200. It was a combination of alot of bad cards, very very rarely hitting anything on the flop. And called basically every time I tried a pot sized bluff (or semibluff if you will). Lost about $100 when I was called on a allin by a guy drawing to the flush on the turn, and I had a set. You know what he said to me after he hit his flush? 'It's all in the timing' .... I was fuming for an hour after that.

Anyway, thanks for the response so far.

Soul, a couple of things to keep in mind. First while poker tracker is a great tool, how good a player you are does not neccisarily come from what icon yout are rated. You dont have to be an eagle to be a winning player. There are eagles that are good players and win a lot, and there are eagles that lose a lot of money too. I am TPA and it has proven sucessfull for me. So dont think that you have to be an eagle to win. In my database, TPA actaully have a higher win % than TAA.