My first blog post......ever

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phexac United States. Aug 30 2007 23:30. Posts 2563

Greetings everyone, welcome to Chemical Imbalance blog! Thank you for coming. I am glad you are here, and I hope you will become a regular visitor and tell others to swing by so that I can achieve my quest for world domination.

First, a few words about the blog name. Chemical Imbalance started as joke among my family members and close friends. You see, I am a very happy person. I am happy most of the time and content the rest. Things that bother other people do not bother me. Obstacles that upset people just get me thinking about how to overcome them. I can see a positive in basically any situation. Losing a job just means you get a few weeks vacation, and what's bad about that? While most people spend their life wondering whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, my range is closer to half-full to overflowing.

This optimistic outlook on life caused those close to me to say that I have a chemical imbalance, just while for most people it means depression, for me it means an unnatural state of constant happiness. If they turn out to be right, I'll be pretty happy.

Now that the ti<x>tle is out of the way, it's time to talk about why I started the blog. Most blogs on this site seem to be just statements of fact--desc<x>riptions of what happened in the past few days/weeks/months. Each post gets a few comments, and that's that. The reason I am starting this blog is that I want it to become a learning tool for me and for those that read it.

I will talk about my game and what I am working on as well as how I plan on overcoming whatever leaks I am working on at the time. I invite everyone that reads the blog to comment and relate their own experiences as well as their take on the problem. I am a winning pla<x>yer now, and I plan on excelling at this game. I hope, my gentle reader, that this is a goal I share with you.

So, for the topic of my first post ever, I have picked the biggest leak I have at the moment: losing large pots on a good hand that gets outflopped. For contextual information, I play NL100 and often play on Absolute, where the max buying is 200bb.

Let me draw up a scenario. You hold AK in early position. You raise and get a caller. On the flop you make top pair. You get and get reraised. If the person is a nit or a tight regular, you know you are beat. They just hit their set. Fine. They can have this hand. But what if the person isn't? He can be an average pla<x>yer. Maybe even a regular who plays somewhat loose. How do you balance out between getting not losing value versus a weak hand (say AQ) and not sliding your entire stack across the table to an AT that just hit 2-pair?

This issue truly messes with my game right now. I have had great session ruined by 2-3 hands where I lost my entire stack paying off a flopped 2-pair or a set.

My immediate take on the issue is that, unless you have a very good read, you should not push over the raiser. That would just be dumb (and unfortunately I have done this on many occasions). Call and re-evaluate on later streets. But on later streets, they will bet TP2K probably just as aggressively as 2-pair. So what do you do? Please feel free to post your take on the situation in the comments.

In my next entry I will post my experience since this point, things I have found in other sources, as well as a summary of your responses.

I hope this blog turns into the learning tool I envisage it as, so I ask you to help me get it there.

Thanks for reading.

0 votes

Nitting it up since 2006

Narious Canada. Aug 30 2007 23:44. Posts 4800

On August 30 2007 22:30 phexac wrote:

My immediate take on the issue is that, unless you have a very good read, you should not push over the raiser. That would just be dumb (and unfortunately I have done this on many occasions). Call and re-evaluate on later streets. But on later streets, they will bet TP2K probably just as aggressively as 2-pair. So what do you do? Please feel free to post your take on the situation in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

If there playing TP2k as agressively as two pair, but won't go broke with it if you push then you want to call down to get max value of hands you beat since they are more likely to have a top pair hand then they are to have two pair or better. Sometimes flatting a flop raise and check raise/Pushing over a turn bet is good too.