In my last post I spoke about having problems paying off sets. I made some post on this site's and other forums and talked to a few people along with reviewing my hand histories. I came up with a simple set of rules to avoid paying off sets. Obviously, you can never avoid them all, no matter how good you are, but these few guidelines have worked well for me. Please note, that I play NL100 6-max at the moment, so my observations are ba<x>sed on that game.
1. LOOK FOR ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR
Sets do not come along often, but when they do people try to make as much money as possible off of them. This means that your average pla<x>yer has to alter his or her typical behavior when playing a made set. Look for these changes.
A. The villain is a solid pla<x>yer who you can generally trust to play his hand for what it is. If he called PF and now he is starting to play his hand in a manner that suggest he has a monster (either reraising or calling where he should not be), he probably has made his set and thus has you beat.
B. The villain is a loose-passive calling station. By his nature, all this person ever does is call. If he starts betting or, worse, 3-betting you post-flop, you should get out of the way. You can count on him having at least a 2-pair.
C. A pla<x>yer who is OOP and has been check-calling you all hand suddenly bets out on the river. Chances are, your top pair is no good. This person does not want to rely on trying to get you to bet into him/her and is taking the matter into their own hands.
These guidelines are what I have been using and they have been working for me, though I still need to get better at not paying off hands that turn a better hand than me. For example, I raise PF with AK and the flop comes 28K. I bet, a loose pla<x>yer calls. Turn comes an 8, I bet, and this pla<x>yer starts playing back at me. Since he is a calling station, 8x is a large part of his range, and I need to take steps to cut my losses if that is indeed what he was holding.
For next time, I will work on the issue of bankroll oscillation. When I look at my graph of profits versus hands played, while there is an overall large positive trend, there are a lot of oscillations that come from situations where I make big mistakes with big hands. My goal for next time is to come up with a strategy to minimize the value of my mistakes when playing big hands. When playing, I have a high steady win rate that is only brought down by big hands where I make large mistakes. I will work on decreasing the downswings in my play by focusing on trying to reduce the cost of these mistakes.
Please feel free to comment. I look for both feedback on my findings as well as suggestions for the problem I am working on now.
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