Another Online Session Pt. 2

Like I said in my earlier post, I planned on playing another session later in the night because I feel this is one of the softest times to play. I only played another 250 hands and it went very well. I did have my first real suck out in a long time in the hand I describe below. I ended up about +$300, so it was a great way to end the night. I started off the session pretty quickly stacking a guy who checkraised me on the river on a KK3xx with A3 when I had AK, so that was nice. I ended up bluffing off half of that money in a bad couple of bluffs and then got back in my groove. I played for about half an hour longer without much action when this hand came up:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1293844
I had played with this quite a bit in my earlier session and knew he was a solid, aggressive player. When he 3 bet my button raise of $8 to $28, I knew his range was pretty wide, so I 4 bet to $86, and he insta-called. This to me showed some real weakness, as I don't think any hand of strength can instantly call with very little thought. Hands like TT, JJ, and QQ would for sure tank a little bit and hands like AA and KK would most surely just shove with that much money in the pot. His hand felt more like an AK, AQ or a really frustrated mid pair in my mind. When the flop came 7 high, he instantly shoved, which to me is another sign of weakness. I felt there was a good chance he was on an Ace high sort of stop and go steal, complete air, or a mid pair. I'm going to make a distribution and then walk through my equity and EV calculations on this hand. I haven't done this on this hand yet, so I'm still not sure if my play was correct. Let's assume that on this hand the distribution is: 25% AK,AQ,AJ; 25% one pair less than KK; 25% air; and 25% AA,KK assuming my read was wrong. Ok, now we are going to calculate my equity, and this might get a little confusing but I will try to explain it the best I can. Now we need to calculate how much of each 25% that will go toward our total equity. First off, we divide up the 25% into thirds, which we will round down to 8%. So now, for AJ, we will on this flop about 85% of the time with our AKdd. So we multiply 8% by 85%, which gives us 6.8%. This will be the same for AQ, so we add another 6.8%. Against the AK, we will split every time on this board (assuming no draws now for simplicity) so we can just divided the 8% in half. So adding this up, we earn a total of 17.6% of the total 25% available. Now we do the same for the other 25%'s. Against all one pair hands less than KK, I am a 3:1 dog. or 25% to win. So now we multiply 25% by 25%, which gives us 6.25% toward our equity. To save some typing I'm just going to put down the results for the rest of the 25%'s. Against complete air, I used conservative figures and rounded down a few percent to get 15% toward my equity. Against the last 25%, I only got 2% toward my equity. Adding up all the percentages to my equity, we get right around 40% in total equity. Now we need to compare that equity to the pot odds to see if my call is positive EV over time. For this call to be break even, we need about 3:2 odds on our money. The pot at the time was $174 + $114, or $288. We had to call $114, so our odds were 288/114, which is about 5:2 on our money. So based on the assumed range, my call is clearly a money-maker in the long run.

This is a very read specific range, especially since I felt he was weak. If I were to take a more general range based on the betting patterns displayed, I am pretty sure that this would be a -EV play. That's why reads are so important in this game, because a person just examining this hand on paper would most likely tell me to fold this flop shove because of how narrow a 4 bet calling range is. As a side note, there is software that I use to do this long, drawn out calculation for me, but I find it really helpful to work through it on my own from time to time. Please leave me some feedback on the clarity of my explanation...