Venetian Report

I played the 1k Venetian event yesterday and it went pretty awful. On like the third hand, I had AJ and made a 3x raise and got called only by the big blind. The flop came Ace high and I bet out 225, only to realize when I looked down I had actually bet 625 because the 500 and 100 chips look very similar in my color blind eyes. My opponent called, which worried me even more on such a dry flop, that I ended up checking it down the rest of the way. He missed his open ended straight draw and I took it down but looked like a total donk. A couple of orbits later, I was in the small blind with Q6 in a limp around pot and the flop came Q106. I checked, a MP player bet out 150, another guy called, and I check raised to 550. Only the second caller called and the turn came an 8. I bet again, he again called. This started to worry me as his range was very limited now. He could have any hand like KQ, QJ, Q10, Q9, Q8, KJ, J9, or a flush draw. The river came an offsuit Ace, which wasn't a terrible card, but I knew it would prevent getting any value from a one pair queen if I checked. I checked the river because not many worse hands are going to call me here, and I wanted to give him a chance to bluff a missed draw. He ended up betting about 2/3 of the pot and I tanked for awhile. I was now able to narrow his range to J9, KJ, Q10, or a bluff. The key part of this hand is bluffing frequency, meaning how often your opponent will bluff in this spot. You then need to merge this with the rest of his range, assign percentages to each hand/bluff to calculate your equity in the pot, and then you need to compare your equity to the pot odds. Obviously, I didn't have anywhere near enough time to calculate all of this, so you sort of have to estimate it all very generally. I really felt I only had to worry about KJ and J9 as Q10 should've put in a raise on the turn for protection, but a weak player will often super slow play hands like that. I ended up calling and he showed 79s for the filled gut shot on the turn and I mucked and made a mental note about the player. Reflecting on this situation, it's probably a bad call mainly because I have no idea how often he will bluff, and live players don't bluff as often as online players, but that's the way it worked out. That cut me down to about 5k from the starting 10k stack and then I literally folded almost every hand for the next three hours. After awhile, I was push/fold mode, and got it in with AK against 88 and 75hh. The 75hh ended up making a boat and I was gone. I am playing the $2500 Bellagio event with my dad today and it would be great to have a big cash going into the WSOP for some nice momentum...