Quiz discussion

Fuel55 no doubt scared all my loyal readers away from this quiz with his early, concise, unarguably correct answers. Go read the comments for those, or stick around for the long versions below. Anyhow, he wins a chocolate fish for his efforts, which he can pick up next time he's in Dunedin.

Q1 Early, blinds 15/30. On the button you(2500) have Q♦Q♠. Surprisingly, all fold to you. You bet 90, and the SB(1300) and BB(2500) both call. Flop is 8♠5♦2♠. Both blinds check and you bet 150 into the 270 pot. The SB calls, and the BB folds. Pot is now 570. Turn is 8♣. The SB checks. What's your plan?

At the table I put in a bet of 480 to the 570 pot. The SB went all in. I folded.

Discussion An elementary error in pot management. This tip came a day too late. What hands can the SB hold for the call of the continuation bet? He must either have an eight (e.g. A8 suited, 98 suited etc.), or a big draw (flush plus OESD or gutshot). Sure it's not much fun to be giving a free card to the latter but I think that discretion is the better part of valour here. If one must bet, then something like 1/3 pot, i.e. 200 seems more sensible (good draws will be getting correct odds to chase, but marginal ones won't). This is a repeated leak in my game (failing to keep pots small with decent but not monster hands) and I hope that by repeatedly drawing attention to it, I'll eventually get it plugged. In other words, check the turn, and call (most) river bets.

Q2 Somewhat later, blinds 200/400/25. On the button again you(4200) have K♦8♥. All fold to you. The SB has 17,000, and the BB has only 200 chips remaining after posting. Do you make a move? If so, what?

At the table I raised to 1200, the BB called (oops!) and the SB went all in. The flop contained a king, so I pushed over the BB's check, he folded, and I won both the main and side pots.

Discussion I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with a simple fold here. K8, aka "the shrew", is hardly the nuts after all. On the other hand, it is 56% against a single random hand, so if we could get heads up with the BB, we'd be happy about that. Having decided to act, should we go all in or make a normal raise? Obviously, I decided that with this particular stack size the former looked stronger than the latter -- Fuel55 suggests all in instead. I don't think there's a "right" answer here.


Q3 Still 200/400/25. In the cutoff, you(6200) have 8♦8♣. All fold to you (what kind of micro MTT is this?) and you bet 1200. Only the BB(10,000) calls. Flop is A♦Q♥4♦. The BB checks. What do you do? For bonus points: what would you have done over a 2/3 pot sized bet?

At the table I bet 1800 into the 2800 pot, and the BB folded.


Discussion Fuel55 raises the possibility of going all in ab initio. I must confess that I hadn't really considered that, but it would certainly eliminate this annoying sort of postflop problem. Still, in the problem at hand, since I would never be comfortable calling any bet from the BB, it seemed that there were only two ways I might win the pot: checking down to the river and winning a showdown, or putting in a bet now and getting a fold. The former seemed a bit unlikely, while the latter might well work, both against hands that I was currently ahead of, and conceivably a few that I wasn't. This time it was successful.