POTD #279 Hungover in Barcelona I Misplay a River
and preflop and maybe the flop as well
There tends to be a bias towards loose play from good players because they believe, often correctly, that they can figure things out later in the hand. This most commonly manifests itself with loose preflop play— sure this open is loose, but I am better than my opponent postflop. I think one of the errors with thinking this way is the looser you play preflop, the more marginal decisions you will have postflop. The goal of poker is to make money, not to make as many correct decisions as possible. If you raise 72o UTG and play postflop “perfectly,” you might have gotten 5/6 decisions right, which is better than getting 0/6 decisions right, but still might be inferior to getting 1/1 decisions right. Your opponent who might be a “worse” poker player than you might go 5/5 with his set that stacks your 72.
The more marginal decisions you make early in the hand, the more you increase the difficulty of nailing future decisions later in the hand. Even if you are so skilled that you’re nailing all the tricky postflop spots you encounter, you will be running into tricky postflop spots more often because you will have a mediocre-to-bad hand more often. In today’s hand, my biggest sin was not the preflop open, it’s fine, but I probably thought “I can get away with opening this into this line up,” only to make an elementary mistake in the hand. So I want this POTD to be a reminder that even if you think you’ll on average outplay your opponent postflop, you won’t always outplay them postflop. Sometimes you will miss some really easy plays that will claw back the EV you think you’re gaining with some early street adventures. You’ll never play perfectly, which means a thin edge can evaporate quickly. Beware.
2022 EPT Barcelona € 25,000 No Limit Hold’em (Event #16)
(1k/1.5k/1.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 100k Starting Stack
It folds to me in the LJ (90k/60bbs) with Q♦️T♥️, I make it 3.5k, it folds to the CO (105k/70bbs) who calls, everyone else folds.
Flop (11k) 8♦️7♥️2♦️: I check, the CO bets 3k, I call.
Turn (17k) K♣️: I check, he checks.
River (17k) A♣️: I check, he checks and I lose to 9♠️8♠️.
