No Limit Update

I suffered the loss of my first full buy-in in a no limit ring game this weekend. I’d like to say I got screwed, but I pretty much played the hand like a complete donkey. I was down a fair amount for the session when I got KK in middle position. There was a limper in front of me and I raised it to 4x BB. Everyone else and the blinds dropped, limper called. The flop was queen high all spades. Neither of my kings were of the spade variety so I wasn’t too happy with what I saw. He leads out for about 1/3 of the pot, and I quadruple his bet, hoping to end it right there. He reraises all-in.

Now there’s one thing I’ve noticed in my limited no-limit ring experience. Players go all-in in situations like this when the either have a monster or absolutely nothing, and I think in both cases it’s a horrible play. If they have a monster hand then they risk scaring away hands that could call smaller bets, just in the hope someone else is dumb enough or unlucky enough to call. If they have nothing, then sure they can bluff their way to some pots, but a pot sized bet can accomplish the same thing without putting your whole stack at risk.

Where was I? Oh yeah, people going all in with hopes that someone is dumb enough to call, rather than setting a trap for their opponent. Well I was dumb enough to call. I figured there was a good chance he had me beat, but I’d show him, I’d call his over bet. See how he likes that. Of course if I thought about it, I’d have seen that it probably wasn’t that much of an over bet. I’d already shown that I had a big hand by raising both pre and post flop so he had to at least put me on a reasonably good hand, which probably rules out a bluff. Brilliant call on my part. I was all proud of myself for laying down aces a few weeks ago in a similar situation, and now I can’t do the same with kings.

I knew part of the risks of no-limit is big swings like this. Unfortunately it was just about all of my bankroll on GamesGrid. I didn’t exactly start with a lot, as this is more of my experimenting site. Luckily, I did manage to win most of it back. I placed third in a small tournament which gave me enough for a buy-in to smaller stakes no-limit game. I played for about ten minutes there, doubling up in the process when I hit the second nut flush with my powerful Q9s and then later when I turned QQ into trips and got someone who had paired his ace to go all-in.

So the no-limit experiment lives on.