Tax Season :(

So, I'm wrapping up my taxes and it is pretty depressing. Last year sucked because I didn't really anticipate the upcoming tax deadline, and this year is much the same even though I know I should have been preparing and setting aside money well in advance. Oh well. Hopefully I will learn this time.

Anyway, April is going pretty well considering I lost $6k on the first day spewing at 5/10. Since then I have played strictly 2/4 and 3/6 and also tried to cut down on the number of tables I'm playing. I think I would rather sacrifice a small %(if any) of my hourly for a slightly higher winrate(resulting generally in less variance which is always nice).

I'm going to try and keep my sessions to 6 tables and a maximum of 8 if the games are really good. I had been trying to play 8-10 at all times and that just doesn't work as well for me. With 6 I am very confident. It's when I get to 8 or 10 tables and something goes wrong when I generally get into trouble. What seems to happen a lot is something bad happens or I make a mistake, and then simultaneously I have another difficult decision/thin spot and what happened 3 seconds ago affects my decision making skills. With 6 tables this scenario is a bit less likely to happen and will probably result in less spew from me.

An interesting HH I played today....

No-Limit Hold'em, $6.00 BB (6 handed) - Hold'em Manager Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

BB ($2014.90)

UTG ($729)

MP ($679.05)

CO ($1386.15)

Button ($669.05)

Hero (SB) ($1310)

Preflop: Hero is SB with A♥, A♠

1 fold, MP bets $21, 2 folds, Hero raises $69, 1 fold, MP calls $51

Flop: ($150) K♣, 7♥, 5♦ (2 players)

Hero bets $70, MP calls $70

Turn: ($290) 10♥ (2 players)

Hero bets $140, MP calls $140

River: ($570) J♠ (2 players)

Hero checks, MP bets $397.05 (All-In), Hero folds

Total pot: $570

Ok so villain in this hand is a 22/14 reg who is a little tighter than most post flop. So he opens in MP and I 3 bet him from the blinds. The flop is very dry and I just make a standard cbet of about 1/2 ish pot. The turn is meh, and again I bet 1/2ish pot planning to shove most rivers. However the river is a J, which in my eyes is a pretty bad river for me. KJs and JJ both get there.

So now I'm like, crap. Here I that shoving was just not going to be +EV for me. If I were to give villain a range for getting to the river it would look something like, KK, QQ, TT, JJ, KJs, KQs, AK. Against that particular range(which we actually want to look at his calling range, so I think we can remove QQ from his calling range because he probably folds that a significant portion of the time) I have 45% equity which is not enough for me to profitably value bet the river, and this is assuming he calls me with every single combo of AK and KQ that he gets to the river with which I'm not even sure is the case because I think the J can act as a bit of a scare card for him as there are not a lot of hands that I'm shoving that he beats anymore.

Now some might be wondering well how come you don't c/c the river? In my opinion, if I check to the villain on this river he is going to play pretty straightforwardly and not turn a lot of hands into bluffs. I don't think he's going to shove KQ, or QQ and quite possibly not all of the combos of AK. So lets just say he only shoves AK 3/4ths of the time. The flop is also so dry, that is really really difficult for him to show up with air here.

Against his river shoving range of all the hands that beat us, and some of the AK combos we only have 31% equity. Now its $397 for us to call and the pot is $570 + his $397 all in. So $397/($570+397+397) = 29%. So we need 29% equity to make a break even call but we only have 26% equity against his range. Therefore I think c/f is the best play in this scenario. Obviously this would change if the flop texture was a little more conducive to him have possibly more hands that he could shove as a bluff.

Also just to show how big of a difference that river J has vs a blank, if you change the Js to the 3s and give him the same range of getting to the river I have like 75% equity. I also think if the river is a 3s it makes him a little bit more likely to call my shove with KQ, and maybe even QQ/JJ some of the time which would make it an easy shove. I think a lot of people would just shove it in here and hope for the best, but I think through some solid analysis and reasons to believe your opponent will play certain hands in their range a particular way you can avoid making these medium mistakes that will go a long way to improving your results.

Later.