Playing the man

I'm pretty happy with this hand. I was playing 100NL half stacked as the 50 tables had long lists.

I had been watching this guy for a while. He was very aggressive, but seemed to be also willing to go to showdown pretty light. He had been fairly hammering me in the blinds, and he stacked me in an earlier hand when my flop checkraise shove (with a middle pair that I rated to be good a fair percentage of the time) was snapped off by his overpair JJ. I waited quite a lot of hands to finally pick up something decent with which to let his aggression defeat him.

I wouldn't normally just cold call preflop, but I wanted to let him take the lead in the later betting since that had been the pattern in our prior encounters. I raised the turn to a) give him a chance to checkraise all-in, and b) to let me make a modest shove on the river if he called the turn and checked to me.