Thursday, May 7, 2009

Sometimes it's good to have the fish on your left

Sometimes it can be handy to have the passive calling fish on your left.

For these hands, both the players on my left were huge fish calling almost any action preflop with any two cards, and paying off with marginal hands postflop. This gives you a great opportunity to play drawing hands like small pairs and suited aces from early position.

Sitting UTG+1 and UTG (consecutive hands), I would nearly always dump 66 and A3s at a FR table. Here, limping gave the opportunity to create a big family pot.



Note there is a bit of a glitch in the replay, as I was UTG+1 and UTG not UTG+2 and UTG+1. Also Ron was BB in the second hand.

The first hand didn't work so well when fish #2 folded, and we ended up three ways. On the eight high diamond flop I figured my hand was worth a value bet, but unfortunately my gin on the turn was not paid off.

Hand two worked almost perfectly, with my two fish coming along for the ride and a late position raiser. The TP+FD flop was perfect, and I bet for value. The turn bet is probably a mistake since I am almost certainly still drawing.

I made a few more good pots against alli after these. I made "isolation" raises, which he would call and the rest of the table fold. He then calls two Cbets and my Q high junk holds up :)

4 comments:

parttimebonuschaser said...

Having fish in any position is good. The only problem is with the fish on your left, when they call your iso raise, its no longer isolating, as it gives every other player to act afterwards better odds to come along for the ride.

The blindman said...

IMO the main reason for having the fish on your right is that you will be playing in position postflop in the majority of pots.

Preflop, if the fish is so bad that they will call 90% of the time when you raise it, it doesn't make a lot of difference. Other players are getting much the same odds to enter whether there is a fish limp and iso raise or a raise and fish cold call. In fact, the latter is a scarier prospect, since the early position raise is stronger than the iso raise after the fish. Note that this argument really requires an uber-uber fish with 90% VPIP.

The funny thing on this FR table was that very few people seemed willing to enter the pot after my raise and fish cold call.

TiocfaidhArLa said...

Looks like you're on track for another big month...

The blindman said...

Not really. I'm up, but I've had a couple of losing sessions that have set me back a bit.

Nearly made another decent tourney cash last night, but my AA was crippled by 67o AIPF hitting trips.