online, 1/2NL
full ring.

I hate Jacks in Fullring games! I never know anything with them.


Hero 350
villain 250 (decent player)
donkey 150 (donkey is a lag donk)


Hero is button with J,J


folds to donkey who limps in MP. MP2 limp, villain raise to 10 in c/o Hero wants to re-pop here, but hero calls. (should hero re-pop? to 30?)

folds to donkey who calls, MP2 folds

flop
6,2,6

donkey check, villain bet 25. Hero?? here is my thinking, I either raise, inflate the pot and face an expensive trip vs QQ- AA, or i get AK/AQ to fold?
or do people lean to calling / re-evaluate on the turn?

i also have donkey in the hand who god knows what he ever has

Re-pop preflop and this flop plays itself, IMO.

Edited the rest. I misread the action.

I agree, you absolutely have to re-pop pre flop. When you don't re-pop here, you give away all control of the hand.

Now that you haven't re-raised pre flop, I think you absolutely have to raise this flop bet. I don't like just calling down here, especially if you're truly concerned that you're against QQ, KK, or AA. If you raise here and get either smooth called or re raised, that would definitely strengthen your feel of Villain's range, and also gives you a chance to get away from the hand on the turn.If you are truly against QQ, KK, or AA, and decide to call down, you'll be faced with stacking off Villain on the river. Plus, just calling the flop also allows Villain to spike an over card on the turn if they are holding AK or AQ, and if that happens, you just went from playing this hand badly to playing it horribly.

Agreed.


As played, if villain is cbetting anything here, i repop to about 70 and try and push villain out of this hand. If you get shoved into, I guess its a question of what range villain would do this with. If its 88/99+ (or if you think villain might re-raise bluff you with overcards), its close, but I'd probably call. Flat calling with jacks really disguises your hand, so villain might be tempted to overplay his hand not putting you on something like JJ. The fact that the donkey is also in this hand probably reinforces raising the flop.

I don't agree with this. People passively flat call pf with JJ all the time. If RT raises here he is either on a steal or has something like 77-JJ. I don't think his hand is disguised at all, he's either ahead or he isn't. I don't think he's getting a worse hand to call his raise unless it's 99-1010.

Jacks suck, you are going to have to find out where you are at some point, I prefer taking the lead preflop and if villain flat calls the reraise with QQ-AA and the board comes like this well, I'll probably stack off or lose at least my flop bet. (Which in turn would be a decent amount of his stack).

is FR 200 online full of nits? just wondering? I haven't played it in over a year but remember I never saw any action except for on the Boss Network.


Because jacks are so hard to play, I like to re pop to define my hand agains the villian. I'm usually not a fan of trying to define your hand, but Jacks is one of those excrutiatingly difficult hands to play that I think it's the best route.

Raise light here. The neighborhood of 65 sounds about right. If the donkey has a random six the donkey has a random six. Don't sweat it.

I also like the flat call with jacks from the button. It's not a strong hand quite yet, but definitely flop worthy. And since you're in position on a late position raise, you're in a good spot to outplay him past preflop.

So raise/fold against the villian and raise/call against the donkey?

I think this hand needs to be reraised here like 100% of the time preflop. You're against a LP raiser who raised to 5BBs after a pair of limpers. If you raise JJ preflop, the hand plays itself as someone else stated.

As much as I hate minraises here, this is the perfect spot for one. Assuming the board is a rainbow board, there aren't really any draws there. You're not gonna get reraised very often because he has to strongly consider that you've made trips. The other player will have a lot more pressure on him with 2 players involved and most importantly, you have position.

Also, we don't get converted HHs from your online hands?

I raise PF to $30. That will help us play the flop, if there is one.

Since you DIDN'T, I raise the flop to $100. We can see what happens after that.

And the reasoning behind this?

I would assume to fold to a push. Except we scratch our heads and wonder if he moved in on us with 77-1010 which sucks and is why we should be reraising preflop.

It doesn't take much of a raise to spoil the pot odds for two overcards. He needs 7:1 to call for 6 outs. In fact, I think min raise does that. At any rate, I think raising to 75 is plenty if we're going to raise.

No, go to action gaming network, download the software if u want, you'll see what i deal with.. its lame for HH.

I trust you, I was just poking fun.

To do what we should have done PF -- tell unpaired overs we're ahead.



Exactly. But you're right, the only problem is that I don't know if an underpair figures it out. They SHOULD.

You're probably right. I'm in live mode, where sending out a whole stack of reds is a message.

Why bet so much if we think he has unpaired overs?

Also, just becuase we didn't reraise preflop doesn't mean that we're trying to run him out of the hand now.

From RT's posts and how he phrased it in the OP I don't think he's looking to trap with JJ, he can correct me if I'm wrong. I think he's trying to win a small pot when he's ahead, try to hit a set, or just dump quietly if he's behind/it isn't clear he's ahead and not get into too much trouble.

The problem I see with that, is it's very hard to see cheaply where you are in this hand. Which is why I think reraising PF is pretty important here.

I agree with all points you made.

I was asking mtdesmoines the question because he said "raise to $100" on the flop which I think is a terrible bet for like 14 reasons. If he asks me to name all 14 reasons, I'm gonna say I was lying and that there are only 9 reasons and that I'll only name 4-7 of those nine reasons.

You. dont ever play in a cash game with me.

Yes, i was multitabling for the 1st time in a while, and tskillz hit the nail on the head with this post. this was my 1st reaction when i jumped tables and saw the jacks after the raise.

1. Answer: because a QKA will come on what ... 85% ? .... of all complete boards. And we have two opponents in this hand. Why let this board mature? To me, we won already — just shut it down. Jacks just aren't a 'stacking' hand, they're a 'potting' hand. Anyway, if we believe that villain has unpaired overs and donkey has god-only-knows, which I do, and I think RT does as well, we need to make villain pay to draw to his pair, and the donkey, well, we just want to make him pay. Also, we need to take advantage of all the safe flops we see with jacks, because of the number of raised pots that end in folds when we play them. By betting hard (and later I stipulated that $75 accomplishes the same thing), we can assure ourselves that no one comes back over the top light. If the villain comes over the top, we can be pretty sure it's >TT and if it's not, we're setting him up for a kill shot in the next 90 minutes or so. If the donkey pushes and the villain folds, then we push too. People talk a lot about how to play jacks. I think it's easy to play them.

2. As far as your second comment is concerned, I'm not sure I understand it yet. Sounds like we want a cheap call down ... why? That's what the villain wants with his unpaired overs. Why give it to him?

1. We price out worse hands
2. We commit ourselves to calling his shove
3. He only shoves with better hands
4. ...?

Dammit Acid is between 11, 6, 4, 3, 2, or 1 reasons better than me at poker in this hand.

Just out of curioisity RT how is it going? It should be much tougher than the live games, but I've never heard of the site you are playing on.

You experiencing same success as you have been live?

Why did you put a roll online anyway?

You can direct me to a thread/post if you've answered these questions already.

Let's hear what you're willing to tell us, then.

1. You seem to have the attitude way too often of "I"ve already made enough with this hand, time to end it," when the only thing you should be thinking is "How do I maximize this situation when I'm ahead and find out as cheaply as possible when I'm losing?"

2. Raising to $75 or even less accomplishes every goal that raising to $100 does except for the times when he does have TT-88 and will pay more for his hand.

3. We don't want him folding unpaired overs. If he has AK, AQ, or KQ, he will need to get 6-1 to see the next card. We don't need to raise to $100 to scare him off. We want him making this mistake.

4. We shouldn't be in a rush to be calling (the donkey) or folding (the PFR) this hand regardless of the action that comes after our raise.

decent i guess. I find at 1/2 NL if i make 1 buy in i'm happy. standard raise preflop is like 6, with re-pops to 14 or 20. where as live, standard could be 12, with repops to 40 etc..

I dont live near a casino anymore, so I havent been able to get to a table. so I deposited 400 online a couple days ago to play some 100NL. Just trying to rack up extra cash (if i can) before i leave for australia Oct. 9th,

sitting at 1033.00 as of today. and play 100NL multi table. or 200NL single table (until its a comfortable BR)

Tiger Gaming was my 1st site ever playing on. Its part of action gaming network and i like it for a few reasons.

A - I'm a cash game player. and their cash games are decent as far as quality of players. Only ever 1 or 2 tables per level going at a time tho. Very rare to see any game over 1/2NL

B - Its not compatible with pokertracker, so my memory and note taking ability works great at that site.

C - The majority of players are Canadian, some of which play in Canadian poker tour events, which are events i will be playing a lot of next summer.

D - Its temporary, and I plan to switch eventually.

Cool. Was just wondering why you stopped once you hit your goal live! Good to see (IMO) that you didn't throw 10k online so that you can still play the live stuff.

gl, etc.

1., 2. OK, I agree with the "..." — I stipulated that $75 does the same thing.

3. I'm not sure I agree, because of the number of times we have to fold jacks on the flop when we play them in raised pots. I like to take wins with them when I can.

4. I would because I have to trust RT's reads here. 50% of my live game is played by read.

WHY?

You have position on everyone.
You have a strong hand.
Other players will act before you after the flop.

If I was in the blinds, I might pop-it against a LP raise, but a call then lead on safe flop would be fine with me.

Not denying any of this. But I still think we need to charge a stiff penalty for drawing to beat our JJ.

The converse of that is that we give away a lot of money when we were already beaten or if they outdrew us on the flop. You only need to make a bet big enough to give 2 overcards improper pot odds since the most outs he will ever have here is 6, and as I already said, that means he'd need 6-1 to see the turn. When we're behind though, we rarely ever have more tahn 2 outs.

Are we still arguing about $75 versus $100? .... I'm not.

I'm talking about your general approach of "we need to punish them to outdraw our JJ" and such. I understand that you say that the bet amount doesn't matter (75 vs 100)

JJ pf is a good hand. People don't like it, but I don't mind it. I don't lose a lot of money with them because I can lay them down in bad spots and because I can run them up on flops like this. Two weeks ago, I had JJ in a $1/2 live game .. this is how it went down:


All stacks around $800+

villain 1 EP: raised to 30
me CO: re raised to 30
villain 2 BB: calls
villain 1: calls

flop: 2,4,8 rainbow
villain 2 in BB checks
villain 1 in EP bets 50
I raise to $150
BB reraises to $400

fold
fold
BB shows a set of 4s.

I'm saying we need to bet hard to define our hand. We're calling the donkey anyway, but we can fold to the solid player's push. That's exactly the play I'm advocating here. I know we're not that deep, but if we're ahead, we might as well fill the pot/TID. If we're behind, we might as well get pushed out.

Do folks have opinions on the flat calling and re-evaluating on the turn?

I understand the logic of reraising pre-flop and on the flop to define the hands, but does anyone think that flat calling on the flop with someone to act behind you would scare AA, KK, QQ and maybe even a weak 6? Could that buy you a free turn and potentially a cheap showdown about the same cost as your flop raise?

In other words, if I had A6 suited, would I always reraise this fairly safe board on the flop against a bet from the initial raiser when there is donkey value behind me? Would not a call scare people more than a raise?

No, I hate flatcalling because we give the power and pricing to the villain and there's almost literally no card but a J that we want to see.

Little late to the party here and not much to add other than I re pop to $35 pre flop (I'd be way more likely to just call from the blinds).

Main thing I wanted to say is that, as usual, arguments can be made for different ways to play a specific hand (even the flat call to "scare them" has, in some cases, some merit, although too much of a gamble for me!) and those who made them, made them pretty good here, imo. Always interesting to hear opposite sides ... seems to be a rarity that we get polar opposite discussions like this one.

So you spent $150 to find out where you were at, when a smaller raise would have done the same thing, only you would have kept in hands you beat. I might also add the villian played his hand horribly by raising so much that you were forced to fold, which is the way we'd expect you to play a set on this board based on your previous comments of charging someone so much to outdraw you. I think that was Acid_Knight's reasoning.

Oh my..

What an abortion of a thread this has become.

I'll say this; if you're going to flat call with JJ on the button, than you're playing it purely for set value and need to get away from 66X boards rather quickly.

So the reason why I raise the issue of flat calling on the flop is that we've been drilled too much in the head to be aggressive, but what that agression gets you is big pots on the flop with a single pair. I think that in general, big pots with single pairs is something we want to avoid.

I think the real issue in my opinion is the double barrel on the turn. If we believe that raiser will double barrel on the turn with air, then we have to raise to define. However, since he's out of position, he would be crazy to double barrel with air. He may check on the turn and that'll define his hand as well without investing the $75 dollars needed to reraise him. What you do by raising on the flop with one pair is create a pot that you'll give up to any resistance. Are jacks good enough to invest nearly $100 to find out if they're good? I'd rather invest the $35 and find out more on the turn.

To be honest, if you find that he'll double barrel all the time with air, it's probably better to simply fold the hand and wait for a good situation for him to bluff his money away.

I do agree however, that there are a number of scare cards for the turn. But I don't mind seeing a turn in this case before I make my decision (especially in position).

From watching all the high stakes cash games on TV, I see small ball players like Daniel calling on the flop with a questionable holding all the time, and this seems like one of them. Naturally, we're not Daniel and he's got reads on most of the people.

I just have serious issues investing 1/4 of my stack to find out if my one pair is good. At these levels, players may flat call or push my reraise with 88, 99, TT as well as QQ, KK, AA.

I think most agree that the reraise before the flop was the right move =) But I was trying to generate discussion rather than the standard answers that we always get.

Fold preflop.