Conclusion:
———————
LA home game, started at 5pm, with buy-ins at $20-$25k, with blinds at $50/$100. 8 players.
Fast forward to 2:30am. Tons of rebuys and adds. Blinds are $100/$200 with tons of straddles. Average stack size is $120k.
Hero is in for $40k, stack is at $125k. Villain stack is at $350k, down about $100k.
Hero is UTG+1, has double straddled to $800.
Villain is in HJ, raises to $2400. Loose aggressive, drunk on at least 15 tequila shots, has been making massive bluffs and showing for the last 4 hours. Villain is also host.
UTG player calls. TAG. Up $40k. Has been trying to play pots with drunk villain.
Hero has
.
Plan here is to isolate villain and discourage UTG from calling. Villain will most likely call any raise, so we have to think about bet sizing that will convince UTG player to fold. Given just a call from early position, we’re not putting him on a very strong hand, but we need to raise enough to get him out.
Hero re-raises to $12,000.
Villain instacalls.
UTG player folders.
Flop is
Everything about this flop is annoying. Villain has shown time and again over the last few hours as he has gotten more drunk that he could have anything. Last action of note was check raising a super tight player on the river with bottom pair and correctly reading that the player wasn’t strong, thereby getting a fold. But villain shouldn’t have been in the hand to begin with, he 3-bet with 82s.
Options are a small C-bet to see where we’re at, but villain’s MO is to raise anything small. We are better off controlling the pot, especially with the ace on the board.
Hero checks, with the intention of calling most bets from the villain.
Villain hesitates. And checks back. (Very curious.)
Turn is
We have a decision to make here about betting. The check back indicates that villain is not playing an ace, and is most likely chasing an FD, or maybe slow-playing a set. Kd and Qd are well within his range, as he could have easily raised pre-flop with unsuited broadways. A made FD is a possibility, but a bet will figure that out for us.
Hero bets $25,000, a bit under pot size. A raise will give us info, and we will most likely fold, but a smaller bet might induce villain to raise with a smaller diamond than J, given his previous affinity to push out weak bets. We’re hoping for a fold here, especially if he doesn’t have a diamond, and is playing 10s or another medium pair.
Villain standing-tanks for a while. He calls.
River is the
.
At this time, another semi-drunk recreational player who has done a “fold and hold” throws his cards into the muck, but it catches the dealers hand, and a card flips over.
The card that flips over is the
.
He apologizes profusely. Villain looks relatively stoic and has no reaction.
Hero checks. As
@upNdown points out above, Villain has played this has very differently than his previous aggressive plays, which makes me smell a slow-play. I’ve seen him do this before, a couple of times. His lack of a reaction to the King being exposed was also atypical; he’s usually the first to chastise people about stuff like that.
Plus, as I stated above, I had worked to triple my buy-in, and was concerned about losing it all on a bad beat. I wanted to see the size of his bet, and match that to the unfamiliar way in which he had played this hand.
Villain pauses for what seems like forever. And then moves all in. Not a value bet, but all in.
Nothing about it seems right. The entire way he’s played the hand feels incongruous to how he’s been playing for the last few hours. After a 10 minute tank, where I mostly was convincing myself not to call, I make the decision to fold. I turn over my jacks and say, “I think you have nut or straight flush.”
Villain gets pretty animated. “How did you not pay me off?”
He turns over
In reading people’s thoughts above, I’m reminded that most of the time, that’s a bad fold. Just happened to be right this time.