Hand Of The Week-Straight Flush Draw
I had been sitting on a table that seemed fairly profitable with several guys that seemed to be playing to have a good time. I knew right away that there were two other players in seat one and four that had a fairly good poker IQ and played semi professionally. It had been my strategy to refrain from making big moves against them and play against the easy money at the table. There was one guy at the table, sitting in seat nine, who was particularly weak and had really apparent tells. He had built up a chip stack of around $3,000 by getting lucky and pushing people off their hands, so he had become my target for extracting chips.
The average raise on the table was $20-$30 on this 2/5 NL table, so I didn’t think twice about calling the $20 raise from seat one with my 7d8d. Seat nine called just about every raised hand, so I wasn’t surprised when he called as well.
The flop came:8c 9d 10d
Seat nine was first to act and made it $20. He almost always bet the flop or called a bet on the flop no matter what he had, so I didn’t give this bet much respect. Seat one called the $20 bet which seemed pretty weak to me. I thought that maybe he had a pocket pair or had a straight draw with AJ. I had a pair and an open ended straight flush draw which I felt was fairly strong, but I wanted to take the pot down or at least isolate the pot with seat nine. I made it $95 to go. Seat nine thought about it for awhile before finally calling me. This told me that he had a fairly weak hand, but was probably getting tired of me pushing him around in previous hand so he was going to try to call me down with a marginal hand. Seat one thought about it for a moment and then pushed all in for a little over $500 more. Ouch! Pretty unexpected, as I didn’t think he was that strong and he was one of the players I had been trying to avoid getting into a big pot with. I had to reassess what I thought he might have. It didn’t seem likely that he flopped a set because I had never seen him raise in early position with hands like JQ. His raising range was definitely pocket pairs and hands like AK to AJ. This told me that he most likely had a set. Against a set I knew that I was about a 44% to hit or 15 outs to the deck. Providing that the board didn’t pair there was a good chance that I could win the hand. If the board did pair, I still had the chance of beating a full house with my straight flush. I made the call while just having my opponent covered. Seat nine folded as expected.
The turn came:Qh
This was definitely not the card I wanted to see, as my odds dropped down to about 24%. However, since the board didn’t pair I wasn’t completely dead in the water.
River:5d
My opponent turned over a set of nines, and I turned over my flush. This hand could have gone either way for me. I wasn’t getting the best pot odds to make the all in call on the flop, but I felt that the risk/reward ratio was good enough that it would be worth it considering the number of outs that I had.
