DISQUS

I too am impressed with your hand recall.

I suppose part of it is that I've tried to treat each hand like its own little battle in the greater war so I try to push them out of my head. That's not to say I'm not trying to profile my opponents at the time.

I suppose if I had to find a memorable moment, it was the first summer that I regularly played poker: the summer between high school and college where I chose not to work and earned a little spending money playing five-card draw and mooching off my friends at late-night Denny's sessions. Add to that a good dose of insomnia and watching old WSOP coverage on ESPN probably around 1999 and I was itching to find a game again. It only took me 8 years to find it.

Once I found my way to JG's house, I got the bug bad and got some scratch together, bought some books and chips and felt, and started a micro-stakes home game. Add a couple of trips to AC to the mix and I'm proud to be the degenerate I am today.

This reminds me of a SAT prep course a friend of mine took. The instructors told them that, if they could, get into the testing room early and walk around, touching the walls, look at the room layout, basically make yourself as comfortable as possible. The main difference with a poker room is that when that comfort wears off (whether that's from your own play or the ATM on your right has decided to pack it in), you can get up and go either for ten minutes or until tomorrow.

Just because I'm enjoying this conversation more than anything going on at work, I'll keep thinking out loud.

I think it's the callers that are more concerning than the raiser. A min-raise (based on no other information and the levels I'm used to playing at) screams A9 here thinking they're "raising for information". The callers are now based on all the action probably getting the right price for their draws. So it's fold-or-push time, the exact situation we were trying to avoid. Now I'm ready to let go and live to fight another day. The only good thing that comes out of this situation now is it's probably going to showdown so we'll at least get some insight for our investment.

But I'd pose back to you: suppose everybody folds but the last to act puts us in, are you still folding?

It's funny: I read this post as I was watching this past week's WPT and they showed a quote on screen as an "old poker adage" - There are three ways to play pocket jacks and they're all wrong.

I'm more of a micro-stakes player so that may be coloring my thinking, but with $300 behind, what's wrong with a $70-80 continuation bet? With five callers, a 9-high flop is likely to have hit at least one of them. Why not see if we can't narrow the field and then slow down on the turn if it gets scary? I suppose it also depends on the draws possible on the flop, but I usually get burned more often than not when I don't protect my hands. We're in position so if the bets come flying now, I'm willing to shut down and wait for a better spot where I'm not trying to figure out what more than one player is doing.

That said, very good post and it makes me want to get out and play.