Roller Coaster Session

Played my longest session yet tonight (quad tabling NL25), and figured out some interesting things. First of all, I was down $60 pretty early on, with one bad beat (not terrible, a flush hit with 2 cards to come) and lost my stack, and the other $35 was lost with poor river calls. There came a point where I was +$34, and then I was about even before my last hand of the night, where I filled up and won a $15 pot. The HUGE leak in my game right now is convincing myself to call gross river bets because "they're only 3/4 of the pot", when the pot is about 3/4 of a BUYIN.

I had an interesting thought about playing PP preflop tonight as well. My old strategy was to setmine 99- and limp or call a raise, given implied odds. I never would look at PFR of the villain who raised me when cold calling, I would just call and look to setup. I realized tonight that I would benefit from calling less when the PFR is high, and more when their PFR is low, which was contrary to what I intuitively thought. The reason is this: with a low PFR considering they're UTG to MP, I'm putting their range pretty tight, something like JJ+ AQ+. If this sounds overly tight to you, remember I'm saying someone with a low PFR. Now if I setup here, I have great implied odds, because JJ+ is going to pay off NICELY. If the villain's PFR was higher, maybe 10+, I would have to put him on a looser range, meaning he's going to be laying down a lot to my flop bet/raise when I setup, so I don't have implied odds.

Something else I learned reading the 2+2 forums earlier involves combinations. Consider this: you open raise to 4xBB from MP with AJo, and get 3bet from a tightie directly on your left. I would put him on a pretty tight range here, maybe QQ+ AQ+. I would generally fold here (because of the range), but lets say you call looking to hit an ace, and you do! How often are you good here? My old thinking would have said about 40/60, because he could have AQ, AK, QQ, KK, or AA, 2 of which you beat and 3 of which you lose to. However, enter combinatorics...

There are 6 ways to make AA, 6 to make KK, and 6 to make QQ. There are 16 ways to make AK, and 16 ways to make AQ. So total there are 18 ways to make QQ+ and 32 ways to make AQ+. This gives the villain roughly 12 hands you beat, and a whopping 38 you lose to, making you more of a 24/76 dog, as compared to my original guess, 40/60. Wow! (Please correct me if my math here is wrong...)

Anyway, here are my stats for the session (Luckily I cleared a bonus for $20, and note that only gets counted in the "overall" section for bankroll purposes):

Session: +$13 -- 756 Hands
Overall: $419.75 -- +$132.40 -- 8090 hands