One of the most personally frustrating things about poker for me is my horrible tendency to make the same fairly obvious and very expensive mistakes over and over. I seem to have some sort of poker learning disability that prevents me from learning from my own past mistakes. For example, this hand highlights probably the biggest and most persistent leak in my entire game, which is my inability to fold one pair on late streets when it's clearly no good.
Villain there is a huge fish but there is still almost no way my aces are ever good on this river. I lose to any heart. I lose to any 9. I lose to QJ, QT, JT, and even weird random AK that might get played like this by a fish. He is almost never betting when I check there with anything that I'm beating. He checks behind nearly all of the time even with his AQ with no heart or KQ with no heart or KK with no heart or Q7 with no heart or whatever I'm desperately hoping he has when I call. Welp, seeya later, $100! No idea why I keep doing this to myself. There's a quote that I've seen attributed to Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and a whole host of other smart people from across history that goes something like "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Am I insane?
This was another expensive failure that I just inflicted upon myself. I pick up a little suited 1-gapper in the small blind here and 3bet a TAGgish player who I suspect is opening pretty wide from the button. I get called, which is bad for me - 3betting light and getting flatcalled by a player in position is a spot where I'm still pretty uncomfortable. On the flop I think his range is mostly AK, AQ, JJ, and TT, with possibly some AA-QQ and 99 in there as well. I flop the ol' gutshot with backdoor straight flush draw and bet trying to represent AK and fold out everything except his AK/KK/AA and possibly some bluffcatching pairs if he doesn't believe me, but he calls. I'm even more uncomfortable here and am quickly losing confidence in my ability to range him accurately any more.
I think the turn is actually a good card for me, giving me a bunch of flush outs without sullying my 4 outs to a straight, but at this point I'm thinking that he's defined his hand within a pretty narrow range of pairs and now possibly trips and I don't think I have much fold equity on this turn against the range of hand that call my flop bet. I was debating between (1) checking and giving up if he bets, and (2) overbet-shoving trying to push him off his weaker bluffcatching hands and get it in with decent equity against AK, but I timed out and got auto-checked by Cake's horrible software that doesn't allow you to request extra time in cash games. In retrospect, checking might not be terrible because with his AK he might try to make a small valuebet hoping to get called by TT-AA that I have trouble laying down, and I might be able to call getting good implied odds and stacking him if I hit my well-disguised straight or backdoor flush. This didn't occur to me at the time, and I have no idea if it's analytically sound. I would love anyone's input on what the correct play is here.
He checks behind on this turn, which I don't think gives me any more information about his range. Obviously I miss on the river. I check basically because I still really think his range is dominated by AK here and I really don't want to put any more money into this pot. In retrospect, a play consider here might be to bet some amount like $23, because I think he has a lot of trouble calling that with QQ or worse and I can easily fold to his shove if he has AK or AA. But I just don't know if he has worse than AK often enough here to make that play profitable. Again, I would love anyone's input on the best way to play this river.
As you can see, he checked behind again on the river and showed up with a hand that I hadn't even considered in his range. This is more or less the worst thing that can happen in poker and basically tells me that I severely fucked up this hand. Whenever this happens, it basically makes me feel like a complete novice, like I know nothing about poker and need to start over from the beginning.
And that's more or less how this entire session made me feel. Nothing I was trying was working, everyone was playing back at me, I felt like I was getting pushed around by everyone, and I just couldn't stop bleeding money. It's a pretty discouraging feeling, especially compounded with the despair that comes from knowing that your most expensive mistakes are ones you should know better than to make, and not knowing why you still keep making them.
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