Saturday, September 9, 2017

Lessons from a LAG

Sat at a table yesterday where my stack more or less stayed static over the course of my session. Winning a few modest pots before bleeding back to around starting stack. During the course of my eight hour session I was able to observe seat two spin his stack up from a $300 starting stack to $2300. An impressive streak where he played aggressively, bluffed a lot, and managed to get paid off when he made nutted hands. Once he had hit the high water mark he continued to play aggressively, bluff a lot, but did not make any nutted hands and bled his stack down to around $450 before leaving the table. I started in a seat two positions to his right which was not a good place to be. Managed to end up moving to 3 seats to his left which was a much better position. A couple of reasonable players moved to positions 1 and 2 seats to his left. It was to those players that he bled a lot of his stack.  Having recently re-read Ed Miller's "Playing the Player" I was trawling through my mind to see if I could recall all the lessons from Ed's book on how to approach playing a LAG like this. Today I'll be browsing through the sections on how to approach playing with this type of player again.  In one pot where I started UTG with JJ I raised to $15, a mid position player called, the LAG called, and the Big Blind thought about what to do for a few seconds before calling. Flop came K45r. The action was checked to the LAG on the button who bet $40 into $60. The Big Blind called. My original plan was to either flat the LAG and hold on to the river, or perhaps to check-raise. However, something about the Big Blind's original call and the call on the flop pushed me to folding. I folded. Turn 7. BB checks. LAG fires $75.  River Q. No straights. No Flushes. BB checks. LAG checks behind and turns over 10-9 off suit for no pair, ten high. The Big Blind shows 54 off suit for a  flopped two pair. His intent was to call all streets for any bet and if the LAG had out drawn him so be it. He was following Ed Miller's plan of information denial by check-calling rather than check-raising with bottom two pair. In the likelihood that the LAG was simply barreling to get people off hands.

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