Say you folded a flush draw with one card to come because you weren't getting the right price to chase. Now, the hand's over, but someone at the table says "Hey (to the dealer), can we see what the last one would've been?" and the dealer shows a card that would've made your flush. Did you make a mistake? Was it a bad decision because, as it turns out, the flush was coming? No, because you couldn't have known that.
Here's a hand from last night's Monday tournament that I went bust on that I think illustrates my point pretty well. At the beginning stages of a tournament, when the blinds are relatively low vis-a-vis everyone's chip stacks, you don't have to risk much to play a pot. You can speculate with the right hands when in position, but basically you are looking for a good spot to double up early, if you can find one. I didn't know it when the hand began, but I was about to be presented with one of those opportunities.
In the second ($.10-.20) level of the tournament, I had $10.10 in chips after posting my big blind, which is basically the starting stack. Jake, under the gun, limped, and the players all folded around to Marc in the small blind, who called. I knew Marc would call with almost any hand in that position, and that Jake's limp probably represented weakness rather than a trap. I looked down at my hole cards.
ME:
I decided I needed to raise it up here, to see if I could eliminate a player (or two), and to better define my situation. I made it $0.80 to go. Jake and Marc both called. Marc's call seemed almost impulsive, or rather stubborn. I felt like he didn't have much, but had decided he wasn't going to be pushed off the hand. I actually got a small feeling a bluff might be coming up. The flop got put out:
FLOP:
This looked like a pretty raggedy flop, but Marc quickly bet $1.20 into the pot. Again, I sensed weakness. The quickness of his bet, combined with the fact that I noticed that he seemed not to be fully invested with his attention in the hand, made me feel this way. I thought about it for a while, and decided to do something risky. If I were to raise it, I might be able to get Jake, who's a generally passive player, to lay down something that's beating me, leaving only Marc to contend with. I made it $4.25 to go, and Jake thought about it for a while. However, as soon as Jake folded, Marc announced, "all in."I had only $5.25 left in my stack. I had him covered by ten cents. I agonized over it for a while. If he held a hand like two overcards, he was likely to make this kind of bluff, and I was getting something like 3 to 1 on my money. If he had AK, I was in trouble, and if he had an 8 or a 9, I'd hopefully have two streets to suck out at 3 to 1. However, given my preflop read on Marc, and my knowledge of him as a loose/aggressive player, I felt strongly that my hand was good. I thought for a while longer and said "I'm probably gonna look silly, but I call." I turned over my ace high and Marc showed his hand.
MARC:
!!! For jack high, with backdoor straight and flush potential. Imagine, then, my disappointment when the jack of diamonds peeled off on the river, leaving me with only ten cents.However, that's the whole point of the story. It doesn't matter what the turn and river cards were. It matters what was out there when the chips went in, and whether I had the best of it or not. The fact is, no other player who was at the game Monday night could have made the call with the AQ in that spot, and that fact alone is worth sustaining a loss in a tournament one night. If I'm able to play better than my opponents, I know I'll get the money in the end.
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