A Mistake

To counterbalance my previous post, here I will highlight a mistake I just made which was pretty bad.

I had T9s in early position and limped. Stack 1150, level 50/100 (soon to increase to 75/150). This could perhaps also be classified as a mistake, but this is still sort of ok. The player to my left calls, as does the BB. Flop is 367 rainbow. Now this is actually a reasonably nice flop for me, since there are no high cards (nothing above my cards). The BB checks and I bet 200 (pot is 375). The last player goes all-in for 938!

I automatically fold.

This was a big mistake. Not just the fold, but the fact that I wasn't even thinking about the possibility of calling. In my mind, I was bluffing, got caught, and had to give up the pot. But this is completely wrong. Even though I have only a gutshot, it is looking very much like tens, nines, and eights are all outs. I would put him on A7 at best. If he has two pair or a set (or 4-5...), why should he go all-in? In fact he might even have two high cards, though to me it looks like a bad spot to bluff. On the other hand, if it was a bluff, it worked!

So anyway. I should have considered that I had 3+3+4 = 10 outs twice. This does not make me a favorite, but now it is time to consider the pot odds. The pot was 1488 and I only had to put in 850 to call. Oops, to be precise the pot was 1400, because my opponent had me covered. So I was getting pot odds of 1400/850 = 1.65:1. That is enough - my odds according to PokerOffice were 1.6:1, and that is ignoring the backdoor flush draw that I have, which would add a few percent.

In fact, it would have been enough for me if I had just looked at the PokerOffice screen and noticed that my odds were colored green. That indicates it is OK to call.

The mistake was not as bad as I thought before I did the calculations. The bet was only marginally in my favor (meaning that over time, I will only make a small profit by calling this bet). Still, it is worrying that I did not even THINK about calling. I remember now that I have written about this problem before too, a long time ago. I thought I had fixed that...