Back to Poker: The Dumb Call

I want to apologize on behalf of no one for digressing for three posts. It's back to poker now. I'm at a point now where I feel you understand how I play the game and I will fill you in as to how I got where I'm at as we go along. Therefore, I'm just going to go ahead and tell my poker tales as they occur in real time.

If it seems like I'm being short or less grammatically correct than usual, it's because I'm currently in the 5-minute break for a 2000-player tournament. It's also because I took a bad beat just before the break. I'm glad it happened though. It will give me a good place to start. Here's the hand.

Situation: Middle of a large multi-table online tournament. I built my chip stack to 4700 with a couple of all-in calls and patiently awaiting my good hands. I played the good hands aggressively and took down some nice pots. 50/100 blind level.

Steel (4th position: AJo, 2000 left): Raises to 300.
Len (small blind 98s, 1900 left): Calls
Me (big blind: TT, 4700 left): I get the pocket 10's and say f*** it and go all in. It's a borderline play but I was assuming Len had two high cards or a lower pair and would fold. I assumed Steel had a nice hand but was hoping for 2 high cards. Honestly, I wanted a call from one and only one of them.
Steel: Takes a while and then calls. I'm assuming he had the standard moron logic of, "oooh these cards are big, call."
Len: Takes a while and then calls. This is just crazy and I really have no clue what he was thinking besides how much fun it is to gamble and get lucky. Or he was tired of playing. Suited connectors are not something you call an all-in with. You're behind and cannot maneuver on the flop, turn and river because there is no maneuvering. The hand is over. The cards are going to come out. So forget this guy and be glad guys like this like to play small stakes online poker. This is where you make your money. This is why you said eff it and went all in with the ten's, hoping a guy like this would call.

Needless to say, a jack came out on the flop and I lost the hand. Len's play was very foolish and I can't explain what he was doing. Steel's play, however, is the one that truly bothers me. It's plays like these that have bothered me since I began to understand the game. He raised preflop in middle position with AJo. I don't know if he wanted some calls or not, or if he would like to take down the pot preflop, and he probably didn't care either way. He raised with good cards, and that was it. But what he really and truly should not have wanted to see was a re-raise all in from a solid, tight player with more chips than him that had no real reason to cripple his stack with a mediocre hand. Well, he probably didn't like the all-in, but he called it anyway because he wasn't thinking. The question I always ask people like this is, "exactly what hand did you expect to see?" There responses vary but generally come to one conclusion: I have no freaking clue. I'm going to make a short list of hands that a person should think of when seeing an all-in from a tight player in the big blind who has a comfortable chip stack, in order of how likely a person such as myself is to make a play all-in the way I did:

1) JJ
2) TT
3) QQ
4) 99
5) 88
6) AA
7) KK
8) 77
9) Any pair
10) AQ
11) AK
12) AJ
13) AT
14) Any two cards (complete bluff is occurring)

And guess what? All of the above hands/scenarios, except 2, are ahead of ace-jack. And those two, along with the one that ties (#12), are the least likely of the list. So, somehow, Steel's amazing intuition told him that I had pocket 10's or lower but that it's not a problem because a jack is going to come on the flop and double him up. You have to hand it to him. He kicked my ass.

(This post was not technical or scientific at all. I don't really need to get into pot odds or percentages here to make my point. If I was him, I'd probably make that call with only AA, KK, QQ, AK. Of course, it depends on the situation. And as far as the argument that Steel may have been under pressure to make a play, it's actually not going to work here. His M (strong force, see Harrington on Hold 'em) was 13.3 which means he could see 13 more rounds of cards. That's not exactly high pressure. He can justify AQ with that kind of M. At this point, through all this ranting and raving, I've actually built my stack up to 14000. I'm 45th out of 341. I'll let you know if I win.)