One mistake kills another session

One mistake kills another session

So last night I get in quite late from a 10:30 PM hockey game with an itch to play for a few minutes. I haven't played all day and I need a fix. I grab the last beer out of the fridge and fire up the laptop. Its already 1:00am and there is no time to really even play a sit&go so I go to the cash tables. Now, you should know that I'm pretty much sworn off the cash games. I can hold my own up to 1/2NL & 2/4L but in the long term it doesn't seem to pay off for me. There are the inevitable bad beats but primarily its because I eventually make one bad move that will ruin my session. Last night was no different.

I did make 2 good decisions last night, I sat at a low limit game and since I was pretty much playing for fun I went for PLO. A very fun game. I found myself at a pretty social table. There was a lot of preflop limping and a lot of first bet folding. Even the action hands were tame for this level of buy-in.

I bought in for the max and started limping into every pot. After about 45 minutes of ABC High-Low PLO I was up about 10%. Not much, but decent considering how many flops I had seen and how many flops I folded. It seemed like I was the only one even bothering with playing the low. The table is playing really straight forward and because its PLO with very little money going in preflop there was no real point in trying to bully and bluff.

As closely as I can remember here is the had that killed my session. It was going to be my second to last hand of the night. I had already turned on the "sit out next blind" button and I was feeling very proud of myself for being patient and booking a small (very small) profit for the day. Especially since it was late and it was a very small buyin for me. Normally a recipe for some very loose play. I'm dealt Ac3cXdXh and there are 4 limpers in front of me. I follow suit as that has been the norm and I'm really only drawing to the nut flush and a possible low if the deuce hits. Flop comes 2d,4s,K. I'm liking my nut low/wheel draw so when the min raise comes around I bump it up 3x to get some $ in the pot. It folds around and I get only one caller, 2 spots to my right. Turn completes low hand (2d,4s,K,7c). He bets, I reraise, he calls. At this point all I'm putting him on is the high hand. Maybe trip K's, I'm not positive, in fact my thought process never really went past the fact that I have the nut low. The river brought paint, didn't fill in my wheel and only reinforced my assumption that my opponent was playing the high end of the hand. After he called my All-in 3 bet we flip em over and I see he has the A3 as well to split the low, but he also had 2pr for the high. I was sick. A split low never even once entered into my mind. It should have. At the very least I could have slowed the betting. I ended up losing half my buyin. Again it wasn't a lot of money but this is very indicative of the brain fart that costs me in cash games and sometime in MTT's as well. I get so hungry to get paid off when I get a good hand that sometimes I forget to stop and think it through.

If the other player is not showing weakness, seems willing to get a lot of chips in the pot, and most likely is also out of position, what kind of hand range can I really put him on and can I beat it? At least once in the majority of my cash sessions and to a lesser extent in my MTT's I miss the boat here and completely forget to consider the possibility that he has a monster. This is generally a very expensive for me. Its a full buyin problem. Now, I'm not saying that I should play with fear or with the "look out" mindset. Playing fewer hands harder has been one of the good changes I have made recently to my game. What I have to be working on is my ability to dodge the big loss hand. If you see enough hands you are going to run into trips, flopped straights, the works. So what are the clues..........

Against about ½ the field I don't think there is any protection other than a commitment to playing small ball.