Recognizing Mistakes Despite Winning

Even for players who know that aptitude in poker cannot be tied to winning any particular hand or session, it's easy to forgo self-examination when making money. But it's crucial to examine hands where we made money, but played sub-optimally, to see if we could do something different in a similar situation in the future. To illustrate, let's look at a hand that I won, but involved a big mistake:

Seat 1: UTG ($38.10 in chips)
Seat 2: UTGplus1 ($36.01 in chips)
Seat 4: Dealer ($42.17 in chips)
Seat 5: Donzo ($32.20 in chips)
Seat 6: Big Blind ($18.20 in chips)
Donzo: posts small blind $0.10
Big Blind: posts big blind $0.25
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Donzo [Ks Ah]
UTG: folds
UTGplus1: calls $0.25
Dealer: folds
Donzo: raises $0.90 to $1
Big Blind: folds
UTGplus1: raises $5 to $5.25
Donzo: raises $13.72 to $14.72
UTGplus1: calls $9.47

We're dealt AK in the small blind and raise the only limper for value. Surprisingly, the limper 3-bets for over 5x my bet. While I'm a little concerned about AA or KK, we're still ahead or flipping with most of the villain's range. I 4-bet for a little under 3x and the villain calls.

*** FLOP *** [Qh Ad 8c]

We flop the ace and it's our action first. At the time, my thought process was something along the lines of "I've been playing aggressively and if I had been bluffing and an ace flopped I would bet, therefore I should also bet with my made hands for balance." This was the completely wrong line of thinking for a couple of reasons:

1) Anonymous Players. On Bovada, there are no player names--players only have the designation of Player 1, Player 2, etc. What that means is that (so far as I know) no one can have any stats or notes on the player other than what they've noted during that session. So while I might run into this player again, I won't know it because they'll be indicated as "Player ___." Therefore, there is little benefit to worrying about "meta game" considerations whereby it would be useful for my opponents to know I will bet or bluff in the same spot.

2) The villain's calling range that we can beat is extremely narrow and possibly non-existent. Unless the villain has reason to think that I'm a player willing to 4-bet and then shove with nothing, he/she is probably not going to call a shove with worse than an ace here. AK is never folding, we're crushed by AQ, and worse aces like AJ or AT would have to put serious thought into calling a raise here, as those hands are effectively bluff catchers, as is any (improbable) weaker ace. As for plausible hands that beat us, we are crushed by the one combination of AA in the deck as well as QQ and 88. Any other pocket pair is almost certainly folding (unless the villain is capable of making a very light call down for a lot of money, which is unlikely at these stakes) as are oddly-played hands with a Q (KQ, QJ, QT, etc). So we're left with a couple of worse hands that might call and everything else folding.

Unfortunately, I didn't go through all of that in my head at the time. All I was thinking was "blah blah, meta game, blah blah." I bet and the the villain folded:

Donzo: bets $17.48 and is all-in
UTGplus1: folds
Uncalled bet ($17.48) returned to Donzo
Donzo: shows [Ks Ah]
Donzo collected $28.21 from pot

In other words, I did exactly what I spoke against doing a couple posts ago: I made a bet that virtually ensured all worse hands would fold and all better hands would call.

Plenty of people would be happy to take down a 112 big blind pot with AK out of position. My point is that we shouldn't be. We should always look for ways that we could have played a hand differently, whether we won or not.