Unethical scumminess or Legit weapon in the arsenal

58o

OK i was reading Connies post about his unfortunate moment in the Irish open (http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055260334 ..For the lazy he goes to make a 3bet with a weak hand when he doent realise the initial bet has already been 3 bet and is thus forced to make a min 4 bet) and i was thinking wow what a great spot if you had the aces etc. Then i was reading Paul Wasicka's blog tonight (Real busy at work these days) and i read the following extract.....
Two hands later the chip leader is now under the gun (UTG) and he raises to 9,500. It folds to me and I look down and see A,K. After that first pot, I now have around 115,000. My game plan coming in was to try and trap with A,K to possibly get a squeeze play from John, so I decided to call. I looked over at the raise and decided to match what he put out. I grabbed two pink (5,000 chip), four blue (1,000), and one yellow (500). For those of you who are good at math, you’ve probably realized that I put out too much and therein lies a problem. The floor was called over and ruled that since the 9,500 raise was a raise of 6,500 on the big blind that in order for my motion to be a re-raise it had to be at least half the initial raise. This meant that my raise had to be at least 3,250 to make it legit. Well, for those of you who are bad at math, my 14,500 was at least 3,250 more than the initial 9,500, so it was ruled a re-raise and I had to make the minimum allowable re-raise which was 6,500 on top of the initial 9,500.

The result is that I had to make it 16,000. UTG now makes the obligatory re-raise because he knows that I most likely made an honest mistake (which I did). He re-re-raises 15,000 more, so now he has 41,000 out there, which is perfect because now I can go all-in and get great fold equity and even if he does call I should be way ahead of his range because he has no clue that I’m flatting with A,K preflop. He called, which obviously made me happy that I might be getting it all-in with a dominant hand. However, excitement soon turned to dread as A,A was then flipped over in front of me.

When the flop came a bland Q high there was no excitement of a suckout to be had and I shook everyone’s hand and made my exit. I will admit that I was extremely upset with myself for making this “misclick” because it resulted in me exiting the tournament. Had I just called, as intended, I could have gotten away from the hand postflop. I hugged my family and had nothing to say, other than “What can you do?” I felt really bad because my dad had just flown in to see me play and really didn’t get to see much action, but se la vi.

On my walk home I started to analyze the situation a little more and became increasingly excited. I try to learn at least one thing from every tournament I play in so that I can be that much better the next time. I was thinking about what I can learn from this tournament and two things came to mind. The first being preparation. On the second day of play I slept terribly. I woke up at 5:30am because the air conditioning unit in the room decided to randomly start blasting freezing air on me. I finally figured out how to turn the thing off and went back to bed. Then I woke up at 9:30 and there wasn’t enough time to eat breakfast. I was in a rush to get to the casino, and my iPhone was out of batteries, so I had no phone or music. I started out the day very badly and the way the day went followed suit. The following night I turned off the A/C unit and got up two hours before the tournament instead of just one. I was super excited and ready to play and that’s the mindset I need to be in.

The other thing I learned was adding the “accidental misclick” to my repertoire. Although it was a genuine misclick during the hand, I believe that if you were to run that scenario out a hundred times that I would be in great shape in terms of EV. The fact that I don’t want to just make a big re-raise and only get into an all-in as a likely coin flip and my stack size made it quite possibly the optimal way to play the hand. The facts were that I got the guy to put in 41k preflop, which would normally leave me with plenty of fold equity if he has nothing (which is ideal because A,K isn’t a huge favorite over a random hand) and he will gladly get it in with hands that I have dominated, such as an A,Q or K,Q because it looks like I either might have a low to mid pair or a suited connector. Most players will re-raise in a spot where it looks like your opponent accidentally re-raised with the intention of calling and that is what you can take advantage of at the table.

A lot of people might consider this a dirty angle shoot, but my take on any situation like this is that if it’s within the rules, then it’s fine. If you know how someone will react to a certain situation and you use that against them, then I think that is just owning them, rather than playing dirty. Anyway, after thinking about the situation and talking it over with Thomas, I felt much better and decided to get it out on paper so that I didn’t have it looming inside.

Anyway my question is this , would it be unethical/ angle shooting to perform this kind of maneuvre on purpose? For example Co raises,BB reraises , you are in BB with AA, announce raise but throw out an amount that is only a raise of the initial bettor, pretending you have not being paying attention and have not seen the 3bet. Is this just scummy angle shooting/ or a potent weapon to be added to your live arsenal? My initial leaning is toward angle shoot, but i would be interested to see what the opinion is here.

mdwexford

I think its fine and rather clever if you do it right.

RoundTower

lol at people putting in 40% of their stack and then being expected to fold. But se la vi, I suppose.

58o

RoundTower wrote: »

lol at people putting in 40% of their stack and then being expected to fold. But se la vi, I suppose.

Yeah, i liked that bit. Sack ray Bluuuu!

5starpool

Could be considered an angle shoot I guess, but you would need to be very clever and observant to make this work.

Personally I think if it can be well pulled off then it's not an angle shoot really. If I was to do it though, I would keep up the pretence though after the hand as well.

Paul Wasicka is obviously a native French Speaker.

Hitman Actual

On the right side of marginal, I guess. But I'd take an instant dislike to anyone I realized had done this to me.

DeadParrot

I suppose its like checking out of turn to induce a bet from an aggressive villain
not exactly ethical but can come in handy

LuckyLloyd

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