Hey TPE, just played a 4 hour 1/2 session last night in which I counted two pretty big blunders and one overall theme mistake I made in not adjusting as well as I'd like preflop. A lot of my opens were routinely getting calls as the session dragged on, which resulted in more midsized pots with low sprs, and me being multiway. As soon as it started happening more often that it became unlikely I'd have position postflop, a cbet bluff with high enough success rate, or flop/turn equity, I wish I had stopped isoing over limps with hands like A5ss in the hijack when the button and cut off were calling mid 30ish% (like any suited 5 card hand because of promos were being called for ~20% of some stacks). Anyway, that adjustment + the two blunders.

I had been playing fairly loose aggressive preflop and value betting pretty wide. That said, it was still possible that some people were folding too much to cbets or turn barrels because they had way too many hands in their ranges preflop. So it was kind of cool. Any piece would continue, but that was still not a huge chunk of their ranges, and further still would usually buckle on the turn when a backdoor backdoor didn't come in.

Anyway, to the biggest blunder. New guy sits down, he's probably 27-29, wearing a track jacket, seems very confident and relaxed sitting down talking to the dealer. He opens cutoff $10 ($210), I 3bet button to $27 with AQo, sb cold calls ($100), cutoff quickly 4bets to $80, and I stupidly rip $210 value cutting myself. There's no way this guy does this with AJ and it's ridiculously unlikely he's going to just show up and 4b bluff without any reads on the situation, if he's even capable of that. Small blind calls, he calls. board runs out and we lose to AK from the cutoff and KTs for the main pot out of the small blind. (sb's range is pretty much anything in the middle that connects)

I think there are a couple of reasons this leak came to surface in this session.

1) I was very clearly table captain, and the new player coming shook me up.

– this is absolutely ridiculous. players come and go all the time and just because I have a favorable dynamic going with the current players doesn't mean it's time to force that on anyone who sits down. I'm guessing it was something ego related.

2) One orbit previous, I lost a 2%er (top boat to bottom boat who rivd quads after all in on turn) for a $180 pot, and the floor staff sort of laughed about it. We're all friendly, so the needles are completely okay by me, but it still got to me. I need to force this out.

I am sort of happy that as soon as I realized I had 5b shoved 105 big blinds with AQ in a button vs cutoff encounter, it was time to bounce.