There’s nothing like a min raise to put a man on tilt.
There’s no doubting the min raise is a legitimate tool to have in your arsenal but when it’s overused it can really annoy. So here’s a little hand involving the min raise that I played yesterday.
I was playing a 4 seater sit n go. It was a superturbo double or nothing sit n go so in about 7 minutes two of us would double our money and two of us would get nowt. Pretty simple.
There was a player I’d never seen before and he had this very simple tactic. He would min raise. That’s it. Every single hand. Min raise min raise min raise. Tedious! I never got to see what he did on the flop because every time we either folded to him or raised him back. But I bet you he would have continuation bet ½ the pot.
His little habit was really annoying me. There’s a number of reasons for this. It’s such a lazy strategy to do the same thing every hand and it’s such a cheapskate thieving trick. More importantly, it massively misses the point of the game. The point of a superturbo tournament is to get to the end game with some sort of stack intact and make the correct push/fold decisions. Not to win some piss-ant blinds on level 1.
So I decided he needed to be raised whenever I got some semblance of a hand.
By the way, all this reminds me of something funny I read last week about high stakes heads up player Viktor Blom. Recently, in the middle of a mammoth 5000+ hands heads up PLO session he said to his opponent, who had just min raised him:
If you min raise again you can play someone else. I don’t play the min raise game. I’m sitting out if you don’t raise x3
Or words to that effect. I wonder how he’d have liked my opponent who was doing it every hand?
Anyway, back to our serial min raiser at the far from high stakes from yesterday. When he next min raised I got A8s and decided to re-raise him. He folded like a little maggot. But it didn’t stop him. He did it again and again whenever he was first to speak.
Next time I had KQo on the button and he min raised again. I was pretty sure my hand was better than his so I raised his 80 min raise to 280. And he shoved all in!
There’s more reasons to fold than call here: there was still plenty of time left, I would still have adequate ammunition to keep going if I folded, but most of all, I’m losing to A2o!
But I thought “Nah, go with it. I know you’ve got nothing and you need teaching a lesson.” It was only $30 if I was wrong. So I called with my KQo.
He had Q8s. Hurray! And my hand held up. Double hurray! And bye bye min raising man. See you around yeah! See I knew he was full of it.
Maybe you can say it’s a question of “Who played it worse?” Well I won. And that’s why I love poker. Sometimes everything falls into place.
