An interesting situation came up today. I was in a hand against Lizette, a house player who has little no limit experience. She sat down with a stack of $200 or so in the $100-500 NL game (with blinds of $2 and $5). She seemed to be playing a relatively straight forward short stack strategy reraising preflop for $60 or so, presumably in anticipation of an on-flop shove.
There was a hand we had played earlier where I raised her blind to $12 with J8 of diamonds. She had about a $200 stack when she called. The flop came 3s 4d 10d. She checked to me and I bet $12. She raised me to $60. I was pondering a shove her, because if a pair of jacks was good then I would have had 12 outs or so plus the fold equity of my all in move, but ultimately I folded. I later regretted this decision.
I picked up pocket nines and raised her big blind my traditional $12 raise. We both had about $400 at this point. She called and the flop came 89J rainbow. She checked and I bet out $12. Lizette raised my bet to $25. I stopped to ponder what she had here. There was about $50 in the pot and with my set I would like to put it all in hoping that she didn’t have a straight. I felt that she had some kind of hand that would prompt her to further action, so I hoped a min raise would prompt her to become pot committed, so I raised her to $50. She raised an additional $70. There was $170 in the pot now, and I felt that she was pot committed at that point, so I shoved. Much to my dismay, she folded.
In thinking about the hand, I think she had a 10 in her hand and had an open end straight draw that she chose to play aggressively. My going all in ruined the pot odds for her straight draw and she threw it away. This has left me wondering if I maybe should have raised her $70 another $140 or so. She would have had to call $140 to win $380, plus the implied odds of the rest of my stack for another $200 or so. I think that would be a correct call to make, so I think my shoving on the flop was correct in hindsight.