Cash Game AK
Under the gun is always a difficult place to play poker from. In a .25/.50 cash game I was UTG with AK off-suit. I had $63. I decided to try and instigate some action by min-raising to $1 This raise made nearly everyone fold, until we got to the poker player on the button. He had a stack a little larger than $100. He raised me to $5. I had not seen this poker online player do too much bluffing, but he did end up in some of the larger pots. Still he was not a big preflop 3-better. As I was raising a lot of hands, I felt he might be trying to steal my bet from the button. But, I was also out of position, so I didn’t really want to play this hand out post flop by just calling the 3bet. I 4-bet to $13. With AK out of position, my best option is to play this hand preflop. If he has AA or KK and I flat call and hit top pair, I could likely be losing my whole stack here. If he has something like QQ he’s probably not going to give me much action if the Ace or king flops. Unfortunately, he then 5-bet to $22. This was $1 larger than a min-raise. If the bet was maybe $30 I would think about shoving and hoping to be in a coinflip, but his cajoling bet really discouraged me from doing this. I didn’t think he’d 5-bet min raise me with anything less than AA or KK and he might not even do this with KK. Queens would probably shove on me in hopes of putting me in a tough spot. Later in the session, I got no action with KK in cutoff after making a 3x opening bet. I also got no action blind vs. blind with JJ against a short stack.