Pre-flop action: Fold, call, or reraise?

Strategy & Advice by werdna720 Posted
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5 Comments

Hey everyone,

Throwing out another quick hand for some feedback. This one is all pre-flop.

To set the stage:
Fortunate to have jumped into a fresh table at Planet Hollywood late night at a 1-2 NL table. Not a lot of money had exchanged hands at this point; however, the guy seated directly after me had been chipping up steadily and playing some tight, aggressive poker. He's approaching $280-$300 after a $200 buy in, and I'm still hovering around $200, looking for a hand to move with.

For this deal, I am under the gun and get dealt A J .

I have a love-hate relationship with this hand. It goes a long way back into my poker history. It looks nice, but if I had to guess the % of AJs hands I have ever won with, it would easily be in the single digit % area. Needless to say... This hand and K10s give me nightmares.

This is quite possibly a mistake here, but I lead out by just calling the $2. The guy behind me just calls as well.

Then, the next player in line raises it to $10. The player behind the initial raiser calls the $10, and then it folds back to me.

I call the $10, and then suddenly, the guy behind me fires in a reraise to $62. Action folds back to me.

What would you do in this situation? And what do you think this guy is holding (based off the limited table history given above and the action)? Is he just trying to steal?

In retrospect, this really looks like a steal to me, but I could be reading this wrong. His initial call rolling into that reraise could be trying to hide a hand, but I imagine that if he actually had a good hand or a pocket pair of some kind, he would have bet out rather than calling initially.

Comments

  1. Your first mistake was not raising. If you feel like gambling when you have played the hand so far, poorly then call or shove at him. I think in your situation YOU should fold since you don't like AJ suited and have had bad experiences with it. I call. Good thing is the is another hand coming in less than a minute!

  2. Calling is terrible against any villain with only $200 effective stacks. Shoving is terrible unless he's a maniac. I'd assume most everyone has QQ+ or AK in this spot. If you're not comfortable opening for a lil raise in the first place than there's no way to justify continuing here...