craptacular

Yesterday I had my first down day in excess of $1k in quite some time. This came from 1.5 hours of live $20/$40 LHE and 5 hours of 2-3 tabling $10/$20 LHE at Party. I am mostly pleased with the way I played, though naturally not with the actual results. I will not whine about the bad beats other than to say that I put in a lot of table hours in some very good games.

I am happy because I felt like I missed very few value bets, paid off far fewer hands on the river (and these are the problems I felt I have been having the most lately), and didn't change my playing style or standards after taking bad beats. The first item is relatively easy to validate, while the second is much trickier because there can be the tendency to fold too much.

My most common mistake in yesterday's sessions (though not necessarily the biggest) was folding too often to flop or turn check raises from frequent bluffers in the blinds (when I was the pre-flop raiser) on ragged or paired boards in the online $10/$20 games. I was probably check raised on the flop or turn in these possible situations on the order of 20 times, and I suspect I laid down the best hand between 20-50% of the time. At one particular table, I had mucked after being check raised so many times that I felt comfortable calling down a flop check raiser with AT high. In general, I need to pay closer attention to identify the players and situations that I am most likely to get pure bluffed check raised (given the history of the session) and also to a lesser extent semibluffed check raised. (I say a lesser extent because this situations are easier to identify and handle).

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The only interesting hand for me from the whole day is this one. I made a bad laydown. Am I too weak?

hand #1
Party $10/$20 LHE, 9 seated
- preflop: fold, wild man (55/18/1.8) UTG+1 raises, folded to hero in CO with QQ, hero reraises, button folds, tight agg passive (11/7/1) in SB caps, BB folds, wild man and hero call. (3 players, 13 small bets)
- flop: flop comes A high rainbow with 2 junk cards, SB bets, wild man raises, hero mucks, SB calls. (2 players, 17 small bets)
- turn: K making 1 flush draw. check, check. (2 players, 8.5 big bets)
- river: blank, check, check. SB shows JJ, wild man shows 88.

At the time, I only considered 2 possibilities on the flop, raise or fold. I absolutely did not consider calling. (mistake? since I'm either way ahead or way behind) Wild man had been making absolutely ridiculous flop raises all night long (his PT stats don't reflect the degree to which he was lagging it up in the actual session). His range was any 2 cards, but for the sake of argument I will give him an A 20% of the time. My main concern is the TAP SB. I think that SB's range is (AA-JJ). That puts him ahead only 9/16 56% of the time.

I hate situations where I don't know how much it is going to cost me to see the river. How do I compute my pot equity on the flop if I'm modelling that wild man is ahead of me 20% of the time and SB is ahead 56% of the time? How should I model how many bets it will take to see the river?

I have position here, so should I invest the 3 small bets on the flop (with 16 small bets already in the pot) to test out the waters (with the intention to call a flop cap, and folding unimproved on turn)? Anyway, it seems like if I do continue in the hand my primary goal is to make it to the showdown as cheaply as possible.