Poker goal / hand analysis:

Aggressive deep stack 6-handed home game. $0.50/$0.50 blinds, $100-200 buy in.

UTG: big stack ($300), very aggressive player. Apart from big hands, he has not had to show down many. Smart player.

SB: $130. Tight, careful player. Less aggressive than the other 5, but the only big re-raise he's put in were holding the nuts.

Hero on button: $150; tricky, slightly unorthodox image; winners I've recently shown down vary from 94o to flopped boats, turned flushes; successful bluffs I've shown down range from 2 overs to nothing near the board. I have a good feel for the risk-tolerance of the rest of the table; my steal-raises and re-raises have been spot-on all night, as have my value bets. I was way on top of my game: not to toot my own horn too much, but it was some of the best poker I've played in a while.

UTG raises to $2 (standard raise); Hero re-raises to $6 with AJ0. SB looks and thinks I open-raised to $6, comments "that's a big opening raise OK I call" (comma intentionally left out as he didn't speak it). He then sees that I reraised and says "Oh, that makes sense then."; UTG also calls.

FLOP: 9c Th Qh

SB bets $12; UTG instacalls. HERO announces raise; calls the $12, considers the pot, and raises $50. SB stares down HERO for a good 2 minutes. SB announces All In. UTG shows his cards to his neighbor and says "can you believe I have to throw this away?"

I ask for a count, it's $100 even to call.

I can't put him on KJ or J8: he's WAAAYYY too tight to call what he perceived to be a preflop overraise with these. It's possible he has AK/AQ/TT/99/QQ/KK/AA. Outside of these hands, all of which are ahead of me, I can't figure anything else out.

possibilities

I need an 8 or a K for the probable nuts. That's 8 outs, twice. ~32% to the winner. Slight chance an A will give me a winner, though I'm not convinced so I won't count that, and I have no backdoor flush.

And unfortunately, my emotions ran too hot for me to properly do simple math. See, I'm fairly bad at the math-end of poker (perhaps why I suck at limit). If I had done the math, I would have seen that I was being asked to call $100 to win $242. I was getting 2.42 to 1, which really meant that all I needed was a better than 29% chance to win to make the call. I actually had the perfect odds to call. Even if I was down to 7 outs, I would have been right at the borderline to call.

I mucked. And then unfortunately I paid $1 to see his cards. Guess what he had?

AJ.

Because I failed the math, I let myself get outplayed.

NEW POKER GOAL: become proficient at quickie pot-odds calculations, even under intense scrutiny and emotional duress.