How I confused my opponent with a flush

Recently I was playing in a home game against a group of fairly talented players, a few of them I would consider very good. I was the big stack by about T$8,000+ with $T15,000 in front of me. Steve, one of the very good players had about T$7,000 and Eric who is not bad at poker had T$4,500.

Steve was avoiding big hands with me, realizing that I could fairly easily call his all in with top pair or better. I was waiting for a chance to catch Steve off guard and playing back at him and Eric in the mean time to keep my chip stack fairly level around T$15,000.

I got dealt AJ on the button. With blinds at T$150-T$300 I made it T$900 to go. Eric quickly folded and Steve called from the big blind for T$600 more.

The flop came 10 5 9

Normally in this situation I would semi-bluff the flop with my nut diamond draw, but with Steve being a great player I decided that I would either check or call his bet. Steve checked, I checked.

The turn came a Q. No luck for me, but once again Steve checked. I wasn’t sure what he had, but I knew he didn’t have a diamond draw.

The river brought the 3. Beautiful. And Steve bet! Steve bet T$400. I thought for a few seconds and raised to T$800.

Steve said “You would have semi-bluffed the diamond draw on the flop.” Well, no, not against someone who expects a semi-bluff. Steve then raised T$1000 more and made it T$1800 to go. Interesting. At this point I decided he might have the straight with KJ which would have been a very goofy check on the turn when he made his straight. But the raise indicated he was only worried about one hand.

I raised T$1000 more making it T$2800 to go. Steve was more confused. He raised again, and I reraised him all in.

Steve finally called all in and I showed the nuts. He thought I might have diamonds after I reraised him all in but because of my small raises on the river and the weak play of the nut draw on the previous betting rounds he couldn’t completely convince himself ot it. It’s hard to get away from the second nuts (he had KJo for the nut straight) so I was lucky that he hit such a big hand.

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