POTD #140 FT Friday: A Tricky Limpraised Pot in the $25K WCOOP SHR.

Pedro Padilha vs Hello Totti

On Tuesday, September 30th, I hopped on a call with Joe Stapleton and James Hartigan to do commentary for the final table of WCOOP 115-H, the $25,000 Super High Roller. You can watch the play and listen to the commentary here (I join around 27:00). It was a deep-stacked final table with a lot of play and several tricky spots throughout. Once the tournament was three-handed, the average stack was around 50bbs and the stacks were relatively even. That led to a lot of limp/check blind vs. blind hands, which are not always the most exciting hands but are some of the more technical and tricky hands.

I pride myself on being a good blind vs. blind player, but most of my study and drilling has been for live MTTs, where there is one BB ante in the pot. When you get deep in online tournaments, you need to adjust to all the ICM considerations at a final table, but also to the fact that, in BB terms, the preflop pot size keeps getting smaller and smaller, which encourages tighter play. There is less dead money in the pot, so you should play fewer hands. While I was giving commentary, I was also looking for potential punts which I could write about on this newsletter and was concerned I would not find anything good to write about, because someone making a 0.2bb mistake in a 5bb pot is something that might matter a little more to me than you.

However, I saw a limp-raised hand BvB where both players had marginal holdings, and I felt that both players made some mistakes and wanted to write about it. I am not an expert in 3/8ths of a BB ante deep-stacked FT play, and Totti and Pedro play many more small-field online poker tournaments with this structure. So I wanted to dig into this hand to see how my instincts compared to the instincts of those who played the hand.

Hand begins at 1:37:30
(30K/60K/7500) (SB/BB/ANTE) 3 Remaining $362K,248K,170K

MissOracle (4.4M) folds on the button, Pedro Padilha (2.1M) calls 60k, Hello Totti (3.7M) makes it 210k with 6♥️4♥️, Pedro makes it 570k with K♣️4♣️, Totti calls.

Flop (1,162,500) 8♠️5♠️4♦️: Pedro bets 290,625, Totti shoves, Pedro folds with 1.3M back.