POTD #112 An Argentinian Overbets in the PSPC Main

Pictured: The most famous PSPC overbet from an Argentinian

I’ve praised the structures of different PokerStars Live Events recently, so I will try to make this one brief, but the PokerStars Players Championship is one of the most prestigious tournaments of recent vintage. A $25k freezeout getting over 1000 unique entries is very hard to do and they’ve done it twice. Giving away seats in various promotions helps, but every succesful tournament succeeds in part due to the marketing and promotional skills of the operators. I was fortunate enough to cash the first PSPC along with both of my brothers and was hoping to go back to back. I doubled up early in day two with AA all-in preflop vs. AQo and had my eye on the prize, literally. The prize pool had just been announced, and I knew that around 40% of the remaining field would cash for $35,100. In a tournament with so many amateurs still in the hunt, I needed to balance maximizing the odds I would cash the tournament while still giving myself a chance to win millions.

A type of sim currently en vogue are MTT ICMX sims, where X indicates the percent of the field still alive in the tournament. So an ICM100 output would look at a hand before anyone in the tournament has been knocked out, and an ICM50 hand would be one with half the field remaining, and so on. I think these sims are illustrative; they can show one how to shape their strategies as a tournament progresses, but I do not think they are flawless and I do not think they should be copied verbatim. They tend to suggest strategies for short and medium stacks that are very tight and would have them giving up significant amounts of cEV for the entire time they remain a non-big stack. These outputs do not simulate an entire tournament, so they do not see how costly giving up cEV every hand for hundreds of hands will be in a repeated game, and they tend to suggest overly tight play for short stacks and overly loose play for big stacks.

A hybrid lesson one can learn from combining their own poker instincts with studying ICMX sims is, if you are a short or medium stack and can keep pots smaller without losing significant amounts of cEV, you should do so. In today’s hand, I was given the opportunity to save a large chunk of my stack and did not take it. I did not properly assess how big a bet I was facing from a $EV perspective, and I made a bad read versus my opponent in a hand that began my descent, which eventually led to my bustout before the money and failure to cash in back to back PSPCs.

2023 Pokerstars Players Championship
(1k/2.5k/2.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 60k Starting Stack

I (~175k) make it 5.5k UTG8 with A♥️8♥️, it folds to Ezequiel Waigel (covers me) in the BB who calls.

Flop (14.5k) A♠️J♥️T♥️: He checks, I bet 10k, he calls.
Turn (34.5k) 5♣️: He checks, I check.
River (34.5k) 6♣️: He bet 50k, I call, he shows A♣️K♣️ and I muck.