POTD #123 AQ Misses in Triton Jeju

I checked with range when I should have checked (as in looked up) my range

NB: I am doing an AMA on r/poker. It starts today at 1pm EDT (or 7 hours after this post published), but is open for questions now. You can participate here

A trend in poker, but also in many competitive spaces, has been a homogenization of play as top players try to emulate an optimal strategy. Tactically speaking, every NBA team is a “three-point shooting team,” and every tennis player is a power baseline player; aesthetically speaking, baseball is sorely missing the odd stances of Julio Franco or Jeff Bagwell. In poker, solvers have changed how the game is played and a general culture of optimization has ironed out some of the aesthetic differences one might see at the table. I feel that when I first started playing live poker, people wore hoodies and sweatpants because they were 21-year-old slobs who wore hoodies and sweatpants everywhere, but if you live in a world where optimizing everything is of paramount importance, one must standardize their leisure wear and recast it as “athletic wear.” Stephen Chidwick wants to decrease the decision fatigue of choosing what to wear, so he’s found a specific Swiss Engineering hoodie that he has determined is optimal for playing poker in, and has made it his uniform; Jason Koon ought to be a paid ambassador for Lululemon at this point; and David Peters probably got married in a Columbia quarter-zip sweater.

One area where personal style remains in poker is how people express their actions; the way people check, bet, call and fold often retain a sui generis quality. Which is not to say that people’s actions vary in such a way that they’re giving off information, just that everyone puts their chips in the pot a little differently. The first time I noticed an odd checking style was Phil Hellmuth defending the big blind and checking dark; at the time I thought it was stupid, even though I would have also thought that defending the BB and leading would have been a “donk bet.” I don’t know why this move upset me so much, I was also checking in the dark, but I just didn’t announce it beforehand. In POTD #59, I previously wrote about another sort of “dark check,” when you are the aggressor, but the board is so bad for you that the solver decides to check its entire range. This is the type of play you do not want to announce before a flop is dealt, because you won’t check every flop, and certainly not one you want to announce after the flop, because then you’d be giving something away about your strategy. In POTD #59, Espen played a hand vs. the aforementioned Lululemon-clad Jason Koon where he felt he needed to check dark. In today’s hand, I played a hand vs. Chen Dong who was wearing an outfit that could be described as “Chinese billionaire or just pretending to be one?” I thought I was supposed to check my entire range and I did, but after digging deeper into the hand, I saw that I made the same mistake as Espen.

Event #3 Triton Jeju 2025 $25K NLH 8-Handed
(2.5k/5k/5k) (SB/BB/BBA). 200k Starting Stack. Registration is still open.

HH: Triton App

I (194k) make it 11k UTG7 with A♦️Q♠️, Chen Dong (218k) calls next to act, everyone folds

Flop: (34.5k) J♦️9♥️3♣️: I check, Chen bets 12k, I fold.