POTD #135 FT Friday: Converting a Chip Lead into a Win

By making a terrible play and sucking out.

A problem in contemporary life, and for the contemporary poker player, is information overload. It used to be that you’d learn different heuristics and hone your skills over hours of play, but you would rarely have the precision to conclude why K6s is a three-bet and K5s is a fold. Nowadays, there are so many sims run, in so many different softwares that are available at the click of the mouse that even recreational poker players are neck deep in sims. There is so much information out there that is can be very hard to mine insights from the sims and appropriately apply them to your game. I remember playing at the same table as a VIP in Triton Vietnam; he raised first in from the SB, bet three times and showed down 82 offsuit for a total bluff. He then looked at me and said that someone told him that 82 offsuit was a common solver preflop bluff, blind vs. blind. As he was raking in the chips, I broke the news to him that actually 82 offsuit was a common bluff from the big blind after the SB limped; from the SB it’s just an open fold.

Wires crossing like this does not just happen to VIPs who study occasionally; it happens to everyone. If you study often and productively, you will slowly fill your brain with all sorts of poker knowledge, but when you are actually playing a hand, what matters the most is not how much knowledge is in your head, but your ability to access it quickly and act on it in an appropriate fashion. In today’s hand, I was three-handed in a tournament with a big chip lead— I was already thinking about the heads-up battle that would follow, so much so that when I faced a three-bet, my wires crossed and I started thinking about heads-up ranges— and I punted and sucked out before winning the tournament 15 minutes later.

I analyzed this video on Run It Once (Hand Starts at 21:21). If you would like to see more of my Run It Once videos, including a series on preflop play blind vs blind that I just launched, you should subscribe: use code: POTD for 10% off

PokerStars High Rollers 3 ($10,300 8-Max) $500k GTD
(50,000/100,000/12,500) 3 Handed
1st 207k, 2nd $155k, 3rd $116k

I (12,998,347) make it 240k OTB with A♥️5♠️, Talal Shakerchi (1,146,988) folds the SB, Sergi Reixach (5,067,165) makes it 900,000 in the BB, I go all-in, Sergi calls with A♠️K♦️, and I win.

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What I Was Thinking

I had two thoughts in this hand. The first was, gameflow-wise, this was my second button since Sergi doubled up through Talal and left Talal as a clear short stack. I thought it was a spot where Sergi needed to be very tight to three-bet/call off; I wasn’t even sure if he’d three-bet/call AKo, and I felt that if he three-bet my second button open, he might be trying to sneak one by me. I also felt that with Talal very short in the SB I could open very wide here— close to any two cards— and this hand almost resembled heads-up no-limit. In HUNL, I remembered A5o being a common bluff shove over a BB three-bet, so I decided to go for it and shove; I got called by AKo and fortunately flopped a five and held.

What I Got Wrong

I got so many things wrong in this hand, a hand that I’ll remind you only had two decision points for me, so let’s start with the one thing I got right. At 50bbs in HUNL, A5o sometimes mixes bluff four-bet jams. It’s not the most common offsuit Ax four-bet jam, but it does get in there. With that out of the way, we can start with the litany of things I got wrong. I did not think Sergi was going to three bet call AKo; well, he did. I thought of this hand like a HUNL hand because I thought I would get to open very wide on the button; that’s not true, Talal can jam his 11.5bbs in the SB quite liberally if I am opening 100%. Generally, you can’t play that aggressively as a chip leader at a FT if you can’t open shove, otherwise your opponent will notice you are raise-folding too much and start three-betting you relentlessly, or at least often enough that opening J2o will become unappealing rather quickly. The sims I ran have me opening around 52% of the time. On top of that, if I wanted to open very wide and leverage my chiplead, there is no reason to open to 2.4x; I should try to make my blind steal as cheap as possible and minraise.

Sergi’s three-bet size is too small; he’s under enough ICM pressure that the only hand he pure three-bet/calls is AA. He three-bets some smaller pairs and AKo occasionally only to reluctantly call them off or five-bet jam, but these are mostly plays to make sure his entire stacking-off range isn’t exclusively AA. Since he’s under so much pressure and has such a polar range, his preflop size should be around 15bbs, which is a small enough size that I can still four-bet/fold, but a large enough size that I can shove myself. Once I face a smaller three-bet size of only 9bbs, I never shove and prefer pulling all of my aggression out of four bet-folds, because shoving 4x pot is too expensive for me, but shoving 3x pot is not. In HUNL, I never shove a suited ace, because I want to keep his bluffs in and have more playability in three-bet pots, but in a tournament he will often shutdown postflop when his three bet is called, so I would rather maximize my equity when all-in and called preflop than flat hands that have nut making potential postflop. Additionally, when I shove A5o heads up, I’ll occasionally get called by worse hands like KQs. In this hand, when I face a very large three-bet, calling a suited ace is not appealing and calling A5o is not even on the radar. Suited aces have much better equity in an all-in, and I pull all my four-bet bluff-shoves from suited aces— A2s shoves more than AKo. In this hand, I misapplied a concept, shoved a hand in a spot I am never supposed to shove anything, picked a hand that was far too weak to shove, and had a bad read on my opponent.

Types of Error
Bad Read
ICM Error
Sizing Error
PUNT

Grade

If you were a good enough poker player that you could always find the correct solver play and play a perfectly balanced mix, you would still want to adjust how you play to best exploit the strategies of your opponent. When you study often, it’s easy to get lost in a hand as you are playing it; instead of thinking of the best exploit in the moment, you are thinking about what a sim you looked at two weeks ago said. Thinking about a chart instead of the actual hand you are playing is a bad starting point, but it’s especially bad when your wires cross and you don’t even make the right computer play. In today’s hand, I shortcutted to HUNL strategies when I was not playing HUNL— I was playing three-handed in a tournament. I had a bad read about his three-bet/calling range, but I’ll note that even if Sergi thought this was a good spot to three-bet light, four-betting non-all-in would have been a much better adjustment from me and is a common solver player.

Today I played the wrong raise-first-in strategy and the wrong strategy when facing a three-bet with range and punted with my specific hand— sometimes I have plays that are “near misses” but don’t cost that much money. Today’s hand was a clear miss that cost a lot of money. A testament to the fact that in order to win a poker tournament, you’d rather be lucky than good.

F