POTD #143 I Spot a Tell in Triton Madrid

Yesterday, Aleks Ponakovs tried to bluff the river and failed, today he succeeds.

There’s a lot of conversation about how it’s become a lot harder to climb the ladder in poker. There are many reasons for this: Micro-stakes games have increased their rake; they may have bots in them; and if they don’t have bots, the ratio of recreational players to pro poker players, including players in stables, has increased by a large margin and lowered ROIs for all, making it harder to reach the next rung on the ladder. The other concern is that the top of the ladder has gotten much, much higher. I remember when a $25,000 tournament was a big deal; now there are $25ks all the time. In a given year, there are dozens of tournaments with a buy-in over $100k. It was a lot easier to reach the top when that meant climbing from $100 ABI to $2k ABI than climbing from $100 ABI to $25k ABI.

Poker success is dictated by luck while playing, but there is also plenty of off-the-table luck, such as the macro conditions when you started playing poker and how they persisted throughout your life in poker. Austrian players can play MTTs in the US without getting taxed, so when high rollers started booming in the US and Europe, it made sense that many Austrians started playing them. Swedish and Finnish players do get taxed, so it makes sense that many of them have stuck to playing online MTTs and PLO cash. During the COVID-19 pandemic, live tournaments outside of the US were cancelled for almost a whole year, and while live poker returned relatively quickly in the US, if you were not an American citizen, getting to the US was difficult. Over a decade after Black Friday, this created an artificial scenario similar to the original online poker environment I cut my teeth in: One global-ish (depending on how lax the security measures of certain sites were) player pool, where almost everyone was playing and where one could rise through the ranks. There were a lot of tournaments at a lot of different stakes, running around the clock, and if you ran hot, you could be upwardly mobile in a way that has eluded many poker players in the current environment. One player who made a name for himself during those days was Aleks Ponakovs; he started playing high-stakes online tournaments and had enough success that he has become a Triton regular and someone who in 2025 almost never misses a SHR. He played some PokerGo tournaments in 2021 and showed up to his first Triton in Madrid in 2022. He’d final table the main event with me, but I don’t recall any notable hands we played versus each other. I do recall a hand we played in Event #2, the 30K NLHE. It was his first high roller, but he outfoxed me in a key pot where I had a live read, but talked myself out of making a big call, before being shown a bluff.

Triton Madrid Event #2 €30k NLH 7-Handed
(10k/15k/15k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration just closed.

It folds to me (310k) in the LJ with A♥️Q♠️, I make it 30k, it folds to Ponakovs (1.1M) who calls in the BB.

Flop (85k) 6♠️5♠️3♠️: Ponakovs checks, I check.

Turn (85k) 6♦️: Ponakovs bets 65k, I call.

River (215k) A♣️: Ponakovs puts me all in for my final 215k, I fold.