POTD #145 Final Table Friday: $50k One Day in Cyprus

In hyper turbos you need to play with hyper precision

At the tail end of my appearance on the PokerStars Twitch channel doing commentary for the WCOOP $25k High Roller, James Hartigan asked me about certain structural charms of online poker. Should online poker keep the goofy 7k/14k blind levels? Should they switch to a BB ante or keep individual antes? James argued he liked the quirks of online poker and doesn’t think online poker structures should copy live poker structures and lose their whimsy. I gave a non-whimsical answer by noting that the BB ante makes RTAing slightly easier, and using individual antes is a small, but real, way to make cheating slightly less profitable.

Another quirk of online poker that rarely exists in high roller poker is hyper turbo tournaments. Most live SHRs have fast structures that would be considered turbos or at least turbo-adjacent for an online tournament, and while there are occasionally deep stacked SHRs, those tournaments almost all take 3-4 days to finish and are the exception to the rule. However, there’s another form of tournament that has become slightly less common— the one-day live tournament. Those tournaments, especially certain EPT tournaments that don’t have shot clocks, will often have final tables where there is no postflop play and many players at the table only have one decision: all-in or fold. It used to be that many online poker players cut their teeth playing hyper SNGs and were experts at playing extremely short-stacked FTs, but as those games have become less popular and as some of the biggest winners in those games have graduated to playing live poker, the number of people with expertise at hyper FTs that are still sharp has been decreasing.

In 2022, I busted the $100k at Triton Cyprus and registered the $50k single day turbo. I had fought tooth and nail to make it to the final table and had 5.8BBs on the money bubble, which was 40% of an average stack. Despite being short stacked, I was 5/7 in chips, and one blind steal would have put me 4/7, and two blind steals 3/7, but still below average. We can thank Mikita Badziakouski and his big chip lead for this asymmetric stack distribution at the final table. Four sub-10bb stacks were fighting it out for a 2.7x mincash, and I knew I had to play tight, but “play tight” is not specific enough advice in a game where being one pip too loose or too tight can lose a ton of EV.

Triton Cyprus $50K NLH Turbo
(50k/100k/100k) (SB/BB/BBA) We are on the bubble
6th: 139k, 5th: 179k, 4th: 228.5k, 3rd: 298.5K, 2nd: 467.5k, 1st 676K

Mikita (3.365M) folds UTG, Chris Brewer (940k) folds in the LJ, I (580k) make it 255k in the HJ with A♠️5♠️, Matthias Eibinger (480k) folds the CO, Phil Ivey (1.765M) folds OTB, Ben Heath (735k) folds the SB, Webster Lim calls all-in for 255k total with J♠️3♥️, I win and secure a mincash