POTD # 151 Montenegro Monday vs Tim Adams

I’ve already established that Winning Wednesday hands do not need to take place in tournaments I’ve won. Hands I punted in the early levels of tournaments where I final tabled also count. Today’s hand comes from a tournament where I fired three bullets and final tabled, but played poorly at the FT. It would qualify as a Winning Wednesday hand, but when I looked at scheduling this week for POTD, I concluded this hand would fit better as a Montenegro Monday.

A way to view gambling, game playing, or investing is that information and knowledge are valuable, but only as valuable as your ability to correctly act on them. A story I like to tell is that I knew people playing in a cash game with a drug dealer. That drug dealer claimed he had sold a lot of drugs to a certain visiting star NFL player and his entourage. My friend heard this news and, like any sharp gambler, decided to bet against that player and his team. The player ended up scoring two touchdowns and my friend lost all of his bets. He had non-public information that he thought was valuable and worth acting on, and whether the drug dealer was lying (never!), the player was a teetotaler with a rowdy entourage, or the player was a freak who could play great while partying all week, those thoughts did not enter my friend’s considerations. and he did not apply that information correctly.

I am going to use that debaucherous anecdote to pivot to something much drier: utilizing a range advantage in poker. In poker, it’s not enough to know you have a range advantage; you also need to know how to play your hand and how to exploit your range advantage. A good example of this is that in PLO you often three-bet AAxx combos, so on ace-high flops you often have top set. Some might think that you want to bet small and trappy with top set in PLO, like you do in NLHE, but the actual strategy often involves regularly potting with bare top set, so that when you don’t have top set you can force your opponent to make really big folds with hands like two pair or lower sets. In this example, knowing an ace-high flop is good for your range is not as valuable as knowing you often need to pot with the nuts. In today’s hand, I made errors playing my range and my hand. I underestimated how good the flop was for my range and correctly assessed how good the river was for my range, but failed to use that information in a profitable way and played my actual hand poorly.

NB: The splash image and video reference a Short Deck tournament (a Short Deck tournament I bubbled when Leon Tsoukernik called my shove with 66, which is a very bad play in Short Deck); during a break at the Short Deck FT they switched over to the NL Main Event.

Timothy Adams (192k) makes it 4.5k UTG7, it folds to me in the SB (161K) with KdQd, I make it 21k, Tim calls

Flop (46k) J♥️T♦️9♠️: I check, Tim bets 15k, I call

Turn (76k) 7♥️: I check, Tim checks

River (76k) Q♥️: I bet 50k, Tim shoves, I fold