POTD #156 Halloween Week Begins: I Try To Bluff a Billionaire

Ugly runouts, stupid bluffs and Talal Shakerchi owning me in today's hand.

Poker enthusiast and Bloomberg writer Joe Weisenthal has argued that adults Halloween celebrations have started too early, but even he would concede that the Monday before Halloween is an appropriate time to start carving your Jack-O-Lanterns. Halloween is not my favourite holiday, but it is certainly a holiday that is easy to build a theme week around. So for one week and one week only, we will be foregoing Monte Carlo Monday, Winning Wednesday, and Final Table Friday, as we focus on one of the ghastliest live tournaments I have ever played: the 2022 Triton Cyprus $100k NLH Main Event, a tournament where I was consistently eliminated, but like a zombie, could not be killed . The tournament started off 250bbs deep, but that did not hinder my ability to lose all my chips and walk over to the rebuy desk. All in all, I fired four bullets (pronounced BOO-lets), and I had busted three times before the end of level 4. I was 3 of the first 5 people eliminated from the tournament.

I have fired four bullets in several tourneys in my life and that’s always unpleasant, but it normally happens when I late register with less than 20bbs and lose a bunch of flips. Losing three preflop all-ins when you have QTs, 66 and AJo is unfortunate, but it’s not something that will torment me for years. The 2022 Triton Cyprus Main Event was a haunting experience because I kept getting great hands only to see disastrous run outs. Every hand began as a dream that turned into a nightmare. How much money can I win with this set? Wait, I am getting stacked, how did that happen?

It’s not just that the hands were unfortunate, they were also unusual hands: squeezed three-bet pots deep, four-way pots, pots where people check-call the turn and lead the river. I’d eventually bust my fourth bullet in a more classic haunting fashion, running QQ into Stephen Chidwick’s KK, and after the tournament I spent most of my time licking my wounds and bemoaning my fate, but I never did a deep dive into hands I played on bullets one through three. Halloween week felt like an appropriate time to revisit these hands. It will be a scary week for people who don’t like seeing tough spots with good poker hands, but it will also be a mystery. Did I play these hands poorly? I am not sure. Will we be seeing a rare POTD B or B+, or will I learn that my plays were doomed from the start? Just in case there are any vampires reading POTD, I’d like to formally invite you into POTD where you can read about this spooky tournament.

2022 Triton Cyprus $100k NLH Main Event
(500/1k/1k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack

It folds to Talal Shakerchi (290k) who makes it 2.5k in the HJ, it folds to me on the button where I make it 9k with K♣️K♠️, it folds back to Talal who calls

Flop (20.5k) J♦️J♠️6♦️: Talal checks, I bet 5k, Talal makes it 17k, I call.

Turn (54.5k) 3♦️: Talal checks, I bet 18k, Talal calls.

River (90.5k) 9♦️: Talal leads 15k, I make it 120k, Talal shoves I fold.

Today’s post is this week’s free post. If you’d like more writing like this from me, or just good old fashioned hand history analysis, please consider becoming a paid or unpaid subscriber. I know a guy playing $100,000 poker tournaments asking for $10/month might seem a little greedy, but I am writing around 40,000 words a month, so a paid subscriber is paying around 1/40th of a cent per word or one piece of penny candy for 40 words, which sounds like a good deal to to me. All the subscription tiers are explained here, and you can subscribe or upgrade your subscription by clicking the button below.

What I Was Thinking

250bb deep, you aren’t always thrilled to stack off KK preflop, but you get four-bet so rarely that there is no other option here; you need to three-bet, especially vs. a player like Talal who plays quite splashy in early levels. I felt the flop was a pure c-bet with range and didn’t consider betting a size outside of quarter pot. Once I got check-raised, I was obviously not going anywhere. On the turn, when Talal checked, I figured I was rarely getting double check-raised, and while there might not be that much value to squeeze out of my hand, setting a price to get a cheap showdown was nice. Once Talal led the river, I was puzzled, but I thought it was unlikely that he had a full house, which would often bet or raise the turn. I thought his most likely hand was a hand like 8d8x, and I thought I had a pretty good hand to bluff with. I would always call with a small flush or a jack, and I don’t have too many hands with blocker value. A 6 blocks 66, but Talal could also play a hand like 65 suited like this. I don’t think he plays 99 like this very often. Blocking J9s would be nice, but it would require either a pretty loose flop peel from me or bet bluffraising the river with a jack. I thought KcKs were two pretty neutral cards— they shouldn’t be in his bluffs or his value bets— and I was quite confident he had a hand a medium flush, so I raised. I did not think I needed to make an all-in raise to get him to fold a flush, so I picked a smaller size in case I was wrong, which I was. Even if he three-bet bluffed me, he probably did it with a jack, which I’d lose to anyways.

What I Got Wrong

I got some things wrong in this hand, but not the decision to three-bet KK. On the flop, I can pick a slightly larger flop size and defaulting to quarter pot means I am not putting enough money in the pot on the flop with my range, but my bet is fine. I can’t fold any pocket pair to a check-raise, let alone KK. The turn filling the flush is good for Talal’s range, but the solver plays an odd strategy, mostly blocking with trips and non-nut flushes and overbetting at least 150% (I didn’t test for a larger size) pot with nut flushes and full houses. He also does a reasonable amount of checking with trips and flushes, which means a hand like mine only has 57% equity when he checks the turn, and Talal check-folds hands as strong as TT without a diamond. Betting the turn is a bad play in EQ, but it doesn’t lose much EV, so I think it’s a fine exploit vs. someone who won’t check-raise the turn enough and especially vs. someone who won’t check-raise bluff the turn enough.

The river is an interesting spot because Talal is never supposed to lead with range. So this becomes an old fashioned pre-solver poker hand: Someone did something odd; why did they do it and what does it mean about their hand strength? But there is still a technical detail I got wrong. Talal’s min river value bet should be a flush, which means trips is still the ideal bluffing combo for me— I block full houses, I don’t interact with his bluffs, and I don’t block any low flushes. Talal is a tough poker player, but he does not have a balanced range here; no one has a balanced range in a 250bb deep three-bet pot that goes check-raise flop, check-call turn, lead river. This is much more about figuring out what Talal is representing and what he’s trying to get me to do. If he tanked and called with 8d8x, I would have felt fine about my play; I correctly put him on a weak hand and he happened to call me down. However, in today’s Halloween hand, he played the role of Jigsaw and set a devious trap for me to fall into. At least I didn’t shove the river.

Grade

I am an accomplished MTT player, I have cashed many Triton Main Events and many SCOOP Main Events. My opponent in this hand is someone who has not only cashed Triton and SCOOP main events, but won them. He’s not the most technically precise player, but he has good instincts and knows how to leverage his table image to trick players into punting to him. In today’s hand, Talal set me up beautifully, not just by leading small on the river, but also (likely) checking the turn with a very strong hand, which led to me betting a hand that should pure check. I gave Talal too little credit and lost half my stack in the process. Not a great start to a dread-filled week on POTD.

C-