RERUN: POTD #158 Halloween Week Part 3: Four Way Madness

Once again I have a set of twos and things get ugly

Today’s rerun comes from Halloween Week, where I recounted a horrifying experience playing the Triton Cyprus Main Event. At the conclusion of the post there will be a #onemorething and a video of me analyzing the hand that I shared with Premium Subscribers in the Discord channel. If you’d like to become a Premium Subscriber you can do so here or you can pay for an hour of private coaching with me and contact me at any of the methods outlined here.

A surprising exclamation, a jump scare, or a simple BOO! can surprise a calm person and rattle their nerves, but the hands I picked for Halloween week resemble a more Sisyphean existential horror. Not again. I had already bluffed off a lot of my stack to Talal Shakerchi when I turned KK into a bluff on an ugly board. Then I lost the rest of my chips with a set of twos to Santhosh Suvarna. When I sat down for bullet two, I wanted to ease my way into the bullet. Let’s play some simple hands. Let’s flop top pair, value bet twice, check the river, and win. Let’s three-bet AK and c-bet JTx and win; let’s check/call a flush draw, turn a flush and pot the river. Those types of hands.

Instead, what happened was, I flopped a set and not just any set. I flopped a set of twos, the hand that ended bullet one for me. There are times when I’m playing a poker tournament that something improbable happens, and I almost want to pause the action in the middle of the hand and declare, “Wait, I just flopped a second set of twos in a span of 15 hands. Are we sure this isn’t a simulation?” This is especially the case when you just lost $100k, and instead of viewing a set of twos as the great hand it is, you are having a little Stockholm Syndrome as you recall what your set did for you 45 minutes ago. Of course, the above paragraph is a little dramatic; it wouldn’t be Halloween week without a little exaggeration. I was happy to flop another set, and like most times I have a set and lots of money enters the pot, I am still mostly thinking “What’s the best way to play this set?”, but there’s a little bit of my brain that’s thinking “Man, I’m going to have so many chips after this pot.” Of course, there is no more classic horror trope than the overconfident, often greedy, man who thinks he will be the beneficiary of good fate, only for that fate to be cruelly upturned and for him to become the victim. Today’s hand is part two of a series where I have three twos. Normally, flopping a set is the best thing you could hope for with pocket twos, but today pocket twos were decidedly not my hand, as I flopped a set again but got put in another tricky situation.

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

Michael Addamo (184k) makes it 2k UTG, Talal Shakerchi (454k) calls OTB, Viacheslav Buldygin (283.5k) calls in the SB, I (131k) call in the BB with 2♥️2♦️.

Flop (9k) J♣️6♣️2♠️: Viacheslav checks, I check, Addamo bets 2k, Talal folds, Viacheslav calls, I make it 11k, Addamo calls, Viacheslav calls.

Turn (42k) Q♠️: Viacheslav checks, I bet 40k, Addamo folds, Viacheslav calls.

River 122k 7♣️: Viacheslav shoves for my final 77k, I fold.

What I Was Thinking

You almost never three-bet 22, unless you are three-betting all-in. 130bbs deep, I am happy to set mine in a four-way pot. You also never close the action in a multiway pot by just calling with a set; raising the flop is mandatory. Once I reached the turn, my thought process was that since the board was so connected and I almost always had the best hand, I wanted to keep piling money in the pot. So I bet, and Addamo folded, but Viachesvav called again. On the river, I felt it was very unlikely Viacheslav was bluffing; he rarely calls offsuit hands in the SB preflop, which means for him to be bluffing on the river, he needs a hand with backdoor spades that calls twice on the flop but didn’t shove the turn, which would maybe be 54, 43, 53, or 67 or 65, or maybe AJ, KJ, JT, but that is at max 8 combos, and many of those hands would fold preflop or on the flop, or squeeze preflop, so I just felt it was unlikely he was bluffing and folded.

What I Got Wrong

Preflop and flop are pretty simple streets and I can’t do anything else. I could maybe pick a slightly different raise size on the flop, but unless I did something crazy like minraise or raise 400% pot, the EV of picking the perfect size should not matter much. The interesting output here is that the solver almost always checks the turn with my hand. There are two reasons for this: One, there are so many ugly rivers that by checking the turn I keep the pot small in the event that a bad card rolls off. Two, I should actually be up against a higher set quite a bit. Addamo has a set 14% of the time, and that number almost doubles when he bets when he gets checked to. For those who can count, I have bottom set, which means if Addamo has a set, it will be higher than mine. Getting 3x pot all-in with one out is, to use a technical poker term, bad.

So the solver checks bottom set. I thought it would be with the plan to pure check-raise all-in, but it actually check-calls quite a bit. The solver is much more worried about being coolered than I am. However, the solver also plays the flop much tighter than Addamo: It folds top pair to a checkraise 30% of the time. Once I check-raise and Addamo calls, Viacheslav folds top pair 90% of the time and folds 3/4ths of his flush draws. I don’t think either will be playing that tight, and I also think that Addamo might three-bet higher sets on the flop, something the solver does not do in the sim I ran. So if you combine Viacheslav and Addamo reaching the turn more than they should, with Addamo likely betting too often when checked to (I don’t have specific multiway reads vs. him, but that is just generally how he plays poker), I think check-raising all-in on the turn is clearly the best play.

I am never supposed to bet full pot on the turn, and if I force myself to do so on the turn, I probably just check range on the turn. So I did some tinkering to get some sort of reasonable river solution, and Viacheslav bluffs some AcJx, some 5s4s and 5s3s, and 22 mixes calling for me on the river. His range has 74% equity on the river before any money has gone into the pot, so I don’t need to call bottom set to defend my range; there have been a lot of decisions in this hand that have winnowed down our respective ranges, and we are at such a rare node that he can’t exploit me by floating the flop and turn wide so he can bluff shove the river for 2/3rds pot when a flush fills. Should I call the river? I lean towards thinking that it’s easier for people to peel the flop with too many flush draws, turn some sort of combo draw, and then lead all-in on the river, than for them to regularly call the turn with hands like AcJd so they can bluff the river themselves, and I am happy with my fold.

Types Of Error
Put in too much money on a connected turn

Grade

The first three hands this week have all followed similar patterns, in that I have reached the river in a very unlikely way where my opponents are certainly not “balanced,” and my goal is to figure out what their actual range is like. In this hand, my preflop and flop decisions were elementary and I am happy with my river fold— if Viacheslav is bluffing here more than 1/4 of the time, I tip my cap to him. However, I think my error in this hand was on the turn. Checking is the solver play and the best exploitative play vs. my two opponents, and even if I wanted to bet, my size is too large and created the exact situation I did not want. I bet so large that it made my range and my opponent’s range pretty face up and allowed them to take advantage of me on the river. It’s not a horrible mistake, especially in an esoteric spot like a four-way 130bbs deep pot, but seeing the answer was revelatory for me. The board is so scary that it’s natural to want to bet my set for protection, but if I can’t get all-in, then all I am doing is making the pot really big in a spot where I’ll have trouble playing half the rivers in the deck.

B-

POTD #158 ⁠onemorething

One thing that frequently happens in multiway pots, but especially four or five way pots is card removal becomes a really big factor. Let’s use today’s flop as an example and say you have Tc9c, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush draw than you? Not that high, once a lot of money goes into the pot on the flop, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush draw than you? Significantly higher. Once you turn or river your flush and a bunch of money goes into the pot, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush than you? Extremely high. In a four way pot you’re going to see a lot less bluffing by one player with AcTx or KcQx and you are going to see that class of hand float vs checkraises a lot less often as well. That means when a club hits both players will have a flush a lot and not too many one card flush blocker combos. So a medium flush will have less equity and you will have fewer hands to potentially bluff with. The solver recognizes this and solves this problem earlier in the hand by folding some pretty strong draws before the pot gets too big.

This also occurs with some straight draws, if you defend the BB in a three way pot and the flop is Q95 a gutshot “to the nuts” is not a sneaky draw to players who recognize that on a 6 turn the bb will have 16 combos of 87. The solver sees that 76 is not that strong on an 8 turn because you actually run into JT a lot more often than you might like. If you’re playing games where people won’t fold top pair to a single bet even when a flush fills in a multiway pot, you can getaway with overplaying draws, but vs strong players you’ll run into higher draws too often and won’t get paid enough when you hit.