POTD #160 Halloween Week End: Drowning on The River

Playing JJ is always a nightmare and today is no exception.

POTD’s Halloween Week is finally wrapping up on the day of All Hallow’s Eve itself. This week has captured many of the most gruesome feelings one can experience at the poker table, but we are ending with the worst feeling you can have, worse than getting bad beat, or bubbling, or forgetting your headphones and getting seated next to Will Kassouf. You’re value betting the river and are sure you have the best hand; you’re already counting your winnings, when your opponent reaches for raising chips. Sometimes you have a hand that is so strong, you quickly call because you still might beat some value, but there are times when you are not sure what your opponent has, but you are sure if they’re raising for value you are beat. Those are the brutal river spots— you go from having 100% equity in your mind to hoping you have 34% equity so you can make a call winning less than 1bb.

It’s an especially ugly feeling when you make a read earlier in the hand like “well they’d never check-call strong on the flop”— well, now you are facing a river raise, and either your opponent did something you deemed impossible, slowplaying earlier in the hand, or even worse, your opponent hit a miracle river that turned their hand into a value raise. A theme of this week has been the feeling that the gambling gods have conspired against you: Every runout is ugly to look at; every promising flop ends with a fatal river. Today’s hand is an exception, because as I was playing the hand, the river felt innocuous and my post hoc analysis confirmed the feeling I had during the hand. The river was more or less a blank, but in today’s hand it sealed my fate. Or did it? Could I have escaped from the haunted house of the Triton Cyprus Main Event, or was I doomed to wander the halls of that poker room forever?

2022 Triton Cyprus $100k NLH Main Event
(1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. Bullet three.

It folds to me (109k) in the CO with J♦️J♣️, I make it 5k, Sosia Jiang (318k) calls OTB, Ivan Leow (168k) calls in the BB.

Flop (18k) 5♣️3♦️2♠️: Ivan checks, I check, Sosia bets 5k, Ivan folds, I call.

Turn (28k) 9♥️: I check, Sosia checks.

River (28k) 9♦️: I bet 28k, Sosia puts me in for my final 99k, I call and lose to Q♣️9♣️.