POTD #164 Brandon Wilson Reps Quads vs David Coleman
Can David call and risk losing the purple jacket? (Photo: PokerGO)
In 2025, every poker hand can be solved— to some degree. The true solution for every hand starts breaking apart once one player in the hand deviates in any way. Say UTG+1 plays too loose— then UTG opens tighter, and a new equilibrium is created. Someone minraises instead of raising 2.2x preflop, and a new equilibrium is created. The BB doesn’t hit the exact solver three-bet bluff frequencies; a new equilibrium is created. Oftentimes this doesn’t matter; there will be marginal shifts in strategy when facing a 20% open range vs. a 19% open range, but for such a minor deviation, any play that is good vs. one range will be adequate vs. the other range.
So you resort to solver baselines or what you think are solver baselines, and then can use your intuition to slightly adjust your strategy based on your opponent’s tendencies. If you exploit your opponents in a way that is too obvious and you move too far away from a solver equilibrium, observant opponents will respond with their own counters and exploit your deviations. The balance between your ability to execute fundamentally sound poker, while also deviating when necessary without alerting your opponent to the fact you are deviating, is what makes a great poker player.
Sometimes you can make deviations in normal nodes. My opponent doesn’t three-bet enough preflop, so I can open raise wider. In solver land, my opponent always folds top pair on the river, but this player never will, so I check. Sometimes hands are so specific and obscure, that everyone knows we are not playing a solver hand; everyone is freestyling, and people don’t even have solver baselines to revert to. Today we look at a hand from the final of the PGT Poker Masters 2025 Event #10, where I considered running sims for premium subscribers, but ultimately decided, what’s the point? Any sort of solver equilibrium for this hand literally falls apart with the second (or maybe, if we are being charitable, third) decision of the hand. So let’s dig into this hand and see what conclusions we can draw from a very obscure spot.
PGT Poker Masters 2025 Event #10 $25k NLH
3 Handed (25k/50k/50k) (SB/BB/BBA) 3rd: $220.5K, 2nd 315K, 1st 504k
David Coleman (2.855M) makes it 115k OTB with A♠️Q♥️, Doug Lee (1.64M) calls in the SB with K♣️T♣️, Brandon Wilson (4.905M) calls in the BB with K♠️9♣️.
Flop (395k) A♣️2♠️2♥️: Doug checks, Brandon checks, David checks.
Turn (395k) 2♦️: Doug checks, Brandon checks, David checks.
River (395k) 9♠️: Doug checks, Brandon bets 100k, David makes it 275k, Brandon shoves, for David’s remaining 2.74M, David folds.
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What David Was Thinking
I was unsure whose perspective I should write from in this hand, but I ultimately decided on David because I think there is an interesting tournament factor with him. If David finishes in the top 2, he wins the prestigious Poker Masters Purple Jacket and pockets a cool $25k, which is a significant amount of money that should marginally affect his strategy throughout this hand. For our purposes, I am going to assume that David has 100% of himself, and there are no perverse incentives such as a situation where backers and swaps do not have a claim to the $25k Purple Jacket bonus, which could lead to a situation where if, say, David had 50% of himself, but 100% of Purple Jacket money, his payouts would be effectively something like:
3rd: $110,250
2nd: $182,500
1st: $252,000
Which would make the payout jumps almost the exact same, money-wise, and encourage him to play passively. I don’t know what his incentives were, but he in no way, shape or form played this hand in a way that looks like his incentives were warped, so I think assuming the payouts for David look like $220.5k, $340k, $505k is appropriate. A small boost for second place, but nothing too crazy. With all that out of the way, we can move on to the actual hand.
David raises AQo on the button to 2.3x, Doug Lee calls the SB with what I’d imagine is a pretty specific range, and Brandon defends the BB with a range that is rather wide and includes all sorts of different hands. I think David imagined he would mix checks with all top pair combos on the flop, and either rolled passively with AQ or determined there were certain properties of AQ that made it an attractive check. I don’t think this should be a pure c-bet with range from David; I would happily check hands like Ax, some total air, and some middle of range hands like KQ high or a hand that will be relevant later in this hand, 99. On the turn, I think David probably thought he was rarely getting two streets from worse and so wanted to give Brandon or Doug a chance to fire at the pot or to improve to a bluff catcher, so he checked again.
On the river, I suspect David thought that Brandon would block a 9 often enough that he could raise any ace for value, and once he gets shoved on, he’s in hell. It’s a pretty simple spot on the river: Brandon is representing quads or a bluff. (He could also shove nines full in this spot, but I suspect he’d pure three-bet 99 preflop.) If Brandon shoves chops to try to get David to fold an ace sometimes, David can never fold 999, but he probably needs to mix folds with twos full of aces sometimes. If David was thinking about having a systematic river solution, he probably decided he’d call with aces full that had a club as a side card and blocked a suited two Brandon would defend in the BB, since he’d never defend an offsuit 2 in the BB, except for maybe A2.
What Sam Thinks (No Cheating)
While this blog is titled Punt of the Day, today’s hand is a great hand for me to put away my punting shoes and become an armchair QB. Objectively, every decision in this hand seems fine, but watching it, I thought “Well, this all seems stupid and avoidable.” So let’s start with the simple decisions. I think David probably should have bet the flop; he has a hand that is strong enough to play for stacks for against Doug, and Brandon should be folding a ton of 2x preflop. I am not that worried about him check-raising and making us play for stacks here, and if he does, so be it. Sometimes you need to play poker with a so-so hand.
That being said, I think the turn check is fine and consistent with the flop play; you can let Doug or Brandon pair and squeeze value from them on the river. It’s rare you are getting two streets from worse hands, and it’s not like an AA22 board where you could at least improve to a better hand on a queen river. The main reason to bet the turn is to charge both players, who have a one-outer to a chop, and to charge pocket pairs that have two outs to beat you. I think neither player has quads enough that you should let them freeroll your full house here, especially when you can lose 2/3rds of the pot when you get one-outed, but the max EV loss by checking the turn is capped at a pretty small number.
If you are worried about Brandon putting pressure on you and want to lock up second-place money, checking the turn is fine. However, that same logic should lead to you just calling the river. In this situation in the tournament, you need to get called by a worse full house a lot to make raising the river an attractive play, especially because you are both opening the door to getting bluffed and making it less likely that Doug overcalls with worse. Both are things that should happen rarely, but getting a raise called by a 9 is also pretty rare.
I think the other problem here is his raise size. David has one very clear value raise here: nines full. Nines full is an extremely strong hand; Brandon will rarely bet/fold an ace on the river, and if you raise 30% pot with nines full, you will be leaving a lot of money on the table. David can balance his river range and play some tricky poker, but to me this river raise size screams “I have an ace” and encourages Brandon to shove chops, which is not something David wants to encourage. If you want to raise 999, bluffs, and mix some raises with some Ax, I would start by raising something close to full pot, which would be around 700k. Once he gets shoved on, it’s a tough spot and David can’t always call with an ace, so folding without a quads blocker seems fine, but I think he opened the door to getting bluffed off the hand by raising so small.
What The Solver Says
I tried running some sims for this hand, but ultimately ended up abandoning them for a couple of reasons. Most of the preflop outputs of a spot like this have Doug playing three-bet or fold from the SB, and then wonky BB defense ranges that are responses to the SB flatting a very specific range of less than 3% of hands. They also have Brandon doing things like never flatting the BB with K9o. So we are in a spot where two of the three players are playing incorrect preflop ranges that are too loose, and we ended up on the river in a spot solvers excel at— specific toy game boards— but ended up seeing a hand play out that looked very human.
So I still think David should have bet the flop because Brandon should rarely have trips and he can win a big pot vs. Doug. However, once we get to the river, I am not crazy over Brandon’s river bet. Blocking a nine makes some sense here, but I think K9 is one of the worst nines to block because you’re trying to get called by king high on the river. Once David raises the river, he probably needs to reluctantly call a river shove with any Ax where his sidecard is a club that blocks suited twos. That means, given that Brandon might have less than 10 value combos, he ought to be judicious when picking which combos he wants to three-bet bluff-shove the river with. Brandon should be bluffing with a club in his hand so that he blocks a hand like AsQc, which would call a river shove because it blocks Q2s.
Final Thoughts and Grade
I think this is a hand where there are several plays that either should never be made or rarely be made. In order: Doug’s preflop flat (three-bet or shove), Brandon’s preflop call (fold), David’s flop check (bet), Brandon’s river bet (check), David’s river raise (raise bigger or call), Brandon’s river shove (fold), David’s river fold (fine in theory, bad vs. someone who will bluff-shove a 9 without a club). That being said, none of these plays are all that bad either. The biggest punt is probably the river shove, just because it’s such a large bet, it needs to work a ton, he has the wrong blocker, and it’s hard for raising 30% pot or checking the flop to be a costlier mistake than incorrectly shoving for 3x pot. However, I said I would grade this from David’s perspective, and I think his flop check, turn check, and river raise size are all small errors that are even more costly when you consider he gets a bonus for coming in second place.
C+
Street poker! Fun!