POTD #167 Overplaying AA in a $50k vs David Peters

Flying an airplane and check-raising AA two things that could create moments of terror

Flying an airplane or being in war are proverbial “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror” experiences. I will add deep-stacked poker to the list¹, with the caveat that the “moments of terror” in deep-stacked poker are tournament life-threatening as opposed to actual life-threatening. Deep-stacked solver poker has led to all sorts of wild plays that get a lot of attention, but if you are in a game where someone is shoving 400% pot once an orbit, you are not playing a game with players finding unusual solver plays, you are playing a game with whales blasting off once an orbi— wait for a good hand and you will print money.

The math of why the solver tends to play cautiously is pretty clear. If you are deep stacked and have a great hand, say AA on J92r, you might have 80% equity when your first bet goes into the pot, 65% when the second bet goes in, 50% when the third bet goes in, and 35% when the fourth bet goes in. If you call a pot-sized shove on the fourth bet, you will be making a +EV call. However, the hand began with you having 80% equity in a 5bb pot, and you ended up getting in a 200bb pot with 35% equity— that is not the optimal outcome. Solvers are good at accounting for the costs or benefits of low-probability events and adjusting at earlier nodes, which means they often play cautiously with great hands at early nodes, because they know the board can run out ugly, or that a hand might be strong enough to get half your stack in but not quite strong enough to stack off.

Making these adjustments is very important, because as a pot gets bigger, so does the size of potential mistakes you can make, and pots grow geometrically. In other words, missing out on 10bbs in value is a lot less costly than putting in an extra 40bbs behind, even if you are getting the correct pot odds to put in that extra money. Today, we look at a hand in Triton Jeju where I had AA on a dry board and thought I played it fine, but I somehow managed to under- and over-play it. Read more about how I failed to win the maximum vs. David Peters below.

Triton Jeju 2024 Event #8 $50k NLH 7-Handed
(1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration is open.

It folds to me (224k) in the HJ and I raise to 4.5k with A♥️A♦️, David Peters (188k) calls in the CO, everyone else folds.

Flop (14k) J♠️9♣️2♣️: I check, David bets 8.5k, I make it 25k, David calls.

Turn (64k) 9♦️: I bet 40k, David calls.

River (144k) T♦️: I check, David checks. I win.

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What I Was Thinking

Looking down at AA preflop and raising it is one of the great joys in life; you should try to do it at every opportunity. My general rule of thumb is that if a player on your direct left calls your open, you check the flop, so I did that here. Even vs. a larger polar bet size, I figured that all my overpairs would mix some flop raises, and AA no club seemed like a fine hand to raise from time to time. I figured the turn was rather good for me; there was now only one combo of J9s and one of 99. David betting big on the flop with top set or a bare 9 seemed unlikely, and while I was concerned about him having 22, I felt that my hand was one I should keep fastplaying, so I bet a size that would allow me to comfortably shove the river. Almost every straight draw filled or paired on the river; clubs did not seem like an appealing hand for me to bluff, and generally, if a bunch of draws fill, you want to cut out your thinnest value bets. I thought AA was one of my thinnest value bets, so I checked, with a plan of reluctantly calling a shove, but David checked and I was able to show down the winner.

What I Got Wrong

Not preflop, that’s for sure. In what is becoming a common theme in POTD, my overall flop strategy was likely too passive, and I should have mixed some more bets with my hand and range. Once I check, David is representing a polar range, and I mix raising with every overpair, but it is an infrequent play. There are two reasons for this. David is not betting all that often with worse hands for value; he will mix some occasional 9x and Jx, but his most common value bets are two pair, sets, draws, and total air. AA wants to squeeze some extra value out of draws and weaker one-pair hands, but AA also really wants to let him keep firing with hands like Kd8d or Ah3h. My flop raise is okay, but the solver raises 9% of the time, and I was probably raising something like three to four times as much as I should have.

The turn is a similar situation to the flop. I frequently bet, but it is not a pure bet, and my size is correct. I was correct that I bet more without the ace of clubs, because I want to get value from nut flush draws, and the AA combos I check most often are ones with the nut flush draw blocker.

In the introduction, I wrote about the problems with making the pot a little too big on the flop and the turn and then needing to put money in the pot without great equity on the river. QQ-AA still have 70% equity on the river, and while the solver has some counter-intuitive turn strategies, such as folding hands like 8c7c while also calling KQ without a club sometimes, overall I am not all that worried about running into a straight on the river. Similarly, even though QTs and T8s pair for me on the river, they are credible hands for me to bluff, because they block potential straights David might have and can still get David to fold plenty of top pair hands. The river basically boils down to this: When I shove AA and get called I have 44%, which is bad; normally you want 50% when called to value bet the river. This hand is an exception, because when I check the river with AA and face a shove, I will have somewhere between 31% and 44% equity, which means I will still need to check-call, but I will be check-calling with less equity than I would have if I shoved and got called myself.

Types of Errors
A classic “too much money”, until the river where I didn’t put in enough money

Grade

Making big decisions when the pot is big is very important, because that is where your money is made. Let’s say I made a really big mistake in this hand, like c-betting a pure check like 7h6h— that would cost me 0.02bbs and is so clearly a mistake that you wouldn’t need a solver to tell you it’s the wrong play. The river play seems close-- shoving AA is a thin play on J92JT— however, by the time we have reached the river, there are 72bb in the pot and 60bb to play. Getting all-in with 42% compared to getting all-in with 44% might not seem like that much, but 2% of 60bb is a lot; fortunes have been made repeatedly taking a 2% edge. So while the river check might not seem as costly as, say, c-betting with a bad hand, it is actually much more costly. Overall, my river check loses almost 5bbs, and that is in a world where David occasionally shoves AJ and JT vs. a check. It’s hard to imagine a world where David is bluffing more than the solver or value betting thinner than the solver, and in that world AA is still a slam-dunk river shove for me. In today’s hand, I made the pot too big on early streets going down a low frequency node, but I did not cost myself much EV that way. Once I made the pot too big, I made a very costly river check that even post hoc I can’t justify.

C

1. While we at POTD strive for originality, since writing this lede, my editor informed me that Tom McEvoy used this same cliche 30 years ago. Pokerstars Blog was on the case.