POTD #168 Winning (small) Wednesday: Top Two vs Adrian Mateos in the Super Million$

A joke that has spread around high roller circles is that one-bulleting a tournament is akin to min-cashing it. It’s a joke based in a bleak truth, that tournament poker is so high-variance that losing exactly $10,000 in a $10,000 tournament that allows re-buys is a result in the ~50th percentile. When you’ve chosen a way to make money where eating room service and sleeping for 12 hours leads to a better financial outcome than your median result, you sometimes question your choices.

Today’s hand is from the March 14th, 2021 GG Super MILLION$ 10k. This is the most prestigious weekly poker tournament in the world, and in recent years it has been a tournament that has been a bellwether for your whole year. If you have a good year in the Super MILLION$, you will likely have a good year overall. If you don’t, you start asking yourself questions like “Is the RNG on GG fair?”, “Am I getting cheated?”, or worst of all “Do I just suck?” In addition to being a challenging tournament, it’s also one of the easiest tournaments to go off for a lot of bullets. In an online tournament, you don’t need to do things like grab your bag, walk to the registration desk, get physical chips and pull a seat card before finally getting seated at a table. In an online tournament you can click the rebuy button, be seated, get all-in, lose and rebuy again in under one minute. All GG tournaments leave late registration open too long and allow too many bullets to be fired, which has amplified the effect the GGMillions has as a year maker or year breaker. Every Sunday it feels like you could lose $80k or win $300k; multiply that by 52 Sundays a year, and it’s easy to see why this tournament has an outsized effect on your results in a way one-and-done tournaments like the WSOP Main Event do not (unless you’re one of the lucky few to go very deep).

Today’s hand comes from a Super MILLION$ that was financially smooth for me. I fired one bullet and cashed for $23,168.07; I ended up a small loser on the day once you counted every tournament I played, losing around $20k in total, but not before I had some tricky spots vs. some very tough players in the Super MILLION$.

3/14/2021 Super MILLION$ $10,300 High Roller
(2250/4500/550) (SB/BB/ANTE) Reg (and 6 bulleting) is open. 100k Starting Stack

HH: GGPoker

I (228,693) have Q♣️J♦️ UTG8 and raise to 9,900, it folds to Adrian Mateos (263,684) who calls in the BB.

Flop (26,450) 5♣️4♠️3♠️: Adrian checks, I check.
Turn (26,450) J♠️: Adrian bets 8,729, I call.
River (43,908) Q♥️: Adrian bets 14,490, I raise to 62,597, Adrian folds.