POTD #183 I Get Tripped up With Trips

Vs Adrian Mateos and Leon Sturm

Last Wednesday, I wrote about a multi way pot that Maria Konnikova played in NAPT Las Vegas, and in my correspondence with me she wrote:

I have a love/hate relationship with multiway pots. I hate them because I’m often not sure how to act—I get into spots that I’ve never studied. But that’s also why I love them. It’s a test of how you can react and improvise in the moment.

Multiway pots tend to be spots that are less studied for a variety of reasons. When you add another player to the pot, the game tree expands multiplicatively and solving a hand takes longer. Additionally, the tools that solve multiway pots appear to be good, but they do not reach a 100% unexploitable solution that heads-up solvers do. I’m grossly oversimplifying, but multiway solvers play a spot versus each other for long enough that they converge to a solution that all the players involved don’t particularly want to deviate, but there is no mathematical proof that they are at equilibrium.

Even if multi-way solutions were as accurate as heads-up solutions and took the same amount of time and RAM to solve, they would still be understudied because there are more permutations of spots. “Hijack vs. BB single raised pot 50bbs deep” is a baseline spot that I suggest people look at when starting to learn solver poker. In a three-way pot, you have six other potential trios with a third player, and each trio is a new spot one could study. In a tournament, you might be 50bbs deep, but the third player in the hand might have 30bbs. That’s a new solution. Don’t even ask what to do if a fourth player enters the pot. Today I played a hand that from a preflop setup is as simple a three-way pot as you’re going to get: button vs. big blind vs. small blind, and we are all even stacked. Then we hit a monotone flop, one of the trickier boards to play, and things got rather complicated rather quickly.

EPT Cyprus $25,000 No Limit Hold’em Event #13
(500k/1k/1k) (SB/BB/BBA) Registration is Open

It folds to Adrian Mateos (100k) who makes it 2.5k on the button, Leon Sturm (125k) calls in the SB, I have 5♠️3♠️ and call in the BB.

Flop (8.5k) 9♥️6♥️5♥️: Leon checks, I check, Adrian checks.

Turn (8.5k) 5♣️: Leon checks, I bet 2.5k, Adrian calls, Leon makes it 14k, I fold, Adrian folds.