POTD #185 "Hand Of the Year" at APT Taipei

One of the most daring bluffs, I've seen all year, but is it a punt?

Since I started POTD, I have spent a lot more time consuming poker media. I want to see what my competitors are up to, what my readers think, and expose myself to any and all potential punts I can write about. The types of hands that often go viral are hands from big livestreamed cash games that I find very uninteresting. Wait… You’re telling me, that of all people, Alan Keating put in a lot of money with a really bad hand? We join a double-straddled pot in progress where someone 4-bet a hand they should have open folded the first time: can someone fold QQ as an overpair? If the aggressor is supposed to have KK+ 30% of the time preflop and they have it less than 5% of the time preflop, you can’t fold QQ. It’s a big pot, but it’s a simple one. So when I saw a hand described as the “hand of the year,” I was skeptical, but then I got paged by Dr. K to look at this hand and I did. What I saw provided more than enough for me to write about on POTD.

Let’s set the scene. We’re at the Final Table of the Main Event in APT Taipei, a $10k USD (or $311k NTD) freezeout that had 671 entries. 8 players are left, 8th place is $122k, and first place is almost 10x that at $1.18M. We are at a deepstacked final table; the average stack is 46bbs, but there is one dominant chip leader, Nishant Sharma, who has 10,600,000 chips and 106bbs. The remaining stacks are all technically below average, but many are hovering around average— there are 5 stacks between 32 and 46bbs. There are two shorter stacks, familiar faces to me: Alexandru Papazian and Matas Cimbolas, who have 20bbs and 8bbs, respectively. The only other player at the FT I have extensive history playing against is Dominik Nitsche, though I have played a little versus the chip leader, Nish Sharma. While the remaining players are unknown to me, they all have a lot of live cashes in Asia over the past several years, which leads me to believe they are all serious and experienced poker players.

If I were at this FT, my overall strategy would look something like this: We are deep-stacked and there is not much variation in stack size between the middle stacks. The 30-40bb range is often a stack size where players might bleed off chips— defending the BB a little too wide, calling three-bets a little too wide, etc. My general game plan would be to play small pots with finesse and accuracy and let the other players collide, with an ultimate game plan of maintaining my stack while advancing into the top 3 or 4. Of course. no plan is perfect; I might end up busting in 8th and I’d need to be prepared for an ugly outcome like that, but I find that hatching a simple plan before the final table can help guide me through playing the actual final table. Fortunately for POTD readers and viewers of the APT stream, we did not witness technical, small-pot poker, but some thrilling big-pot poker. Was it the hand of the year? We still have a month to go, but it’s certainly in the conversation.

APT Championship Taipei 2025 $10K Buy-In Main Event
(50k/100k/100k) (SB/BB/BBA) We are at the Final Table

Two folds and John Niko Costiniano (4.2M) makes it 200k in the LJ with A♣️T♠️, it folds to Hao Chang (4.8M) who calls in the SB with K♥️Q♦️, the BB folds

Flop (600k) J♠️J♦️2♣️: Hao checks, John bets 150k, Hao makes it 410k, John calls

Turn (1.42M) 9♥️: Hao bet 760k, John calls

River (2.94M) T♦️: Hao bets 1.8M, John shoves for 2.81M, Hao folds

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What I Think (No Cheating)

First, it sounds like the APT ran a great event that did very well, but do they really need 5k chips in play at the 50k/100k/100k level? Let’s call the floor over and colour up some of these stacks. I give this floor error a C+. Preflop seems fine by both. Hao could three-bet, but calling is fine and folding would be a mistake. On the flop, the c-bet is fine; the check-raise seems dicey, but acceptable. The float of the check-raise also seems dicey, but acceptable. I’d never call A9 on the flop and I’d never fold AT with a backdoor flush draw. AK/AQ offsuit seem like higher-EV defends than AK, but AT is likely on the cusp.

The turn barrel seems like the standard play. KQ still blocks hands like KK/QQ/KJ/QJ, it picks up a straight draw, and it can get small pocket pairs and ace high to fold. Betting just over half pot seems like an appropriate size. The turn call with AT, on the other hand, seems like our first real punt of the day. The SB’s bluffs should be hands like KT/QT/KQ that still have a lot of equity vs. AT, and AT is drawing dead vs. value bets. Additionally, the 9 turn will give some flop floats like KT/QT/KQ straight draws that can continue on the turn, if you want to have some hands to bluff on blank rivers.

On to the main event of the hand of the main event: the river. I am not sure what size KQ should pick on the river; it’s trickier than it appears. For chips you’d just shove, but at a final table where getting all in and losing a massive pot is really expensive, it does make sense to pick a smaller size. Picking a size that, if you were bluffing and failed, would leave enough chips behind that you’d still be 6th or 7th in chips make sense to me. Hao’s river size might be a tiny bit large for my liking, but it’s fine.

The river shove from AT, on the other hand, is totally insane. He doesn’t even have a combo of AT that blocks a combo of JT suited. The ten blocker really doesn’t do much for John; I’d be shocked to see Hao show up with TT to this action. John doesn’t have an appropriate hand to shove the river, but it’s possible that he just had a read. He saw the small non all-in bet size, decided Hao was scared and he could get a fold, and went for it. He shoved rather quickly in what is possibly the biggest pot he ever played in his life and got the fold, which brings me to Hao’s fold.

I don’t know how much Hao has played with John ever or in this tournament, but if someone is capable of showing up with a hand like AT here, which is not just a crazy river bluff, but a questionable flop call and losing turn call, then you also need to be extremely confident that not only is John never running a crazy bluff, but that he’s never shoving a worse jack or KQ himself.¹ If he’s not opening JTo preflop, he only has 8 combos of value and you are getting such good pot odds, that if he shoves AJ half the time, you need to call. If he is opening JTo (or 22) preflop, he has more value hands in his range, but it becomes harder to peg him as a tight guy who never bluffs. Hao simply needs to call the river.

What The Solver Says

Whether Hao or John were playing solver poker or street poker, I was shocked to find out that the solver actually likes many of the plays in this hand. The flop looks okay all around. AT bets the flop 61% of the time and John’s exact combo bets 90% of the time. KQ without a backdoor is a low-frequency check-raise, and the combos that like check-raising the most are the ones that block KJs and QJs, but even this combo still check-raises 12% of the time. AK never folds the flop vs. a check-raise; AQ rarely does, and AT often does, but usually needs a heart in their hand, such that OOP has a full array of hands with BDFDs, to have just enough equity to continue.

The most common turn size used for the SB on the turn is 30%, but KQ is a high-frequency bet and 54% pot is commonly used. I’ll also note that the SB never gets to the river with TT because they block-bet the turn with it, but TT is a hand that will check-raise the flop and bet the turn occasionally from the SB, so tens full is a real hand that the SB can have on the river. AT doesn’t pure fold on the turn; it stubbornly mixes continues, while AQ pure folds and AK mixes as well. Ace-high hands as weak as A3, A4, A8 mix turn calls, and A5-A7 regularly mix turn raises that they pair with AJ, the one value hand that IP raises.

Which brings us to the river. The solver very much does not want to get all-in on the river. The biggest size OOP picks is 50% pot, and it mostly sticks to betting 10% or 25% pot. OOP’s bluffs are rather hard to find; they give up with turned straight draws that pair on the river, so the only river bluffs are some suited aces (A3s/A4s) and kings (K7s) that make some pretty loose turn barrels, and some small pocket pairs (33,44). So one reason OOP can’t bet big on the river is because of ICM pressure, but another is they just don’t have enough bluffs in their range to bet big.

The river gets pretty wacky for the in-position player vs. a half pot bet. Every jack mixes folds, but KK and QQ never fold. AJ and KQ sometimes shove the river, mostly as a bluff to get the other player to fold … AJ and KQ. The other common bluffs for the in-position player are T9s, K9s, Q9s, KK and QQ. So KQ is indifferent vs. a shove because it’s more or less a pure bluff-catcher; you need to fold some value bets some of the time, and AJ has better blocker value because it blocks full houses.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, this hand was better played from a theoretical standpoint than I initially expected. Some of the plays I thought were questionable turned out to be relatively high-frequency plays, especially the turn call from AT high. However, I still think the river is poorly played from both. When you get to an extremely specific narrow range spot, it’s highly unlikely that any given player will be totally balanced. ATo is such a loose shove, that it’s not like KQ ran into the “one bluff” that the other player can have. I did not see John play throughout the entire tournament, but I suspect there were some warning signs he was capable of this sort of play, and Hao should have been able to sniff it out and find the call. On the flip side, if John sensed weakness and pounced on it, good for him, but he might have just gotten lucky. Hao never bets all-in with range on the river; was his small bet a sign of weakness or a sign he understood the spot? Either way, AT is simply not the right combo to bluff-raise the river with. It doesn’t block much value from Hao-- it blocks AJ but also blocks some ace-high hands that Hao could be bluffing the river with. This is a river spot where John is supposed to be bluffing maybe 20% of the time total and has fewer than 10 value combos, so he really needs to be careful about not over-bluffing the river. If he has 3 bluff combos, he’s bluffing too often, and if he’s bluffing with ATo here, I’d have to imagine he’s bluffing substantially more than 3 combos. Without knowing their river thought processes, it’s hard to give them a grade, but given my overall flop/turn strategies were a little too tight here, I will show them some grace and give them a grade slightly worse than the floor error in not colouring up.

C

1. Since I wrote my final draft of this post, I was told that John had a notable hand earlier in the tournament bursting the money bubble with Q5o vs AA.