POTD #226 Monte Carlo Monday: A Three Way Pot Between Three Big Stacks

Wai Leong Chan, Thomas Boivin and myself tangle in the Triton Main Event

When I started writing POTD, I had all sorts of ideas. I wanted to use the Substack “tag” system to categorize every hand. Was it a single raised pot? Deep stacked? Near the money? Was I bluffing or value betting? By meticulously tagging each post, I’d allow the readers of POTD to click on tags and read every blog where I, say, missed a value bet while deep-stacked in a Triton tournament vs. a pro.

Another idea that I intermittently implemented was pairing hands that I wrote about, but were not played by me, with hands that I played myself. A critique I get when I write about other people’s hands is that I am being unfair to them, getting to play armchair quarterback while they’re playing for real money. In most cases, I’m aware of the mistakes others have made because I have made them myself, so over the next couple weeks, I am going to be doing some catching up. I have hands that I wrote about as early as POTD #51 and as recently as POTD #220 that I have not paired with a hand. Over the next few weeks, I will be looking back at some old blogs and writing about some new hands. I hope you will learn from the mistakes of myself and others.

I’ll begin by pairing a hand that Maria Konnikova sent me in POTD #178. In the hand, Maria played a three-way pot where she ended up getting in a little too much money with a big combo draw on the turn. However, my main note on that hand was that I felt Maria should have check-raised the flop, because in multiway pots you tend to play very aggressively as a preflop raiser facing a bet and call. In today’s hand, I made a dicey flop peel in that exact same situation, and it led me to an equally marginal turn spot. Sometimes playing multi-way pots puts you in tricky situations that are tough to avoid, but I do not think today was one of those hands. Read on to see how I could have avoided making the same blunder Maria made.

Triton Monte-Carlo 2024 $125K NLH MAIN EVENT
(10k/15k/15k) Starting Stack 250k. Registration is Closed. 53 left. 27 cash.

I (800k) have 9♠️9♥️ UTG8 and make it 35k, it folds to Wai Leong Chan (880k) who calls in the CO, Thomas Boivin (800k) calls on the button, Ding Biao (115k) folds in the BB.

Flop (145K) T♠️6♠️2♣️: I check, Wai Leong bets 35k, Boivin calls, I call.
Turn (280k) T♣️: I check, Wai Leong bets 100k, Boivin folds, I call.
River (480k) 7♥️: I check, Wai Leong checks and I lose to J♠️J♥️.