POTD #228 Winning Wednesday: Busting Bullet 1 to David Peters in Jeju
"But I had the perfect blockers"
One of the best pieces of poker advice I’ve ever gotten was from Justin Bonomo, who noted that, generally, when players announce their reads on the population, they’re often talking about how they play. If someone says “no one ever bluffs in this spot,” they’re telling you what they think of how other people play, but they also are telling you “I never bluff in this spot.” When I wrote about Ryuta Nakai bluffing Jesse Lonis in POTD #194 and noted that a lot of people bluff in this spot, many people disagreed with me. I still believe that spot is frequently bluffed, at least relative to the pot odds we need to call with a bluff catcher. However, it caused me to think back on my own poker career and times where I may have been bluffing too much or not enough in that spot. Perhaps I felt that spot was overbluffed because I myself was overbluffing it.
So over the next two days, we will turn back the clock to July 31st and August 1st, 2018, where in a span of six levels, I made two very ambitious river bluff-raises with blockers. Today’s hand will also be part of Winning Wednesday, where I write about hands I played in the early levels of a tournament I ended up doing well in. Specifically, this hand joins the annals of Winning Wednesday hands where I torched my first “practice” bullet only to rebound and succeed on my second entry.
Part of being a balanced poker player means that sometimes you should find several very aggressive plays in a short period of time. If I never raised with a hand that should raise 5% of the time because I just raised with a hand that raises 5% of the time, my strategy would become predictable and easy to exploit. It’s a tricky “I know, that you know, that I know” balancing act. I think the first principle here is that if someone finds a rare bluff, it usually means they’re a bluff-happy player, which means you should rarely fold to them. However, if that same bluff-happy player is, let’s coin a term and call them a shy bluffer, meaning they underbluff after getting caught bluffing, or maybe even just after they’ve shown a lot of aggression in general, because they think their opponents won’t give them any credit. Then the bluff catcher can start overfolding until enough time has passed that the shy bluffer is ready to bluff again. Whatever was going on in Jeju in 2018, I was not a shy bluffer, I was prepared to do a lot of bluffing even after I got caught.
Triton Jeju 2018 - NLHE Main Event 2M HKD $255K
(1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA). Registration is Open. Starting Stack 250k.
It folds to David Peters in the LJ (290k) who makes it 5k, I call in the SB (183k) with 7♦️6♦️, the BB folds.
Flop (14k) 9♦️7♥️5♠️: I check, David bets 4k, I call.
Turn (22k) 5♣️: I check, David bets 24k, I call.
River (70k) 2♦️: I check David bets 87k, I shove for 141.5k total, David calls with J♥️J♣️.
