POTD #229 Bluffing Tan Xuan in a Jeju $2M HKD
Famously one of the easiest players in poker to bluff.
There are certain players everyone remembers their first time playing against. I remember playing with Phil Hellmuth in a WSOP side event as he berated everyone at the table for playing terribly and bluffed off his entire stack, and having a recreational player ask me “does he always play that bad?” as Hellmuth stormed off into the hallways of the Rio. I remember playing “Lodden Thinks” with Antonio Esfandiari and somehow coming out a winner because there was a bigger fish in the game than me. I do not remember my first time playing with Negreanu or Ivey, but I assume it was in an EPT Super High Roller— I’d guess Bahamas for Negreanu and Monte Carlo for Ivey, but if I remember correctly, that was when Ivey was still in Terminator mode at the table and rarely spoke.
One player I definitely remember playing against for the first time was Tan Xuan. I was told by people who had played in private live games or Chinese App games vs. him that he was sort of the Asian Ivey. His fundamentals weren’t the sharpest, but his reads were on point and he was fearless, and he had made a killing, enough so that it was unclear if it was worth his time to even play the $500k HKD (~60k USD) warmup tournament in Triton Jeju 2018. Triton was not the operation it is today, and Tan was not the star he’d become. When he unbagged his chips next to me at the start of day 2 of the $2M HKD Main Event, I thought, look, I am sure this guy is great, but I just bagged the chip lead, and I was prepared to tangle with him. I was going to show him solver and exploitative tricks he’d never seen in the cash games running in the smoke-filled backrooms of Shinhwa World. I decided to run a big bluff against him that fortunately worked; it bolstered my chip lead and put me on the path to final table the tournament. Was this a good exploit vs. a player whom I was an unknown to, or a lucky punt that achieved a miraculous outcome— getting Tan Xuan to fold?
Triton Jeju 2018 - NLHE Main Event 2M HKD $255K
(3k/6k/6k) (SB/BB/BBA) Registration is open. Starting Stack 250k.
It folds to Xuan Tan in the HJ (350k) who makes it 15k, I (900k) call on the button with K♦️4♦️, everyone else folds.
Flop (45k) A♦️J♣️2♦️: Tan bets 20k, I call.
Turn (85k) 6♠️: Tan checks, I check.
River (85k) Q♠️: Tan bets 55k, I make it 275k, Tan time bank folds, I show him the 4♦️
What I Was Thinking
I did not know much about Tan at the time. I knew he’d won a ton of money in private games in Asia and was a very sticky, tough player. I figured that a western solver pro, like myself, could flat wide on the button and outplay him postflop, so I expanded my range a little by calling Kd4d. On the flop, I figured Tan was likely c-betting too often, and I wanted to keep his air in the hand in case I improved to the nuts. On the turn, I did not want to bet-fold the turn and was not sure what I was specifically trying to target with a bluff, so I decided to check back.
On the river, I had a highly technical poker thought, “hey, I block the nuts, that’s pretty cool.” I also had an exploitative poker thought; I thought that Tan thought that I would view him as a wild card and I would not bluff him. So I thought he would not give me credit for running a big bluff here, and with a nut blocker I could get him to make some pretty big folds, so I decided to go for it, and fortunately the bluff went through.
What I Got Wrong
I thought preflop was a loose exploit vs. Tan, but it looks like it’s a mix for chips vs. a smaller raise size, and Tan is a loose opener who is live to have a bunch of non-solver approved opens, so my call is fine. On the flop, range vs. range equity is around 51/49 and Tan does a lot of checking, but when I give him one flop c-bet size, he bets just over 20% of the time. When facing a bet, my most common bluff-raises are Jx, flush draws, and gutshots; king-high flush draws mostly call the flop. On the turn, most king-high flush draws mix, but they greatly prefer betting to checking. This is because I can fold out better hands right away, build the pot if I river the nuts, and most importantly, I should rarely get check-raised all-in, so I can almost always see a river.
On the river, my primary size is all-in, and while my minimum value raise is AQ, my most common one is KT. The problems with my river raise are as follows: I want to bluff the river with a ten or a king, but unless I have exactly TT, I want to bluff the river with a pair, such that I block hands like two pair and sets myself, while also potentially unblocking some of Tan’s bluffs like Kd3d or 5d4d. Usually if there is a spot where someone bluff-raises the river and is representing the nuts, they have many more potential bluff hands with a blocker or two than actual combos of the nuts, and it’s a spot where I need to have a value bet more than 60% of the time to make Tan indifferent to calling with a bluff-catcher. Simply put, having just one king is not enough, and the Kd may be the worst king to be bluffing with.
The other thing I got wrong in this hand was, while I tried to exploit Tan by making a big river bluff raise in a spot where I felt he’d give me too much credit, I failed to miss the more obvious solver-approved exploits. Tan tends to c-bet too wide, especially out of position and with the middle of his range, and even more so back in 2018. The best way to exploit someone like that is to start raising the flop (a minority solver play) and betting the turn (a majority solver play). If my goal was to not to play a big pot vs. the Asian Ivey, I could have folded the river or folded preflop, but if I wanted to muck it up in the streets with Tan, I did not play the hand in the best way.
Types of Error
Missed exploit: I should have raised the flop or bet the river
Bad river bluff: Wrong combo
Grade
The hand I’m pairing with today’s hand is POTD #185, a hand where someone made an ambitious river raise with the wrong blocker and got someone to fold a straight. Today I raised the river with a blocker representing a straight, but in a spot where around 25% of my river range has a straight blocker and 5% of my river range is a straight. So it’s a spot where it’s really easy to over-bluff. I know I was likely over-bluffing the river, but I was also likely getting to the river with too many bluff combos, given I did not raise the flop or bet the turn. I was arriving at the river with too many bluffs and had one of the worst possible blocker combos to bluff raise the river with when I would much rather have had a pair or at least no diamond. However, I do think my read was right that Tan would read a river raise from me in the situation as being strong, and he did not think I would try to bluff a guy with a reputation as being a rich nosebleed player who doesn’t care about money. So, much like beating Antonio Esfandiari in “Lodden Thinks” the first time I played with him, I do think I got one over on Tan and deserve credit for that. However, all that goodwill was squandered when I proudly windmilled over the four diamonds, Tan is not the guy you want to goad on; he will get his payback.
C