POTD #231 Monte Carlo Monday: Bottom Set Three Ways
No one is folding. What do I do?
One of the Main Event Lessons that I expanded on in Week In Review #45 was “Small bets carry a lot of weight in multiway pots.” I kept the wording the same as the Run It Once series the lesson came from, but in hindsight, I wish I phrased the lesson a little differently, so I’ll do that now. The main leak I see in multiway pots in Main Events is, people are so obsessed with denying their opponent’s equity, so they make large bets on connected boards. The problem is, when you make large bets into several players on connected boards, you end up tightening up your range and their range, so much so that hands like top pair often want to fold to a flop bet. And if the board runs out in a way where a lot of draws fill, so much money will have gone into the pot that neither player will really have any credible bluffs, and players might need to start hero-folding or making hero check-backs with hands as strong as two-card flushes relatively often.
Small bets carry a lot of weight in multiway pots, but so do big bets. If you want to deny equity from your opponent, a small bet will do just fine, so I feel the lesson should have been rephrased “If you want to deny equity from your opponents, a small bet will do just fine.” A hand I discussed in that Run It Once series and also on POTD was Brad Owen’s bustout hand in the WSOPME (POTD #94). In that hand, I discussed Brad betting too large into two people with a very strong draw and getting all in vs. a stronger pair-plus-draw hand that had him dominated. He should have found a way to get less money in the pot with his hand and his range, such that he would have stayed in the tournament when he missed his big combo draw. However, for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction: You do play more cautiously in multiway pots, especially when c-betting. Today, we will look at a hand that I played totally fine, but my instincts about how my range was supposed to play this spot were way off. Sometimes you are supposed to do a lot of c-betting in multiway pots, even when you see a flop that appears to be good for other players in the hand.
Triton Monte-Carlo 2023 - Event #7 $30K NLH 7-Handed
(3k/6k/6k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration is open.
I (405K) have 9♥️9♣️ and raise to 13k, it folds to Ding Biao (244k) who calls in the SB and Kiat Lee (280k) who calls in the BB.
Flop (45k)Q♣️ J♥️9♠️: Ding checks, Kiat checks, I bet 15k, Ding raises to 45k, Kiat cold-calls, I make it 120k, Ding shoves 231k, Kiat folds, I call. Ding has K♠️T♠️, I river a queen, and Kiat told me he folded QJ.
