POTD #234 Top Pair in The Vietnam Main Event vs Justin Bonomo
Shortly after Tết my play was not Tip Top.
When I first started playing poker, not being results oriented often meant something as simple as “I know their KK beat your AA, but you just got unlucky” to “I know they had AA when you had KK, but you played it well” to “Just because you won the pot doesn’t mean you played it well.” On this very blog, I’ve advocated that there are often times people should be more results-oriented; if you face a triple check-raise line, your opponent is likely not balanced, and rushing to look up the hand in a solver might not tell you much about how you should have played that hand.
I still believe you should look up those spots to learn what the solver baselines are and how the spot should play, but I still believe once you’ve gotten past the initial stage of “Should I have folded AK, it lost to QQ?” you should be results- and process-oriented. What’s tricky about how not being results-oriented plays into solver poker is that many of the technical mistakes you’ll make are at the margins, and you’ll only get punished for those mistakes if your opponent happens to have a hand that’s capable of capitalizing on your errors. A simple example of this is value betting too thin on the river: It can only be a costly mistake if your opponent has you beat or bluffs you, which will happen less often than not.
In today’s hand, we are going to compare a hand I played to POTD #203, a hand where Adam Owen value bet the river too large and too thin and opened up the door for Shina Okamoto to bluff him with a hand one pip worse than his. Adam’s big punt in this hand was making a greedy value bet that ended up putting a lot of stress on his hand; had he bet smaller, Shina would have been more likely to call than raise, and Adam might have been more likely to call a raise. Adam overbet the river when he should have blocked, and today we are going to look at a hand where I bet full pot when I should have bet smaller, but the main lesson of our hand is the same. If you bet big a couple pips too wide for value, you open the door for an opportunistic player to make you play a pot much bigger than your hand is comfortable with. Fortunately for me, I ran into a worse hand and I was not forced to test the limits of my hand’s strength.
Triton Vietnam 2023 - Event #9 $100,000 NLH - Main Event
(2K/4K/4K) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. Registration is Open.
It folds to me (403k) on the button, I make it 10k with 9♣️8♦️, it folds to Justin Bonomo (462k) who calls in the BB.
Flop (26k) 8♣️4♠️2♥️: Justin checks, I bet 26k, Justin calls.
Turn (78k) K♠️: Justin checks, I check.
River (78k) 4♣️: Justin checks, I bet 40k, Justin calls, I table my hand and Justin mucks.
