POTD #239 I Make a Live Read in The Silver Main Event
But I don't follow through
When people classify great poker players, they tend to oversimplify what “type” of player someone is. All great players are chameleons, maniacs play tight on the bubble, and nits know when to leverage their table image to get a bluff through. I am someone who is pegged as an inflexible solver robot, and part of what I am trying to accomplish with POTD is showing how flexible my poker game can be in practice. Sound fundamentals and solver baselines create a structure that allows me to think of what the ideal max-exploit strategies in the long and short run are. When I am playing my A-Game, I know what the solver’s answer to a problem is, but I trust my intuition to deviate, and I go back to my solver knowledge to determine what the best deviation is.
I know that few people think of me as being a live-read guy, but I use them, I just I weight them less then other information. I believe that when you play a poker hand, you are receiving tons of information, and it’s your job to filter out the information that does and does not matter. I tend to focus on objective pieces of information, such as the bet sizing, preflop positions, and the action in the hand, because they are objective pieces of information that I rarely get wrong and help me solve the puzzle of the hand. When I am under time pressure, I tend to focus on the information that I know is accurate and go from there. However, I’ve played thousands of hours of live poker, and I have developed intuition and when I notice that something doesn’t quite feel right. I pay attention to it; however, I’ve been wrong enough times in my life that I revert to fundamentals to determine how large a deviation I am willing to make. A live read might be enough to get me to fold QQ preflop, but it will rarely get me to fold KK preflop. Today, I will be pairing a hand where famed live-read expert Chance Kornuth made a bad read in the WSOP Main Event in POTD #88, and I’ll be comparing it to a hand I played in the “Silver Main Event” in Triton Jeju, where I made a correct live read, but I did not have enough confidence to go with it.
Triton Jeju 2024 Event #3 25K NLH 8-Handed - Silver Main
(5k/10k/10k (SB/BB/BBA)
It folds to Motoyoshi Okamura (423k) in the HJ who makes it 20k, it folds to Cristoph Vogelsang (186k) who calls in the SB, I call (473k) A♦️7♠️ in the BB.
Flop (70k) K♦️7♣️6♣️: Cristoph checks, I check, Okamura bets 25k, Cristoph folds, I call.
Turn (120k) 2♥️: I check, Okamura bets 100k, I call.
River (320k) 8♦️: I check, he checks, I lose to A♣️K♣️.
