POTD #240 Final Table Friday: I Make a Cowardly River Call on a $665,000 Bubble.
Artur Martirosian blocks and I just call with a straight.
There is always a bit of whiplash when you play a nine handed final table in an eight handed tournament. You made the final two tables and saw your table slowly whittle from eight players to five players. You are getting used to playing more hands and in live tournaments having more physical space. Then one player gets knocked out, there is a redraw and you’re touching knees and elbows and asking yourself questions like “Do I just need to fold TT here?”. This is even more true in tournaments with action clocks, where the clock takes up a lot of physical space on the table. In an ideal scenario you’d at least have made the money at this point and you’d be getting compensated for being crammed like a crammed sardine, but sometimes you run the risk of having two unpleasant things happening. You risk being physically uncomfortable and bubbling a poker tournament; an all around disaster. Last week on Winning Wednesday I wrote about how I liked tournaments that close registration when the day ends because you can go to sleep knowing you won’t re-enter the tournament. Today we return to the same day of the same tournament where the odd scheduling had another side effect, it was becoming increasingly likely that we would not play down to the money today or if we did, we’d play deep into the morning. Which brings us to today’s hand a stressful hand at a cramped final table full of people anticipating a late night.
I’ll be pairing today’s hand vs Artur Martirosian with POTD #164 a hand where I wrote that I felt David Coleman should have just called on the river because he’d often be value betting vs a chop and opened the door up for him to get rebluffed by an aggressive and unpredictable player. In today’s POTD I look at the opposite side of the coin, a hand where I just called on the river vs an aggressive and unpredictable player when we were both under a reasonable amount of ICM pressure, but in hindsight, I may have over-corrected and gone too far.
PSPC $250,000 Super High Roller
(10k/20k/20k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. 9 Left 6 Cash.
6th: 665k, 5th: 855k, 4th: 1.092M, 3rd: 1.472M, 2nd: 2.137M, 1st: 3.277M
I (1.54M) make it 50k from UTG with 9♠️ 9♥️, Cristoph Vogelsang (355k) folds, Orpen (920k) folds, Chris Brewer (1.07M) folds, David Yan (2.25M) folds, Byron Kaverman (480k) folds, Justin Bonomo (1.12M) folds, Jean Noel Thorel (615k) folds, Artur Martirosian (1.38M) BB calls
Flop (130k) J♥️T♣️7♦️: Artur checks, I check
Turn (130k) T♠️ : Artur bets 75k, I call
River (280k) 8♣️: Artur bets 55k, I call and beat Q♦️Q♥️
