POTD #242 EPT Barcelona: I Make a Thin Value Block and get Raised. Easy Fold?

On this day it was not.

Sometimes when I pair hands that others played with hands I’ve played, it’s a real struggle to find a good match, but not today. Today I’ll pair POTD #220, a hand where Andrew Lichtenberger blocked the river with top pair, got raised, called and was shown a straight, with a hand where I did the exact same thing at EPT Barcelona. Four-straight and four-flush boards are very difficult to play for some technical reasons, but also some psychological reasons. People tend to like bluffing when they have a reason to bluff: a blocker, a range advantage, a read. On four-straight boards like T9872, if someone is never folding a jack, your bluff’s success is often a function of whether your opponent has a jack, and that’s not something you can control. You can know someone is less likely to have QJ on AKT if you have QQ. On T987, it requires a bit more work to determine if you block a one-card straight, since the key blocker is one that gives you a straight yourself. You need to map out which Jx combos they are most likely to have, and what sidecards in your hand depress the number of Jx combos they might have. Then you need to hope that your logic is correct and your opponent doesn’t have a straight. It’s a nervy bluff to make, when you often are snap-called in situations where your opponent doesn’t even need to look at both of their cards.

Computers don’t need to guess what are the best side cards; they know. They also know when straights are rare enough hands that one player might be able to value-block with top pair, or value bet half pot with a set, or raise the low end of the straight. As solver poker has proliferated, we are seeing many more advanced plays— thin value-bets, bluff raises, bluff three-bets— on these kinds of boards. However, they’re still hands that are ripe for humans to make all sorts of errors. In POTD #220, I concluded that Andrew Lichtenberger made a couple errors; in POTD #242, we will see if I did the same.

2024 PokerStars EPT Barcelona €30,000 Super High Roller Warm Up
(8k/16k/16k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. Registration has just closed.

It folds to Maher Nouira (835k) who makes it 35k in the LJ, it folds to me (1.2M) in the SB who calls with K♦️T♠️, the BB folds.

Flop (102k) T♥️9♥️2♠️: I check, Maher checks.
Turn (102k) 8♣️: I check, Maher checks.
River (102k) 7♣️: I bet 16k , Maher makes it 85k, I call and lose to A♠️J♦️.

What I Was Thinking
Preflop, my hand is too weak to three-bet; I could fold it, but for whatever reason I decided to call. I don’t play leads on the flop. If I’m mixing preflop folds with JT, QT and KTo and he’s almost always opening them, he’s going to have a top pair advantage on this flop and I should mostly check.

On the turn, I figured I’d bet my more robust top pair hands, hands like JT and QT that also have a straight draw, but I figured that KT was slightly too weak to bet, so I checked and waited to see what the river would do to my hand. Not the ideal river of course, but I still should be up against a decent amount of middle-pair hands. If I check and face a bet, I’m in a tricky situation, so I decided to block 1bbb for value and to slow down Maher. He raised me, and now I am in that tricky situation I tried so hard to avoid. I figured I should beat all his bluffs and lose to all his value raises, so I was trying to figure out how the king kicker interacted with his potential straights. I figured that of his unpaired Jx, he’d almost always bet the flop and turn with QJ, so I could fold a hand like QT that doesn’t block any of his value raises. But I figured that KdJd and Kd6d were both hands he could credibly have, and I need to call with some hands after betting 15% pot on the river. So I thought KT without a heart was a pretty good combo to call with and I did.

What I Got Wrong

Preflop is a mix between call and fold. I decided to call. As we were two big stacks and registration just closed, I should have folded. I was correct about my turn strategy: AT’s kicker is strong enough that I mostly bet it, and QT has enough backup that I mix bets, but KT and, oddly, JT are close to pure checks. On the river, every top pair mixes blocking 1bb. There are no combos that pure bet, and a block serves a couple purposes: It can get called by 9x / 8x / 7x, but it also might cause Maher to just call on the river with hands as strong as sets and 6x, hands that would bet larger than 1bb when facing a check. Betting 1bb and getting just-called by a set is better than checking and facing a 3bb bet from the same hand.

Of course, the downside of betting 1bb is, I might get raised, and then I might need to put 5 or more bbs in the pot on the river. The boring answer on the river is that once I block and I get raised, two pair and top pair except for QT mix calling. Certain suits have preferences for calling more or less often. I prefer calling with the Kh because Kh6h is the solver’s most common K6 combo, but I highly doubt that’s true of any human players in this situation. If anything, the opposite is true, and I’d imagine my hand is a better hand to call with than KhTx. My combo also occasionally three-bets the river, and I suspect my three-betting range on the river would have too much Qx because it blocks the nuts, but that doesn’t doesn’t make all that much sense because he rarely has QJ. It seems like 99 is the superstar three-bet-bluff-raising candidate, because J9 is one of his most common Jx hands, and he never bluff-raises the river with a nine himself.

Types of Error
Calling station (or maybe I was just unlucky)

Grade

I wrote about the theory of whether I should call a river raise above, but like many river raise spots, this really is a question of, is Maher bluffing enough or not? Some of his bluffs here are relatively easy to find, hands like AK/AQ/KQ occasionally raising; some are much trickier to find, such as hands like 55, 44, 33 and A2s-A5s raising the river. My general instinct in these spots is that people usually need a reason to bluff-raise the river, and in spots where one might not have obvious blockers or reasons to raise, people are probably not bluff-raising enough. When you combine this with the fact that A6 and 66 mix just calling the river in position, I think it’s possible that Maher is raising a little wider than the solver because he anticipates I won’t three-bet the river enough. These all lead me to believe that while I played the hand fine up to the river, I probably should have just folded on the river, but it’s hardly a disastrous call.

B-