POTD #248 Pocket Kings Three Bets and Sees an Ugly Flop
What's the best way to proceed in the $125k London Main Event?
Twenty years ago, the online poker boom created many professional poker players, but today, it has created almos as many former poker professional players. Despite what Benjamin Rolle says on Twitter, poker has gotten a lot harder. Many of the former professional poker players cut their teeth in games where simple strategies, repeated consistently, would all but guarantee that you’d be a winner in the long run. A tool in those players’ toolbox that was used constantly was the humble c-bet. Most players responded to facing a c-bet by overfolding and underraising, which meant that c-betting anything was usually the best play.
A linguistic way to look at how profitable c-betting was is to dig into the word “float.” Floating was a designed play: You float the flop with the plan of taking the pot away on the turn. People did not tend to do it systematically; it was a psychological play designed to trick your opponent by feigning strength. I can’t have nothing, I called your bet. Nowadays, floating is much more systematic, but the actual word “float” has mostly disappeared from poker jargon. If you have QdJc on Th7c3c, you are not “floating” the flop, you are “pure calling” in the way you’d “pure call” a river shove with a set. It’s not an optional play to set up a future bluff if you feel like it; it’s a mandatory play akin to opening jacks preflop.
When the average player’s strategy was not regimented, many of them would turn mandatory floats into optional floats. This allowed the aggressor to always bet, auto profit on the flop, and figure out the rest of the hand later. Nowadays, your small bet is not generating nearly enough folds, which means your auto-bet might just build a pot that can get stolen from you later in the hand. On POTD, I’ve spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of checking, especially when you’re OOP and especially multiway, but like many things in poker, the real skill is in finding a balanced strategy. Today, we will look at a hand where I thought I found a savvy solver check, but the unsophisticated 2006 just-bet strategy was probably ideal.
2023 Triton London $125k Main Event Event #11.
2k/5k/5k (SB/BB/BBA) Starting Stack 250k. Registration is Open
It folds to the HJ where Pablo Brito Silva (437k) makes it 12k, it tolds to me in the BB (267k) with K♦️K♣️ and I make it 52k, he calls.
Flop (111k) T♥️7♥️4♥️: I check, Pablo checks.
Turn (111k) 3♥️: I bet 25k, Pablo calls.
River (161k) 9♦️: I check, Pablo checks, I lose to A♣️Q♥️.
