POTD #252 I Bluff with Nut Low
and get rebluffed by two pips better.
Tournament poker players need to be generalists. It’s hard to master 10bb poker and it’s hard to master 200bb poker, but you need to try your best to do both. You also need to figure out 50bb poker, 75bb poker when there’s a 10bb stack in the big blind, and I haven’t even mentioned tournament factors. Cash game players tend to be specialists: They know how to play 100bbs deep and have mastered it; they might not have mastered, say, 125bb play, but the difference between 100bb play and 125bb play is much smaller than the difference between 25bb and 50bb play.
When you are a generalist playing vs. an expert and you’re in their area of expertise, you need to be prepared for trouble. Tournament players have traditionally had an easy adjustment to make when playing deep vs. deep stack specialists. They play very defensively and sacrifice EV, but make it less likely they make a blunder in a giant pot. Let’s say you’re 200bb deep, the button raises in level one of a re-entry tournament, and you have JJ or TT in the BB. The solver almost always three-bets. Humans often just call. They’re concerned about getting four-bet, or playing a three-bet pot OOP on A92 rainbow, or even just playing an overpair with 6x pot behind.
My philosophy in these sorts of spots has been, if you don’t want to make a pure solver play because it makes you uncomfortable, you should try and make yourself feel comfortable making that play. That means studying the spot, but it also means practicing implementing it in real poker hands so you can get reps playing vs. real opponents. Exposure is the only way to make you feel more comfortable. When I play Tritons, I am often playing deep-stacked NLH vs. more experienced and better deep-stacked players than me, but I am a fighter. I don’t want to play defensively and hope to get to showdown. I want to win, and that means sometimes I’m going to get knocked out.
In today’s Wrecked Week hand, we return to Jeju, where I bluff the river with five high and get raised by fearless deep-stacked NL specialist Rui Cao’s six high. If you bluff nut low and get raised by third nut low, you probably did something wrong. Let’s dig into it.
Triton Jeju 2018 - Main Event $2M HKD ($255K USD)
(1k/2.5k/2.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250K Starting Stack. Registration is Open.
It folds to Rui Cao (448k/180BBs) on the button who makes it 6k, it folds to me (365k/146BBs) in the BB who calls 5♦️3♦️.
Flop (16k) Q♦️4♣️2♥️: I check, Rui bets 6.5k, I make it 21k, Rui calls.
Turn (58k) K♣️: I bet 16k, Rui calls.
River (90k) T♥️: I bet 22k, Rui makes it 150k, I fold. On stream I see he has 6♣️5♠️
