I am flying to Korea this week to play Triton Jeju. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you can do so for one month at the cheapest rate I’ve ever offered, $1 here. If you’d like to read about how the POTD schedule will be changing when I’m in Korea, you can do so here. If you’d like to become a Premium Subscriber and see what you get for $300/year. I am rerunning some of those speciality posts this week and you can see what you are missing. Today I am including the conclusion to what I called “Idiot Week”, hands where I was confident my opponent played their hand like an idiot, but I was wrong. Today Sami “LarsLuzak” Kelopuro value bet ace high on the river and was called by my queen high. Read all about it below. Search for #onemorething, if you’d like to just read the premium content.
The difference between encountering an idiotic play live vs online is quite stark. Live, you might get an eyeroll out of me or some grumbling. If you come talk to me ten minutes later I might not be paying attention because I am in a fugue state still thinking about that moronic play from last orbit. Online, I’ll be more demonstrative, no one can hear me yell in my home. However I don’t have time to dwell about the idiocy of my opponents. By the time I finish bellyaching I’ll have a fresh hand vs a fresh idiot waiting to take my money. It’s imperative to lockdown and focus, you can tag your opponent as a fish and save the hand history for further study. You might even have enough time to send the HH to a friend to say “get a load of this moron”, but you need to keep playing.
Today is a hand I remember well, I went to my cottage in Quebec to play WCOOP events on Pokerstars. It was a beautiful fall day outside and I was surrounded by nature, so I did what one is supposed to do on a day like that and chained myself to a desk so I could play online poker tournaments. One would think that being surrounded by serene natural beauty would prevent me from thinking ill thoughts about my fellow man, but you lose one pot and your primal instincts come out. It was a small stakes hand in a small stakes tournament, but one that I vividly remember two and a half years later.
This is the first Friday without a Final Table Friday post. The reason for this is because this Idiot Week hand was supposed to be POTD #255, but then I wanted to run POTD #257 the Octopi hand vs George this week and I had one too many idiot week hands and had to do some shuffling and decided POTD #255 worked just as well in Wrecked Week. I tell you this to remind you that starting next week I will be writing three punts per week and I do not intend to have 1/3rd of my hands be Final Table hands from now on, so get used to seeing some mild format changes as Punt of the Day enters its second year.
PokerStars Hand #246233000558: Tournament #3650077788, $1000+$50 USD Hold’em No Limit - Level VI (250/500/50) - 2023/09/28 14:51:14 ET
Table ‘3650077788 2’ 8-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: Sam Greenwood (10200 in chips)
Seat 2: kevenppn (39965 in chips)
Seat 3: berny9623 (22690 in chips)
Seat 4: Lrslzk (18832 in chips)
Seat 5: TEENageTuRtL (27446 in chips)
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Sam Greenwood [Ts Qc]
kevenppn: folds
berny9623: folds
Lrslzk: raises 500 to 1000
TEENageTuRtL: folds
Sam Greenwood: calls 500
*** FLOP *** [Kh 7h Kd]
Sam Greenwood: checks
Lrslzk: bets 500
Sam Greenwood: raises 875 to 1375
Lrslzk: calls 875
*** TURN *** [Kh 7h Kd] [8s]
Sam Greenwood: checks
Lrslzk: checks
*** RIVER *** [Kh 7h Kd 8s] [8d]
Sam Greenwood: checks
Lrslzk: bets 2750
Sam Greenwood: calls 2750
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Lrslzk: shows [Ad 3d] (two pair, Kings and Eights)
Sam Greenwood: mucks hand
Lrslzk collected 10750 from pot
What I Was Thinking
My hand is not quite the right hand to three-bet shove preflop and is much too strong to three bet bluff BU vs BB 20 BBs deep. On the flop I figured that I would mostly raise with my continues here and rarely call. I thought that any hand that had two overcards to a 7 and some backdoors would mix flop raises. I’d have rather had a heart in my hand or a hand like JT that can make straight with the K and the 7, but I also figured that vs a button raise QT and QJ high would have enough high card value that they’d mostly continue. So I raised. I got called, I turned nothing and as I usually do when I check-raise total air and don’t improve on the turn. I gave up. On the river I figured my hand was far too strong to bluff and I could start by bluffing hands like 7x with a low kicker, 65, low flush draws or even hands like Qd2d before I started bluffing QT, so I checked.
I checked, faced a half pot bet and figured that I beat all his bluffs, mostly counterfeited two pair, and blocked some potential value bets like Q8,T8,QQ,TT so I called. When I saw Lars turn over A3 I stared at my CPU in a state of confusion. Was he value betting or bluffing? Once I calmed down, I came to the conclusion that he was value betting, but it was clearly a stupid value bet and I should start checking strong to him on the river in the future. So I can punish his obviously stupid and bad value bets.
What I Got Wrong
If we are all 20bbs deep, Lars shoves the button from time to time with hands like A8o, A2s, 22, KQo and QTs and open folds hands like K6o and T8o. Which means I shove less often from the BB, when he can’t play open shoves and minraises tighter. When he doesn’t play shoves and minraises first in with a linear range QTo actually becomes a very high frequency bluff shove all-in from me that is specifically trying to target QJo. The flop resembles POTD #253 in that I play raise or fold with all my continues and QT is a pure raise on the flop with or without a heart. JT is my worst pure continue, while every hand with two cards larger than a 7 and a heart mix raises as well.
My default logic on the turn of if I check-raise total air and don’t improve to a draw I check-fold does not apply here. QT prefers betting the turn with a heart, but every combo bets a good amount and the preferred size is quarter pot. Quarter pot is enough to get some ace high to fold and if the river is a a queen or ten I can comfortably value bet. and hope to get called by a 7, 8, pocket pair, some ace high or a rivered pair that QT likely has pipped. That being said, checking is totally fine. When the river double pairs I mostly stick to bluffing hands that play the board including missed flush draws and counterfeited 7x, but the occasional ten high and nine high combo sneak in there and bluff. When the river goes check-check queen high has over 50% pot share at showdown. It’s far too strong to bluff. Once I check and face a bet every combo with two cards over a 7 mix calling, even T9 high. and 97 high. His most common bluffs are 22-66 so if I don’t have a 6-2 in my hand, I can comfortably call any bet.
Which brings me to his bet. I thought it was a terrible bet, I wasn’t sure if he was value betting or bluffing. Every single ace high hand with a kicker less than 6 pure bets the river for value. A hand like his has 83% equity when I check the river , the only mistake he made on the river was not betting bigger. The solver splits between betting 70% pot and 90% pot on the river. His measly half pot bet left 2-4bbs on the table. It was the type of hand that made me so mad that I immediately copied and pasted the hand history and I could not wait until the end of my session when I could look up the hand and see how poorly this Finnish idiot played this hand. After looking it up, I realized he had played the hand great and I had nothing to be mad about outside of having lost a pot and threw a mini tantrum while losing half my stack in a $1k.
Types of Error
Didn’t consider betting the turn
Didn’t give my opponent credit for finding a great play
Grade
This hand resembles a few of the previous idiot week hands, I missed several tricky plays, but mostly played the hand fine.I could have shoved preflop as an inequal stack bluff and barreled on the turn with queen high nothing on KK87, but my flop checkraise and river call are good. Normally when you call down with queen high it’s in a nuts or air situation. You’re way behind all the value bets, but you beat his six high bluffs. It didn’t seem possible to me that I could call down queen high in a spot where he’s value betting ace high, but I shove so much Ax preflop that I rarely have it to this action and I need to call with some hands that aren’t full houses. I thought that I could never call with queen high if he value bets ace high and he was an idiot for betting so thin, but I should have looked at it from his perspective. He can only value bet ace high, because I can call him with queen, jack, ten and nine high. I think if I were playing A-level poker, I’d have given more thought to jamming preflop or betting the turn, but the rest of this hand is well played, but if I call someone an idiot, even if I am just muttering to myself while playing online, and they found an A-level play themselves, I deserve a demerit
C+
POTD #260 #onemorething
If you look at this in equal stack sims whether it’s GTO Wizard, Lab, or Octopi— QT no heart mostly folds the flop. There are a variety of different reasons for this: in my inequal PIO sim QT has 36% equity on the flop. In GTO Lab inequal it has 34% equity. So even facing the same pure range 20% pot c-bet strategy the extra 2% is enough to push QT into being a check-fold over raising to 3bbs. In GTO Wizard the button plays limps and the limping range is weak enough that QT bounces back up to having 36% equity, however the c-bet size used in GTO Wizard is 33% pot, which is large enough that IP mixes checks and c-bets a slightly polar range. QT still has 36% vs a betting range, it doesn’t want to raise to 4.8bbs on the flop into a more polar c-betting range. The Octopi sim combines both qualities that makes QT an unfavourable continue. A linear preflop range with no limps, which gives QT 34% equity and a larger c-bet/check-raise size to 4.7bbs, so QT no heart folds in Octopi as well.
If you are studying your own play it can be a little tedious to create bespoke sims for each individual hand. If something is a play in some sims and not in others, it’s probably close enough in EV that either play is fine. However, if you have time or if a specific hand is really gnawing at you, I’d recommend doing a personal deep dive beyond what is listed in the big public libraries. My sim today gives a different output than GTO Wizard, Lab, and Octopi. Most importantly it justifies that my flop play is actually a good play :).