POTD #261 Kristen Foxen Folds KK
and Felipe Ketzer shoves QJs and Elton Tsang folds TT and Phillip Sternheimer goes all-in with JJ.
Winter is almost over and most hibernators have woken from their slumber, but if you were still in your den or merely offline last week, you may have missed a hand that took over the poker world. A hand where Kristen Foxen did the unthinkable and folded KK at the final table of the Main Event in Triton Jeju 2026. It’s a tricky hand where every player who entered the pot had a reasonably close decision, and when a hand gets this popular, I know it’s time to give it the POTD of the treatment. However, before I get into the hand, I need to talk a little bit about the discourse surrounding the hand.
I am reminded of a piece of advice I received at summer camp as a teenager: “You can criticize a person for what they did, but do not criticize them for who they are.” Someone playing a poker hand poorly does not make them a bad poker player or a bad person, just as someone playing a poker hand well does not make them a good poker player or person. Every poker player makes mistakes. Sometimes they are technical solver mistakes, sometimes they make a bad read, sometimes they misclick or misread the board. Punt of the Day is not a project for me to dunk on other people for being idiots and playing hands poorly. I think loyal readers know that after 261(!) of these. I am much harsher towards my own play than the play of others when I look at others’ hands. I have written critically of plays made by Seth Davies, Jason Koon, Alex Ponakovs and the winner of this event Ben Tollerene.
What consistently baffles me is how any time anyone’s play gets criticized by anyone, there is a reliable contingent of people saying “Well they are playing high stakes as a pro and you aren’t.” These non high-stakes pros aren’t criticizing the pro or saying they’re unskilled, they’re criticizing a specific one-off play. Everyone makes mistakes; there should not be an Omerta around saying “I think this poker play was bad.” If someone says “I think this person a stupid fish who sucks at poker and also they have bad breath,” feel free to rush to a punter’s defense. Poker is played for high stakes, but it is just a game; people can criticize how someone plays a game.
HH: Triton App
Video of the Hand
Triton Jeju 2026 Main Event (Event #10) $100k NLH
We Are at the 9-Handed Final Table (75k/150k/150k) (SB/BB/BBA)
9th: $335k, 8th: $464k, 7th: $635k, 6th: $870k, 5th: $1.146M, 4th: $1.449M, 3rd: $1.787M, 2nd: $2.535M, 1st: $3.766M
Felipe Ketzer (1.175M) shoves UTG9 with Q♠️J♠️, Elton Tsang (5.375M) calls next to act with T♥️T♦️, Punnat Punsri (5.525M) folds, Phillip Sternheimer (3.775M) goes all-in with J♣️J♦️, Tom Fuchs folds, Kristen Foxen (2.9M) folds K♣️K♠️, Elton folds. Phil scoops, on 9♣️5♥️2♥️K♦️2♠️
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What I Think
This is the rare POTD hand where I am going to talk about the hand from four different perspectives, but for the sake of transparency, here are my original thoughts.
I am running it and will write about it. My guess is that KK is too tight a fold, but calling QQ or AK loses more money than folding KK.
Elton’s call is close and 99 is a fold. Sternheimer’s shove is good because he can get Elton [to fold] a lot and get HU with dead money.
I didn’t even comment on Ketzer’s shove in my tweet because it’s so obviously the right play. He is the tournament short stack with 8bbs; he is about to post 1/8th of his stack as a dead ante and another 1/8th of his stack in the BB. He has a suited broadway, he has to shove. I saw some people suggesting half-stacking, but half-stacking when you post the BB ante the next hand is very dangerous, and if he raised, say, 7 of his 8bbs to avoid posting 1/4 of his stack dead in the BB, then he’d be getting too good a price to fold even to crazy multiway action. He has to shove. This is not the spot to half-stack, but it’s also not the hand to do it with; you’d want to do it with a hand like ATo or KJo that might have sub-10% equity in a multi-way all-in.
Elton’s spot seems very close to me. Calling 8bbs cold with 7 players left behind to act when you will always fold to a re-raise can get very expensive very fast. However, TT is doing very well vs. Ketzer, especially if you think Ketzer is shoving wider because he’s about to post the BB ante, and while I still think I’d fold 99, I am calling TT.
First things first for Phil, I think he needs to play all-in or fold here. If he calls, he will play a very tricky side pot hand vs. Elton, who covers him. Elton can make life really difficult for Phil on any board where he doesn’t flop huge… even a board like, say, 7h6h2c or 543 rainbow is a tough spot for Phil’s jacks, and on a board like AK2 he’ll often end up folding the flop with 10% pot equity. When Phil shoves, he can get Elton to make some big folds. Busting to Elton is not ideal, but when Phil plays a hand here, he’d rather shove and get Elton to fold than flat and be put in a world of pain postflop with 2/3rds pot to play in a massive pot.
So I’ve eliminated flat-calling, which brings us to the next question: Is JJ a good enough hand to shove? Not if Elton is playing like me and folding 99 to a shove the first time around. Elton has Phil dominated or flipping too often and our shove isn’t going through enough. If you think Elton is flatting 88 or AQo the first time around, or if you think Elton is folding AK or QQ to a jam— and I could see those things being true— I like the shove, even if I’m worried that the five people behind us might wake up with KK+, which is why I said so in my initial tweet.
Which brings us to Kristen. At this point if we call all-in, Elton is almost always going to fold, which means there are usually 8BBs in dead overlay in the hand, which is rather nice. It also means we probably only bust the tournament when Phil beats us, unless Elton wakes up with AA or makes a really loose call with AK or QQ and bad beats us. When we are knocked out, we will usually get at least one pay jump. My instinct in these spots is that even very skilled recreational players like Phil don’t quite get just how tight these spots are to play, and/or they have so much money that they’re willing to throw away mid-five figures to go trophy hunting, which is a reasonable thing to do if you’re playing $100ks for sport This seems like a spot where if all the conditions line up perfectly it might be a marginally winning fold from Kristen, but if anyone is a little too loose folding would be really costly. I have two kings, I’m all-in.
What I Got Wrong
I didn’t test to see if the solver would half-stack; I only gave minraise and shove as the options, and I am more or less happy with my logic to conclude that Ketzer would rarely half-stack so I didn’t include it in my sim. I ran an FGS-3 sim, which means it looks at this hand and three hands that follow; however, the three hands that follow will be played exclusively as push-fold.1 Ketzer’s shoving range is a little too wide here, because the solver thinks he will pay the blinds and the BB ante and then only get one free hand, when he will actually get six free hands. That being said, I am still very surprised at how wide the solver is shoving here. AA,KK and some bluffs minraise to induce, but every suited ace, every pocket pair, every suited broadway, KQo, KJo, T9s-K9s, and A9o+ shove most of the time.
Elton is supposed to call 99-AA and AJ-AK, suited and offsuit. I was too tight. I was one pip off on the pairs, and I’ll say I was one pip off with the offsuit Ax— I probably would have called AQo, but never AJo— and I’ll say I was half a pip off with the suited aces, because I’d never fold AQs and might have called AJs. My range for Elton was too tight, but I guess that is a reasonable response to Ketzer shoving A2s and A9o. Elton splits between shoving and calling with his range; he takes hands that are very strong but don’t like seeing further action after cold-calling, and gets a first-mover advantage by shoving them himself. With hands like AK, AQs and QQ. I’d have just played pure call with range and figured it out to further action.
Once Elton calls, Phil and almost everyone else in the hand are supposed to play QQ+/AK as the second person to call Felipe’s all-in. The exceptions are Kristen, who is short enough that she can shove JJ occasionally, and Ben Tollerene in the BB, who has such a big chip lead that he can occasionally do things like shove 99 to get Elton to fold QQ and then get HU vs. Ketzer and his A2s. Those are the benefits of having more than 2x second place at a nine-handed FT. Phil’s stack-off and my analysis in the prior section are too loose, especially because my FGS sim probably has Ketzer and Elton playing looser than they would. Shoving jacks loses around $50k and calling loses around $30k, but that doesn’t mean Phil should start introducing flat calls, just that if you’re going to blunder by playing too loose, you’d rather put less money in the pot.
Which brings us to Kristen. The sim I am looking at has KK being a call and it being worth $75k. Calling QQ would lose $180k, calling AKs would lose $188k, calling AKo would lose $256k. It also has Ketzer shoving J9s, Elton calling AJo and Sternheimer folding JJ. So I am not sure how valuable this sim is at modeling this exact hand in this exact spot, but it does give us a baseline of how a hand like this is supposed to play out. I wrote earlier about how I was one pip off in ranging Elton’s pocket pairs, and I’ve seen some social media chatter defending Kristen’s play because it was only one pip off, but I don’t think that defense is all that sound. Being one or two pips off when your flatting range is supposed to have six pips in it means your range might be 25% too loose or tight. When your entire continuing range is supposed to be KK+, then folding KK, while not as bad as calling QQ, still means you are missing half the hands you are supposed to be calling, and in this case every hand that is not the literal nuts. It’s a tricky spot with KK, but the sims I’ve run and the other ones I’ve seen make it pretty clear you can fold QQ, but you have to call KK.
Final Thoughts and Grades
This is a weird way to wrap up almost 2000 words of technical poker analysis, but this is not really a “math” hand in my opinion. If I were in Kristen’s shoes and I had a calculator and unlimited time, I couldn’t really brute-force my way to a solution. Tournament poker players are good at thinking this hand through because they’ve analyzed similar spots and have an intuitive sense of what a sim would spit out as appropriate stack-off ranges in a spot like this. It’s pattern recognition, not math. When I first looked at this hand, my intuition was that QQ was an easy fold, but you couldn’t fold KK. I am no stranger to folding QQ in a spot like this in a $100k Triton Main Event (check out POTD #56 for proof).
I didn’t know QQ was a fold in this hand; my poker intuition told me a solver would say that QQ was and KK was a call. The real poker intuition that matters in this hand, and that is the crux of many poker hands everyone reading this blog has played, is figuring out what your opponent is up to. If you have a read that Elton’s flat call feels like aces, or that Phil seems very relaxed for a guy playing a monster pot, you can fold KK here. I made a Run It Once video defending three KK folds, including one from Juan Pardo at Triton Main Event table to multiway action. Feeling that someone has AA preflop is a pretty common read, and if you have it and believe in it, go for it.
Live reads and tells are one part of knowing what your opponent is up to, but the other part is knowing how they play poker. When I made my (terrible) fold in POTD #56, I, at best, ranged one of my three opponents correctly. In this hand, I suspect Felipe and Elton are not as wide as the solver, but there is really one player that matters the most here, and that is Sternheimer. If you think he is folding JJ and AK here, you can probably fold KK here. In the moment, one might be sitting there with KK thinking about pot odds, equity, independent chip modelling, and future game EV, but this hand boils down to a pretty simple question: Does my opponent go all-in with AK here? If yes, then I have to call.
Felipe Ketzer B
Elton Tsang B
Phillip Sternheimer C+
Kristen Foxen C
I suspect this will be read slightly more widely than a normal POTD, so a reminder: a grade of B means the hand was well played, but there was no next-level above-the-rim element to the hand.