POTD #264 Bread and Butter in Super High Roller Series Cyprus
A deepstacked three-bet-pot
In POTD #227 I launched a feature inspired by subscriber Lion King called “Bread and Butter” hands, where I talk about punts I made that weren’t as spectacular as three-bet shoving the river incorrectly. Mistakes like missing a preflop jam, or folding a hand too high up in my range on the turn, or picking the wrong c-bet size. Most mistakes one makes will be B&B mistakes because they will have more B&B decisions, but the most spectacular mistakes often occur in unusual nodes or when you’re off the game tree entirely. Executing in those spots requires technical expertise, but those spots are about on-the-fly problem solving more than B&B spots. I like diving into the bread and butter spots1 because they are often the mistakes you make on autopilot, the types of mistakes you don’t even know are mistakes until after the fact.
Today’s hand is one that splits the difference, between a decision that I’ve encountered so many times that I know like the back of my hand, and one that’s obscure enough that I am totally freestyling. It’s about a decision early on in a hand, but at a pretty obscure node: UTG vs. CO three-bet-pot 100bbs deep. I’d imagine something like 10% of all hands I play in live tournaments are 100bbs deep or deeper. Of those hands, I’d be UTG for around 1/7th of them, get a hand to raise around 1/6th of the time, and get three-bet and have a hand that can call a three-bet around 1/10th of the time. In a given year playing a full schedule of live tournaments, I might play 20 hands that fit this criteria.[If the estimates are accurate, that would take 84,000 hands. -ed] So while it’s not a spot I should know perfectly, it’s a perfect bread and butter spot.
In the first bread and butter hand, we talked about the correct c-betting strategy and continuing vs. a probe bet after checking back the flop— a spot where the pot is small and each individual error doesn’t cost too much, but one that occurs so often that mistakes can cumulatively be rather expensive. Today, we are looking at a pot that has already gotten pretty big enough that any bread and butter error I make facing a c-bet could be expensive. A different class of bread and butter from #227, but one that is just as important.
Super High Roller Series Cyprus Event #1 $25,000 NLH
200k Starting Stack (1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA). Registration is Open
I am UTG7 (200k) and make it 4.5k with J♠️T♠️, it folds to Roman Hrabec (200k) CO who makes it 16k, I call.
Flop (37k): K♥️9♣️5♦️: I check, Roman bets 13k, I fold.
