POTD #266 In an $150,000 I Make a Big Fold in a Three Way Pot
Not as big as Andrew Robl and not as right as him.
The more decisions that are in a poker hand, the more information you have about your opponent’s hands, and vice versa. You get even more information in spots where any of your opponents are supposed to play pure strategies. Knowing your opponent has AA 0% of the time is more valuable than knowing they have TT 50% of the time. If I raise the button 100bbs deep, you know that I do not have 72o; if you flat my open from the BB, I know you don’t have AA. That means if the flop is king high and I have AK, I can assume I have the strongest one-pair hand possible. However, the BB might or might not three-bet KQ, which means I can’t be confident that KJ is the strongest one pair hand.
In multi-way pots, everyone tends to play more pure strategies, because it’s hard to play pots versus several opponents at once. You’re not fighting a fair fight, so you make sure you have a piece of the board before engaging in multi-way combat. Even preflop, you might be able to raise 72o from the SB to exploit a tight BB, but you can’t do that from UTG. Multi-way pots have more pure strategies and more decisions, so you are given more information from your opponents, and each piece of information you gain is often more actionable than it would be in a heads-up pot. If someone checks in a heads-up pot in a spot where every hand in their range mixes, you might not be able to eliminate a single individual hand from their range. If someone checks in a multi-way pot, you often can eliminate not just specific combos such as 8c8d, but entire classes of hands such as sets.
This makes multi-way pots little games of inductive logic; you take all the pieces of information you have received— the HJ raised preflop, the CO flat-called and check backed the flop, the BB stabbed the turn, etc.— and you slowly make conclusions. “The second preflop flatter never has AQ,” “The CO who checked back the flop never has top pair,” “The c-bettor never turns a set.” This can create river dynamics that are complex, but are almost toy-game-like: Player A is capped at having the third nuts, Player B is capped at having the sixth nuts, and Player C can have the first or second nuts, but has total air more than half the time.
Of course, poker is a human game, and while the solver can deduce facts about everyone’s range before brute forcing a perfect strategy, many load-bearing solver assumptions fall apart in real poker. A solver might determine that “A straight should always be the nuts here because no one would ever check a set on the flop,” but that’s cold comfort when you’re eliminated three-bet shoving the river into a boat. Of course this is true in heads-up poker as well, but when one player does something unusual and solver-unapproved in a heads-up pot, it’s much easier to deviate because you don’t need to worry about other players in the hand. In today’s hand, I approached the river with a rules-based approach of what value-betting thresholds would look like and what a reasonable bluff-catcher should look like. I thought my opponents would share the same beliefs, but whether they were trying to get one over on me or each other, my assumptions of how they should play the hand were technically right, but in practice could were not.
Triton Poker Jeju 2024: Event #9 $150K NLH 8-Handed
(5k/10k/10k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration has Closed
It folds to Pieter Aerts (570k) UTG7 who makes it 20k, it folds to James Chen (704k) in the HJ who calls, it folds to me (457K) in the BB with 5♥️5♦️, who calls.
Flop (75k) 9♥️8♠️6♦️: I check, Pieter checks, James checks.
Turn (75k) 9♠️: I check, Pieter checks, James checks.
River (75k) 7♥️: I check, Pieter bets 40k, James calls, I fold, Pieter has K♣️J♠️ and James has A♠️A♦️.
