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 Premium Only posts this week and you can see what you are missing. Today I am including a punt from level 1 of an invitational tournament, something I pray I don’t do in Jeju in the coming weeks. Search for #onemorething, if you’d like to just read the premium content or skip straight to the YouTube video if you’d just like to read the video content.
My philosophy in poker is that good early street fundamentals provide the foundation for improvising on later streets. It’s much easier to exploit someone who underbluffs on the river in heads-up pots (fold!) than to exploit a tight CO when you’re opening UTG. Even if you do add a couple extra preflop opens to exploit a tight CO, the additional opens aren’t making very much, but folding to an underbluffer is printing money. Even in a heads-up pot, there are fewer ways to exploit a weaker player on early streets than on later streets, which is why it’s important to resort to solver baselines.
A strong solver foundation helps you master early streets, but you still need to do your part and make the right decisions once the pot gets bigger on the turn and river. It’s easy to find some odd preflop three-bet or solver check-raise; it’s much harder to play tricky turns and rivers once the pot gets bigger. This week, we will be looking at three hands where I find a pretty normal flop check-raise and then end up lost on the turn.1 Sometimes it will be because an odd turn rolls off, sometimes I’ll have misgauged my hand strength, and sometimes I won’t even know that I am facing a tough decision or made an error. I pride myself on having strong fundamentals that set me up for success and make future streets easy to play, but in this week’s hand, all the off-table work did not prepare me enough to execute when I check-raised the flop and whiffed on the turn.
Triton Monte-Carlo 2023 - Event #1 $200K NLH Triton Invitational
(1k/1.5k/1.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 300k Starting Stack
It folds to Dan Smith (332.5k/222BBs) in the HJ who makes it 3.5k, it folds to me (307k/205bbs) in the BB who calls 7♣️4♣️.
Flop (9.5k) K♥️6♣️5♦️: I check, Dan bets 2.5k, I makes it 12.5k, Dan calls.
Turn (34.5k) 6♠️: I check, Dan bets 14k, I fold.
What I Was Thinking
Unless you’re under extreme ICM pressure or facing a very large raise, you defend the BB with 74s, but it’s too weak to three bet. On the flop, I knew this was the type of hand that often check-raised the flop: an open-ender with a backdoor flush draw, but also an open-ender that I only have suited combos of preflop and my opponent never has. I picked a larger raise size because I knew my flop value raising range here was mostly top two and sets, so playing a big polar raise size seemed appropriate. Dan called, and I was unsure if the 6 turn was good for me. On the one hand, it gives me a full house a bunch, and I also occasionally turn trips, which Dan shouldn’t do all that often. On the other hand, it decreases the number of combos of K6/66/65 that I can have.
I decided I’d play a mixed strategy with all my open-enders and decided to check. Dan bet a size larger than I anticipated and I did not think I could chase an open ender with seven high on a paired board facing a 40% pot bet. So I just folded.
What I Got Wrong
My hand is basically a pure flop check-raise. I am not sure if I picked the right size; running 200bb deep sims with multiple flop check-raise sizes is pretty onerous. However, given that in the sim I ran, hands like TT and AJ with a backdoor still call my check-raise in Dan’s shoes, I would not be shocked to see that the ideal check-raise size is even larger.
My turn strategy is 1.5x pot or check. My bluffs are almost exclusively straight draws, and there is no real preference toward any particular straight draws, beyond the fact that I bet all of them a lot of the time. A 1.5x pot turn bet is enough to get Dan to fold a whole host of top-pair hands. Checking the turn is fine and might even be the best play if I don’t think Dan is folding enough top pair on the turn. It’s also possible that betting the turn and shoving the river is the highest EV play, if Dan is never folding top pair on the turn but frequently folding it on the river.
What is not the best play is folding to a turn bet. I got a little confused by Dan’s size, which was bigger than I expected, but I am basically getting direct pot odds to call and try and improve to a winner. That’s before accounting for the implied odds that I can win an even larger pot when I river a straight. The solver almost always raises 74 on the turn, but that’s in part because I bet the turn with 74 so often that I rarely have the opportunity to check-raise the turn with it. Either way, raise or call, 74 is too strong a hand to check-fold. Folding loses around 3.5k chips; by comparison, folding 43 loses around 1.5k chips, and folding 87 loses around 2.5k chips. An open ender is just too strong a hand to fold to this action, even vs a bet size that I felt was a little too large.
Types of Error
Tricked by an odd bet size
Folding too strong a hand
Grade
Check-calling seven high out of position never feels great. and double check-raising often feels overly fancy, but in this hand both of those plays were better than just check-folding. I underestimated my pot equity, the value in being able to make a sneaky straight, and the fact that my turn bluff works more often with a 4 in my hand, and I say all that knowing the highest-EV play may have just been to bet 55k on the turn and shove 240k on the river and dare Dan call me down with top pair. My preflop and flop play were solid, but I made one questionable turn play and one bad turn play.
C
POTD #282 #onemorething
I wrote that
My hand is basically a pure flop check-raise. I am not sure if I picked the right size; running 200bb deep sims with multiple flop check-raise sizes is pretty onerous.
But not for Premium Subscribers. I ran a sim that had r70, r120 and r170. R170 is never used, but r120 is used quite a bit, it’s about a 50/50 split and the composition of the r70 and r120 range aren’t all that different. So maybe an r95 size where I raise to ~16k would be ideal. When I use r120 it’s enough to get top pair to start folding right away, especially top pair without backdoor flush or straight draws. KQo mixes, but even Ks7s with no backdoor flush draw pure calls. Facing a larger checkraise the IP player get’s rid of all the A high backdoor floats, but still floats a little bit of QJ,QT,JT with backdoors. As for pocket pairs, the shape is pretty similar to the other classes of hands we’ve discussed. 99-77 can turn straight straight draws so they pure call, but QQ-TT mix folds. Practically I like busting out the bigger checkraise size here, it’s a good way to get money in the pot with great hands and your opponents will likely respond too linearly, they won’t call pocket pairs enough and call too much top pair, which will make them easier to play against later in the hand.