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, we look at a hand from a deep run I had in the 2019 WSOP Main Event. Read all about it below. Search for #onemorething, if you’d like to just read the premium content.
There are all sorts of reasons one might feel nerves at the table: They’re running a big bluff, they flopped the nuts and they’re thinking of “Vegas and the fucking Mirage,” or they’re about to flip a coin for the largest pot they’ve ever played. I’ve felt nerves in those situations before, but as I’ve played more and more live poker, my nerves have calmed. There is one specific type of nervousness I feel still remains, and those are the nerves I feel when I fear my hand looks faceup. Sometimes this occurs literally— I peel my cards too high and I’m concerned my opponent saw my eight of hearts and am nervous until the hand is over. Other times, I am thinking “of course they know I have it here” or “of course they know I’m full of shit here,” but I think this is the right play anyways. At least this nervousness is somewhat balanced.
A reliable source of nerves for me is when I feel it looks like I can never be bluffing. I am value betting, my opponent is in the tank, and my opponent vocalizes my internal monologue for me. How can you ever be bluffing here? Sometimes after the hand, my tablemates confirm my suspicion: Of course you’re never bluffing there. So I thought back to a hand I played deep in Day 6 of the World Series of Poker Main Event, where I had a full house and it felt like I could never be bluffing, but I did not care because I had a full house and value bet it anyways. After the hand, there was table talk about what I could have been bluffing with, and I sheepishly said maybe I could have turned top pair into a bluff, but I was not sure if I believed it. So today, we’re going to look back at this hand and see what could I have been bluffing with, but also determine if my lack of bluffs was due to errors in my flop and turn play that created a situation where I’m never bluffing on the river.
2019 World Series of Poker Main Event Day 6.
(100k/200k/200k) (SB/BB/BBA)
It folds to Mihai Manole (10.23M/50bb) who makes it 500k in the LJ, it folds to Corey Burbick (5.49M/27.5bbs) who calls in the CO, it folds to me (7.175M/36bbs) in the BB who calls with J♣️9♥️.
Flop (1.8M) Q♥️9♦️9♣️: I check, Manole checks, Corey bets 600k, I call, Manole makes it 1.8M, Corey folds, I call.
Turn (6M) K♦️: I check, Manole checks.
River (6M) J♠️: I bet 4.98M, he calls and mucks with Q♣️T♣️.
What I Was Thinking
I thought preflop was a pure defend and I did so. It’s interesting that nowadays I’d mostly call the flop here, because I know that the BB rarely raises with the preflop raiser still to act in a multiway pot. However, I did not know that in 2019, so I am not sure why I chose to just call the flop. My best guess is that this deep in the Main Event I wanted as much information as possible about my opponent’s ranges before playing a monster pot, and I thought that I was underrepresenting my hand by just calling and might be more likely to induce some bluffs.
Once Mihai checks, Corey bets, I call, Mihai raises and Corey folds, I was between clicking it back and calling. I figured that I’d rather fastplay 9x that didn’t interact with any straight draws, and specifically wanted to slowplay a hand like J9 in case he was check-raise bluffing the flop with KT or T8. The turn looks okay for my range; I should have a decent amount of JT and 9x, but I figured I’d have enough Qx that I’d mostly check range on the turn. I’ve also witnessed enough crazy Main Event blowups that I wanted to check in case he was running some sort of crazy “Dirty Diaper” bluff. The turn checked through and I rivered a full house. I was not sure what my bluffs would or should be, but I was not sure if he’d bet all-in with a straight when checked to, so I did not want to leave things to chance and decided to just value shove with my full house and hope to get called. And I did.
What I Got Wrong
There are times when I select a hand for POTD where when I begin to write about the hand I truly don’t know if I punted or not. So I was curious to dive back into this hand, and the first thing I saw was a clearly losing preflop call. A 2.5x is a big preflop open; Corey is probably not flatting ATo or 65s in the CO with 27bbs. I am getting a bad price; I am out of position vs. two players, both of whom have strong ranges; and I have a hand that is likely to be dominated and does not have low-card value that a hand like 54o or 75s might have in a multiway pot. It’s a bad preflop call for chips, but a worse one deep in the Main Event, and even worse when the metagame in most Main Events tends to involve too much flop betting from my opponents.
Preflop is bad, but let’s dive into the postflop plays I was unsure of. I played the flop as a pure call, but the 2.5x preflop and the tight preflop ranges for me and my opponents mean I have a trips advantage, and I raise most of my continues on the flop. Had the board been QQ9, I’d call much more often with my range, maybe even pure, but on Q99 I do a lot of raising. If I raise this board and Manole chooses to continue after my check-raise, I’d be in a tough spot, but that happens sometimes and I need to be prepared to play poker. My exact hand is about 50/50 to raise vs. Corey’s bet. Once I call and Manole raises, I mix calling and raising, but T9 pure three-bets. I don’t think the specific kicker effects matter too much, but I probably should have given more credence to three betting the flop. Raising the flop at either decision point is a fine play, and I should have been doing it more often than the 0% I was doing it, but my line is fine.
Which brings us to the turn and the river. On the turn I regularly lead with my hand and range. I have trips or better more than 60% of the time, and even if I made some generous assumptions, I doubt that’s true of Manole’s range. If I force myself to check the turn, Manole pure checks back the turn with his entire range. The more he checks back the turn, the more incentivized I am to shove my hand on the river, because the more likely it is that he has trips or a straight.
So what do I bluff in this spot where I “can’t be bluffing”? Almost all my bluffs come from Qx, usually Qx with a backdoor flush draw that makes a loose flop peel, but also exactly QJ with the Jh that blocks J9s. Ranges are narrow enough here that any hand that blocks even one full house combo makes that hand a very valuable bluffing combo. When I shove the river, I am supposed to get straights to fold; when I check the river, I am supposed to induce bluffs from hands like AQ. So regardless of what the solver prefers here, I think the river is a pretty easy street to play. It’s more likely Manole calls with a straight than bluffs with a queen, so I should shove myself.
Types of Error
Loose preflop play
Range error: Did not play the flop or turn aggressively enough with my hand or range.
Final Thoughts and Grade
A loose BB defense can rarely be too bad, especially when I am only one pip off, but it probably loses around 1/10th of a BB, and I am in a spot in a tournament where I am really not interested in playing large multiway pots. My flop play is fine; I could have raised either time, but calling twice is acceptable, and if it’s vs. an unknown in the Main Event I tend to err on the side of letting them do something stupid vs. a range they might think is capped or face-up, rather than getting in a click-back war vs. them. The same logic applies to my turn play: I don’t know what Manole’s check-raise range is supposed to look like here, but I am more than happy to let him keep putting money in the pot. I could see an argument for raising the flop or for leading the turn, but I feel most confident in my river play. I think he might occasionally have QQ or KK, but the best way to get all the money in the pot with my hand, which is likely best, is to bet with it myself. Letting him check back or bet-fold with a straight is a disaster, and while it’s a very hard spot for me to bluff, it’s also a hard spot for him to bluff. I also was correct in identifying the type of hand I might bluff, a hand like Qc2c. So after all this multiway trickery, the only clear mistake I can say I made in this hand was my preflop defend, which is clearly a losing play.
B-
POTD #295 #onemorething
I’ll expand a little bit on why I think preflop is such a clear fold. I think there are three reasons to expand your preflop range vs specific opponents.
They are so bad that if you make a very strong hand you’ll get paid too often. This allows you call a button raise with K2s
They are so loose preflop that you have more equity than you’re supposed to. If someone is opening 98o UTG, you should not fold A2o in the BB, just because the solver does.
They won’t put enough pressure on your postflop. If someone will never three barrel 22 on AKT and never c-bet larger than half pot postflop. Defending K2o becomes much more appealing. You’ll showdown weak top or second pair a lot more often.
In this hand the first condition is certainly not met. I don’t know Mihai that well, but he seemed competent. Corey is a long time MTT pro and even if was not up to date with the latest solver strategies, he is not such a weak spot that I could expand here. The second condition is also not met, Mihai is not opening all that wide and Corey has a very tight and specific flatting range. I should not have more pot equity here than versus the solver. Number three I am less confident about, but my general rule of thumb is multiway pots do not get checked around often enough in big field main event tournaments, which means when I call preflop here, I’ll face a c-bet too often. This is bad. Especially when I might be facing c-bets from hands like QQ on K92 more than I should be. I think too many players decide to alwas expand their preflop ranges in softer tournaments, but just as you exploit a nitty fish by bluffing more often and a calling station by bluffing less, sometimes the correct preflop exploit is just to fold, even if you’re better than you’re opponents.