POTD #300 A Tribute Volunteered By Ben Tollerene
A Hand from Triton Montenegro
I tend to be pretty selective about the non-Sam hands I select for POTD. I’m fine nitpicking every minor mistake I make, but digging through every hand played during a Triton so I can write 1000 words about every incorrect c-bet decision feels a little unnecessary. I do make exceptions for hands that go viral, that I find particularly interesting, or in today’s case, when I receive a text from someone that says “I volunteer as tribute potd” with a screenshot of a hand. A text like that is a green light for me to write about it, and today’s hand was a doozy.
The text volunteering to be tribute was from Ben “Ben86” Tollerene, who made a big bluff at the nine-handed final table of Event #1 in Triton Montenegro 2026, a tournament that would ultimately be won by Daniel Dvoress. Daniel’s victory was his first NLH Triton win after previous PLO and Short Deck wins, and the first of two three he’d have this trip. Ben has been in great form in Tritons recently and had a whopping eight cashes in Montenegro, but was unable to close out this one and failed to get a big score.
Hands like today’s are a great illustration of the thin margins that can turn a FT appearance into a 1st-place finish or a 9th-place finish. Has his bluff worked, he might have ended up with a top 3 finish, but it did not and he finished 9th. Could he have avoided busting out and saved himself some chips? Read below to figure it out.
$25K NLH Golden Decade – Event #1 Triton SHRS Montenegro 2026
(50k/125k/125k) (SB/BB/BBA) 9 Handed FT.
It folds to Ben Tollerene (2.3M) on the button who raises to 275k, it folds to Dejan Kaladjurdjevic (8.3M) who calls in the BB.
Flop (725k) K♦️5♥️3♥️: Dejan checks, Ben bets 150k, Dejan raises to 425k, Ben calls
Turn (1.575M) 6♥️: Dejan bets 400k, Ben calls
River (2.375M) 7♣️: Dejan checks, Ben bets 1.175M with 1.2M back, Dejan calls with K♥️T♣️ and beats Ben’s A♥️3♣️
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What We Were Thinking
When Ben sent the hand to me, I replied “my guess is .... maybe preflop is just a fold as annoying as that it is and the rest just looks good,” but Ben’s valid concern was that he has a lot of hands with the bare Ah in it; he could have Ah8x-AhQx, and that’s not even counting AxQh or QxJh type hands. If his min value bet is a set, he can’t possibly bluff every single unpaired hand on the river and will sometimes need to wave the white flag, but we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s go back to the start. Preflop seems very close, but at a nine-handed FT where there are two chip leaders and 7 short stacks packed very tightly together, I think I’d just fold A3o on the button. If the blinds were the other short/mid stacks, I could get on board with raising, but the chip leader in the BB can play so aggressively in response to our open that I’d just fold.
The flop is a board I’d suspect we’d range c-bet for chips, but at a FT vs. the chip leader, you can tighten up and play a little more passively and cooperatively. Generally this type of hand, middle or bottom pair, is the type of hand I’d check back with some frequency, but I think we have so little 3x preflop that Ben should probably c-bet, because it’s unprotected vs. overcards and we have it so rarely. Once he gets check-raised, he has no other option; shoving the flop is too risky and you can’t three-bet fold such a strong hand. With five outs to improve to two pair or better and backdoor straight and flush draws, you need to call.
Similarly. we have some properties of a hand that might want to raise the turn when deeper, but the only reason to shove the turn is if you think you can fold a hand like KcTc or 7d6d. If you can’t fold out better, all you can do is call and hope to improve. So we get to the river. We can’t bluff all our hands with a flush blocker that can’t beat a pair of fives, but how do you choose which ones to bluff? My instinct is that A3 is a good hand to bluff because we don’t have much 3x in our range— it should be Ah3x and that’s it. By comparison, if you have a side card like the Qd, you could have AhQd, or QdJh, maybe even Qd7d. Almost any side card you have with a big heart will be a card you have in at least 2-3 unpaired combos, so when you have the rare A3 combo. I think you should bluff with it. My only marginal concern is that we might want Dejan to have K3 or 53 since they might check-fold the river, in which case you don’t want a 3 in your hand; you’d rather have AdQh that might block KxQh-type hands that would check-call the river but unblock two pair that might check-fold. Specific kicker dynamics aside, this is mostly a frequency game, so if Ben is bluffing Ah3 when he should be checking it back and bluffing AhQ, it doesn’t matter all that much, so long as he’s not bluffing both of them all of the time.
What We Got Wrong
It looks like preflop is a fold, but A4o is an open. The pip between A3 and A4 is a pretty big one, but opening a little too loose preflop is rarely all that costly. On the flop Ben is 50/50 to c-bet with range; despite having a large range advantage, he wants to play passively vs. the chip leader. However, his exact hand— A3 with the Ah that blocks K3 suited— is a pure c-bet. When he gets check-raised on the flop, he pure shoves his hand over a check-raise, so that’s a miss from both of us … except for the fact that Dejan is supposed to check-raise/fold some top pair combos. If you’re not getting top pair to check-raise/fold, I think calling is the best play.
His hand never shoves the turn, and he sticks to bluffing hands like A4 or A7 with a heart. When he shoves those hands, he makes top pair without a heart indifferent to calling a shove. Bluff-shoving Ah3 is a reasonable play, but only if your opponent will fold top pair or hands like 76 or 54 without a heart. Also, with the Ah you still might want to slowplay to keep in bluffs he might have, like QhJx.
Which brings us to the river. Two things surprised me here. The first is how wide Ben can shove for value; he can shove AK with a heart and any AA combo. If Ben is not going to shove those hands, he needs to give up with more bluffs. All of Ben’s bluffs come from the same class of hand— hands with one heart that have a pair of fives or worse in them. There is some merit to bluffing linearly, bluffing hands that can never win at showdown like QhJx before bluffing hands with some showdown value like Ah3x. The thing is, these hands both have the same amount of showdown value: none. Dejan’s flopped straight draws have all made one pair, two pair or a straight. His flush draws have all filled, and his bluffs like QxJh all bluff the river the first time themselves, in part because all his straight and flush draws have filled and it’s hard for him to be bluffing.
So if we have a variety of hands with no showdown, how do you choose which hands to bluff with? You bluff the hands that generate the most folds from your opponent. In this hand, what we’re trying to get Dejan to fold are weak top pair hands with or without a heart, which means you want him to have a hand like KcTs or KcTh. In either case, that means you don’t really want to bluff a hand like AhTs or AsTh and would much rather bluff a hand like Ah3c, which doesn’t block KT combos, but does block K3s combos, which obviously can’t fold if Ben is supposed to shove AA and AK himself. Ben is right that it’s a really easy spot to be overbluffing on the river with unpaired hands; however, he has by far his highest-EV bluffing combo, and even if Dejan is not perfectly copying the solver river range, I think Ah3x is a mandatory bluff, but I would be fine with Ben giving up literally any other unpaired hand on the river.
Final Thoughts and Grade
This hand was sent to me as “tribute” from Ben after he busted the tournament, but instead he’s getting a written tribute to his great play. His preflop open is one pip too loose, but his c-bet, turn call and river shove are all mandatory plays. There’s an argument for him to three-bet shove the flop, but I think he made the right deviation away from the solver play in this hand. That being said, one clear mistake is usually a B-, and I am going with my gut and what the solver confirmed for me here: Preflop is marginal, but too loose.
B-