POTD #314 Benjamin Rolle Gets the Best of Me at a Final Table

Three handed in the SCOOP Second Chance Main Event

Tournament poker is a game of escalating stakes: As you get deeper in a tournament, you’re playing for more money. A type of common play that people use, especially deep in turbos, are what I’ll call trick plays. Like trick plays in sports, they are one-off plays that can’t be overused in a repeated game, but might work once or twice vs. an opponent who is unprepared. When stacks are short and every BB counts, successfully three-betting off 12bbs to represent AA can be a huge win… if your opponent believes you. I find that what often happens nearing bubbles or at final tables is, people test out these plays at the first opportunity, banking on the fact that their opponents will believe them the first time, before adjusting later on.

This creates an unstable equilibrium, where one player overbluffs early on, daring their opponent to bluff back; the opponent often decides they’ll wait until the second or third time to rebluff, and by the time the second or third time comes around, the tournament might already be over for one of the players. It’s a turbo— sometimes you’re three-handed, then one player has KJs and another has 88 and you’re heads-up.

During the 2023 SCOOP, I made the final table of a $5k turbo, and Benjamin “Bencb” Rolle repeatedly hit me with plays where he was repping a very strong and narrow value range and they kept working. He got a little lucky: In two hands I had bottom-of-range VPIPs; in one hand I shoved and he had AA. I’ll be going through all of the hands that I did not write about today in the POTD Discord (you can also watch my Run It Once video going through the FT, if you aren’t a RIO member become one Use code POTD for 10% off) but there is one hand that really stuck with me, where I feel I could have countered Ben’s aggression, but I made a play that was the incorrect solver play and the incorrect exploitative play.

SCOOP 2023 Event 114-H $5,200 Turbo Main Event 2nd Chance
(240k/480k/47,500) (SB/BB/ANTE)
1st: $104k, 2nd: $80k, 3rd: $62k

uwintakeit (8.54M/17.8BBs) folds, It folds to me (17.66M/36.8BBs), I make it 2.5bbs with J♠️9♥️, bencb789 (7.58M/15.8BBs) makes it 5.5BBs, I fold.