POTD #318 Jumalon vs Saaskilahti Round 1
The hand that propelled them to their heavyweight HU match (Photo: Poker.org)
Last year when I did Punt of the 2025 WSOP Main Event, it was a much bigger undertaking. PokerGO aired unedited streams of three feature tables, so I had almost three times as many hands to cover from Day 3 through Day 8. When the Final Table began, I was relieved that I could just focus on the play at one table, and that the days were shorter and did not run late into the night. I was still prepared for plenty of fireworks and fun hands, as often happens at the WSOPME FT. Then the actual FT started and ended almost as quickly. There were some fun hands that I wrote about, like POTD #84 and #85, but the tale of every hand was the same: Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi grinding up all his opponents and ending the FT in 80 hands. There was not a variety of hands for me to write about.
This year, we looked to be on the same track. Lucas Jumalon entered the FT with a big chip lead, and while his stack dipped early on, it was mostly smooth sailing as his chip lead grew through the first two days of the final table. I was prepared for another anti-climactic FT— Lucas grinds down the short stacks into dust and gets heads-up with a 10:1 chip lead and wins in four hands— but then something surprising happened. He doubled up Lauri Saaskilahti in what ended up being at the time, the biggest pot of the tournament, and I immediately posted in the live chat watch party in the POTD Discord that I had found a hand to write about. So let’s write about it.
2026 World Series of Poker Event #82 Main Event NLH World Championship
(1.5M/3M/3M) (SB/BB/BBA) We are 4-Handed
Lauri Saaskilathi (92M/31BB) makes it 6M with T♣️T♠️, Michael Gagliano (24.5M/8BB) folds, Greg Mueller (58.5M/19.5BBs) folds, Lucas Jumalon (370.5M/123bbs) defends 4♥️3♦️.
Flop (16.5M) 9♠️4♦️2♥️: Jumalon bets 10M, Saaskilahti makes it 25M, Jumalon calls.
Turn (66.5M) 5♦️: Jumalon puts Saaskilahti all-in for his final 61M, Saaskilahti calls and holds on the K♦️ river.
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What I Think
Jumalon’s preflop call is fine; it might be a slight loser for chips, but he is the chip leader and should be able to eke out extra EV either by bluffing more or just getting to show down weak hands a little more often. That brings us to my next point: Part of the reason we can make a loose preflop call here is because, as the chip leader vs. second in chips, we can control the size of the pot. When we flop bad second pair, we want to keep the pot small. Jumalon instead decided to lead 60% pot. As far as I can tell, there are three reasons to have a leading range on any flop here as the chip leader:
The board is very good for our range and not good for our opponent’s range.
Your opponent will either over-fold or under-raise vs. a lead.
You have a very good hand and want to get a lot of money in the pot and think this is the best way to do it.
None of these conditions are met. The board is too disconnected to be good for a BB defense range, especially if we are making loose defends with hands like 43o (and have been making them throughout the FT, defending the BB with hands like 42o and K3o the prior day). A nine-high board is not quite low enough to favour the BB; Lauri is opening a lot of suited and offsuit nines here. There is a really big difference between 742 and 942, and an even bigger difference between 942 and 743, when flopped straights and one-card straight draws are possible for the BB.
Sometimes under ICM pressure, you see spots where the solver pure leads as the chip leader from the BB (POTD #54); those leads occur because the in-position player is under so much ICM pressure that they never raise. In those spots, the OOP chip leader bets often and small because they know they’re never getting raised. In any form of poker, the bigger you bet the less often you get raised, so if you want to lead to freeze Lauri, you shouldn’t need a big size. Either way, I would not expect Lauri to co-operate, and I am not just being results-oriented when I say this. There is no way Lauri is well versed enough in specific ICM solver concepts that he’d ever play zero-raise here. As for the third condition, we do not have a very good hand; we will rarely get called by worse or fold out better. So it’s the wrong board, vs. the wrong opponent and we have the wrong hand.
Once he gets raised, I initially thought that calling seems fine, as does folding. However, once I started counting his backdoor straight draw outs, I think he should fold. A 3 is not the cleanest two pair because it gives hands like AA or A9 a wheel draw, so it’s lower EV than turning two pair with a hand like 84. He has backdoor straight outs, but not that many; only an A, 5, or 6, and only a 5 gives us an open-ender, while an ace is a bad card for our range. If the flop were 963 and I led 76, I’d want to call a raise with it, but not 43 here. If he had a backdoor flush draw I’d certainly be on board with calling. The turn shove feels very PLO-y: It doesn’t make sense as a range play, but does as a hand play. Lucas would never play a set or straight or two pair like this, but if he checks, he might just need to stack off anyways, so shoving and hoping Lauri might fold something better than 43 seems like a reasonable play. Credit to Lauri for recognizing what Lucas’s hand looked like and calling.
What the Solver Says
The solver defends 43o vs. a minraise for chips at basically any stack depth. I suspect the cEV solver will put a lot more pressure on the BB than Saaskilahti will vs. the chip leader with four left in the Main Event. So I think the preflop peel is good, even if an ICM sim might not like it. This is also why Saaskilahti should have raised to a larger preflop size like 7M.
In POTD #317, I wrote about how there was no real need for me to run any bespoke sims because no sim I ran would ever play preflop flats from the SB. Similarly, I don’t need to run anything to see if Jumalon should ever lead the flop. He shouldn’t. I suspect if I ran a sim, you might see 43 check-raise some of the time, which is sort of like leading 60% pot, but I also don’t think you’d see very much flop three-betting. So I am not going to bother to Frankenstein up a sim that goes down a different fake node then the actual fake node we are down. The preflop call is good and I’ll say quasi-solver approved; the flop lead is bad. Calling the flop raise is acceptable, but probably bad, and the turn shove is fine in the Main Event where I could see some players making some really big folds, but maybe getting exactly A5 or JdTd to fold is enough.
Final Thoughts
I posted on Twitter about how prep before a huge FT is useful, but overrated. I’ve written several times on POTD about how the gap between learning a new solver concept and successfully implementing that concept in your game, while not forcing it, is very hard to do. It feels like Lucas has been trying a little too hard to find rare plays at this FT, and this hand is the perfect example. These flop leads tend to exist on boards with lower cards, under enough ICM pressure where your opponents will co-operate, or at stack sizes shallow enough where you can reluctantly stack off hands like middle pair. None of the criteria are met here, and he likely lost 90 million instead of 30 million, but it did not end up costing him $10,000,000.
C