As my main event coverage winds down (I will put the finishing touches on the POTWSOPME post today), it’s time for me to begin my ritual where I pair the hands I wrote about that were played by other people with hands that I played myself. Sometimes there are clear throughlines or concepts that make comparing the punts of others with my own punts easy. Other times, I need to do some stretching. Either way, in the coming weeks expect to see me slowly knock off the checklist of pairing punts, which avid POTD readers are aware of, but only I track because it’s important to me.
The reason it’s important to me is that I can get defensive when people criticize me for writing about the punts of others. I am violating poker’s number one rule, “Don’t tap the glass.” I’ve made the case for why I think criticizing other people’s play is totally fine. It’s something that exists in every poker game in the world. Ask people to rank the quality of the opponents in their home game and get ready to hear a whole lot of shit talking. There’s nothing people love more than critiquing the play of people better than them; look at the chat box of a given Triton stream if you’d like further proof. So people like evaluating other’s plays, and I say let them do it. The popularity of every competitive sport is in some part built around the fact that there are fans who will grouse about how the best in the world are bums.
However, out of fairness, I do like to show that any mistake made by others is probably one I could make or have made myself. So today, we’re going to start pairing hands and end “off the beaten path” week with a hand I played at the GGMillion$ FT in Triton Cyprus that resembles POTD #317, a key hand played by Han Feng deep in the WSOP Main Event. In both hands, we knew there was an obvious and best preflop play, but chose to deviate vs. capable opponents for reasons that were probably not best.
Triton Cyprus 2023 - Event #1 $25,000 GG SUPER MILLIONS
(75k/150k/150k) (SB/BB/BBA). We are 9H at the FT Payouts are
1st:918k, 2nd:623k, 3rd:415k, 4th:339.5k, 5th: 272.5k, 6th:211.3k, 7th: $156k, 8th: $115k, 9th: $91.6K
Igor (13.5M/90BBs) makes it 350k, Santhosh (2.2M) folds, Heindorn (2.9M) folds, I (3.6M/24bbs) call with A♥️Q♥️, Boika (2.1M) folds, Schwecht (2.4M) folds, Putz (2M) folds, Bedir (2.2M folds), Nicolas Chouity (8.25M/56bbs) calls
Flop (1.3M) A♣️T♠️4♥️: Nic checks, Igor checks, I bet 300k, Nic calls, Igor makes it 1.2M, I calls, Nic folds.
Turn (4M) 6♣️: Igor checks, I check with ~2M back
River (4M) 8♠️: Igor checks, I check and I win vs J♠️J♣️
