To honour my return to Triton Jeju, I am running a sale. 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, to see all the Premium Content I post every day, you can do that as well. On to my Punt of the Day.
Day 2 in Jeju did not go as planned. Well, it did in that I had an outcome that I should regularly expect to see: fired two bullets and did not cash. However, I was very, very, very tired. I was falling asleep at the table and definitely did not play my best, but I pride myself on having good fundamentals, such that my C or D game is still rather good. I busted my first bullet, took a nap and felt like a whole new man. I registered the tournament and played well on my second bullet, although I never really got above 20bbs, so all the hands were pretty easy. Once again, I did not have an easy hand to pick as my Punt of the Day, but I had several potential options. Many of them were deep-stacked hands that I was not even sure I had misplayed, so instead of writing a POTD when I went to my hotel room at 1AM, I cooked up a couple multiway sims and woke up with a clearer idea of which hand I should write about.
After reviewing all the hands, I once again didn’t make any huge blunders, but when you have poor results and are very tired, it doesn’t feel great. Naturally, you wish you did better, but there is also a Dunning-Kruger effect: The more tired you are, the less competent you are at judging your own play. So maybe tired Sam thinks that tired Sam played okay, but rested Sam will review tired Sam’s play and tell a whole other story. It’s important to study and practice such that your fundamentals are strong even when you are not at peak mental capacity. Ideally you’d never play tired, but playing while tired is a skill every poker player needs to develop. When you are tired, you have less ability to emotionally regulate, which means the ups and downs of making small errors or having bad results will likely cause you more distress, which makes playing well even harder. Review your play in a sober, rested headspace will provide clarity into your actual performance. Sometimes you made errors, and sometimes you are just being results-oriented and grumpy because you lost a hand you could have won if you did something different. In today’s hand, I bluff caught with what I felt was a pure call that I didn’t really consider folding. Could a fresh Sam have come to a better conclusion?
Since I played this hand yesterday vs. a real opponent, I will not be sharing my hole cards before the paywall. If you’d like see my hole cards, you can pay me $1 at the link in the introduction.
$20K NLH 8-Handed – Event #2 Triton SHRS Jeju II 2026
(1k/2k/2k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration is Open.
It folds to Gytis Lazaunakis (190k/95bbs) who makes it 4.5k in the HJ, it folds to me (270k/135bbs) in the SB who calls with ??, Joe Hindry (160k/80bbs) calls in the BB.
Flop (15.5k) 7♥️6♦️2♥️: I check, Joe checks, Gytis checks
Turn (15.5k) 6♣️: I check, Joe checks, Gytis bets 5k, I call, Joe folds
River (25.5k) A♦️: I check, Gytis bets 35k, I call and lose to A♣️Q♠️
