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.
How players should balance time playing poker and time studying poker has been a regular conversation in the poker world. I don’t think there is a clear answer, but I believe players need to do both. When you play real competition you will have to play down nodes of the game tree the solver would never take you, and when you play for real money you need to learn how to deal with financial and competitive stress. There is no substitute for playing real poker, but studying is like putting a donut on your bat in the on-deck circle. You are training with heavy weights so that when you deal with the chaos of real poker, your game is strong enough to deal with the uncertainties of the real world.
Training is not a substitute for playing, but using training tools, you can isolate weak spots in your game: You can eliminate boring hands like folding 72o preflop, and you can play difficult hands vs. challenging opponents at a speed you never could vs. real opponents. When you play vs. a trainer, you get immediate feedback on every decision you make, which will help you identify leaks in your own game, which you can isolate and strengthen without needing to wait for that spot to come up naturally.
I took a bit of a hiatus from poker, but not from studying. I did some independent study, but a lot of the studying I’ve done you have seen on POTD. I do deep dives into the hands I play and learn from the mistakes I have made in the past. So I felt rather fortunate that I had a hand yesterday that closely resembled a hand I wrote about in a previous POTD, POTD #211. Surely after writing a 1,500 word essay on a particular hand, I’d be able to execute and plug the leak in my game that I identified almost nine months ago. Well, poker is a tricky game, and for every leak I’ve plugged, there might be another one that pops open. Let’s dig into today’s hand and see if I learned from my mistake.
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.
Titi Poker $25K NLH 8-Handed – Event #3 Triton SHRS Jeju II 2026
(1k/1.5k/1.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack. Registration is Open.
It folds to me (213k/142BBs) with ?? I make it 3.5k, it folds to Wang Ye (258k/172BBs) who calls.
Flop (9.5k) A♣️Q♣️3♠️: He checks, I bet 3k, he calls
Turn (15.5k) J♣️: He checks, I bet 11k, he calls
River (37.5k) 2♥️: He checks, I check. He wins with K♥️T♠️
