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.
Another day 1. Another day where I don’t make it to day 2. We have only played five tournaments and the highest-stakes tournaments have yet to come, but this is not the start I wanted on my return to super high rollers. Yesterday was especially frustrating. I ran up my 200k to around 700k. Then I got AJs AIPF vs. QQ in a ~400k pot, flopped an ace, and you can guess what happened next. Then literally the last hand before registration closed, I four-bet shoved A5s over Dan Dvoress’s three-bet squeeze in a standard spot. Unfortunately, Dan had QQ, and by the river he had a pair of queens and I had ace five high. I re-entered, played my 20bb stack for 30 minutes, lost some chips, shoved 22 on the button, got called by AK and went back to my room.
I am trying not to complain here, but I figured some POTD subscribers might want a view into the lifestyle of playing a new tournament every day and not being able to build any momentum. This is the reality of it: Sometimes you are on the wrong side of standard hands and you don’t put a cash on the board. It sucks, but what can I say? Every day is a new opportunity to end the drought. Hopefully today’s $40k Mystery Bounty can be my slump-buster. For POTD purposes, this has meant most of the hands I’ve written about have been deep-stacked hands, because the large majority of my hands have been hands where we’ve been 100bbs or deeper. I’d love to write about some tricky ICM spot at a final table, but I need to get there first. So enjoy today’s hand. a deep-stacked hand where I had a tricky spot with top pair in a three-way pot over 100bbs deep and checked back the river. Let’s dig into it.
$30K NLH Event #6 | Triton SHRS Jeju II 2026
(1k/1.5k/1.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. 7 Handed
Byron Kaverman (200k/133bbs) makes it 4k UTG, I (230k/153BBs) have A♥️K♠️ next to act and call, it folds to the BB (281k/187bbs) who calls.
Flop (14.5k) K♥️Q♣️2♥️: BB checks, Byron bets 5k, I call, BB folds
Turn (24.5k) 8♠️: Byron checks, I bet 22k, Byron calls
River (88.5k) 7♦️: Byron checks, I check and I beat A♠️Q♥️
What I Was Thinking
This deep preflop you don’t always three-bet AK. You are not in a great situation if you get cold four-bet or four-bet from the opener. However, if you can induce a squeeze three-bet from behind, you often get some pretty nice opportunities to back-raise all-in yourself— especially once Byron opens to a larger size preflop, which should also make three-bet sizes larger, which gives me a better price on my hypothetical backshove. I rolled passive and decided to flat his open, and it folded to the BB who peeled.
This flop is okay for my flatting range. My flatting range is pretty tight and specific here, and while I’ll rarely have a set here, I do have KQ, a lot of strong draws and one-pair hands. Byron bet, which I assume is something the solver does relatively often, and while I considered raising the flop, I didn’t think my hand was strong enough right now or had enough potential to improve for me to want to raise when we are this deepstacked. So I just called. On the turn, once Byron checked I thought I could bet a large size for value, and with the Ah in my hand comfortably fold to a raise, since a good amount of his turn check-raise bluffs would be nut flush draws. I did not think I’d have enough nutted hands in my range to play an overbet size here— the occasional KQ or QQ, maybe some 22— and I thought my most common value bets would be hands like AK or KJ, which I didn’t think were worth an overbet. I thought 80% pot was reasonable and ended up making a mental math error and bet 90% pot.
Once he called on the turn, my logic on the river was pretty simple. I thought in a heads-up pot for chips that AK would be my weakest value bet. I thought in a three-way pot vs. the BB, Byron would c-bet a little tighter and I’d defend the flop a little tighter. This would make our turn ranges a little tighter, which would make our river ranges a little tighter. I had what I believed would be my weakest value bet in a HU pot— early position vs. early position hands often play very tight— so I figured that this being a three-way flop was enough to make checking the best play with my hand.
What I Got Wrong
My preflop flat is fine. My flop flat is also fine. Three-betting preflop would also be fine, as would raising the flop. It’s all fine so long as I don’t fold. On the turn, I pure bet with KQ and 88. Every top-pair combo mixes. There is a slight preference to betting AK combos without a heart, and the combos with a heart usually fold to a check-raise. The solver splits between b70, b90 and b120 when I gave it a whole bunch of sizes to pick from. If I b70 on the turn AK, always value bets the river and KJ mixes. If I b90, AK mixes and KJ always checks and if I b120, I need two pair to shove the river. So technically my hand is a mix and my check back is fine, but I think in reality vs most opponents my hand is just far too strong after this action to not value bet it and I really don’t mind daring most opponents to try to checkraise bluff me here. When my hand has 85% on the river the solver pure value bets it, when it has 82% on the river, I mix checks and when it has 77% it pure checks. I think instead of thinking about what the solver would do with my hand here, I should have thought about how much equity my hand has in the moment and I think it clears the 85% threshold so I should have bet.
Grades
The error in my thought process here was, instead of thinking through the hand and our ranges, I applied a lazy heuristic of “let’s take your cEV value betting range and tighten it by one pip.” On top of that, I miscalibrated my cEV value betting range here. KJ is the bottom pip for chips, so if I followed my own lazy heuristic, I’d have checked back KJ and value bet AK. I also ignored the fact that since I regularly three-bet AK preflop or raise it on the flop, this is a low-reach hand for me, so it actually doesn’t make up that large a chunk of my value-betting range. So checkraise bluffing to fold out a hand like AK is a dangerous proposition when I’ll often have KQ or 88. However, the main problem with the hand is this: I really don’t think Byron, most human players, or the solver regularly have AK beat to this action. They’d often bet or raise the turn with two pair or a set. I have an ace in my hand, which makes it less likely he’d have AA.
The case for my check back is something like: Well, Byron made it a large size preflop, our ranges are all a little tighter than they appear. But does the presence of a BB flatting hands like 65o or 74s really alter how UTG7 should be playing vs. LJ on a KQ2 board deep-stacked? No, not really. My hand is too often the best hand, it is not my bottom value bet for chips, and I should have found a rather easy value bet.
C
*Reads title of post, then reads hand history*
"Hmm, I think I would bet river"
*Reads analysis*
"Yes, I am smart"
"I think instead of thinking about what the solver would do with my hand here, I should have thought about how much equity my hand has in the moment and I think it clears the 85% threshold so I should have bet."
^ Great advice!