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.
I am back from Jeju, but still have a backlog of posts to catch up on. My plan is to get all the posts finished ASAP, and once I catch up to the backlog, I will resume the normal MWF, Saturday Week in Review, Sunday Special schedule.
I wrote about this earlier this trip, but there are times when you max late reg a tournament where you just kind of hope to get dealt some good preflop hands, win some all-ins and get back in contention. When I max late regged day 2 of the $150k, that very much did not happen. I started the day with 20bbs and proceeded to play a bunch of intricate technical poker hands that began with me having under 12bbs and somehow involved me having several postflop decisions in pots that were not blind vs. blind.
These hands are understudied and surprisingly common. When many people look at preflop or postflop ranges where one player has under 10-15bbs, they often mistakenly use preflop ranges as if all players have under 10-15bbs. When that’s the case, the preflop raiser is usually playing open jams, which means their raise first in range is split into a polar AA/bluff type range, and postflop plays out as if both players are aware that the other player has an overpair a large percent of the time. Several of the hands I ended up playing on this day involved hands with one deep stack and one short stack, and that’s when things get much trickier.
If you have 12bbs and raise the CO, you are never supposed to have KQo or JTs or 55 postflop. If you have 50bbs and raise the CO into a BB that has 12bbs, you are almost always supposed to have KQo or JTs or 55 postflop. So even as you’ll have a range advantage on most boards, you still need to figure out how to play 55 on T92fd or KQ on 852r. You usually have the best hand, but how do you feel about putting 1.5x or 2x or 2.5x pot in the middle? Betting because you have a range advantage does not automatically cut it if it might lead to you regularly bet-folding hands with 25% equity. Checking and letting your opponent see free cards when your hand is often best and you don’t have much money behind is also not great.
Of course, since I was the late registrant, these hands that I played are not ones where I had to worry about playing a linear range vs. a short stack, but ones where I was the short stack and needed to determine how to best play vs. my opponents who might be playing too linearly. I had four of these sorts of tricky hands, and after running the numbers, I was able to find the one where I punted the most. The answer surprised me.
Since I played this hand recently 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.
$150K NLH 10th Anniversary Special – Event #15|Triton SHRS Jeju II 2026
(5k/10k/10k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration is closed.
It folds to Joao Simao (946k) in the CO who makes it 22k, Danny Tang (719k), Alex Ponakovs (517k) folds, I call with BB with ??
Flop (59k) T♦️5♣️2♦️: I check, Joao bets 15k, I call
Turn (89k) 9♠️: I check, Joao bets 15k, I fold.
