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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.
One of the hardest things about playing a big poker series, whether it’s a Triton, a WCOOP, the WSOP, or the festival at your local casino, is that by the end of the festival, the stakes are usually the highest, but you are the most fatigued. Of course, this is also true of most individual tournaments. I’ve won tournaments at 3AM, but I don’t think I’ve ever registered one at 3AM.
One of the most important skills a poker player can have is playing your best at the end of a grind. This is not so much about playing your A game when tired— to me that is by definition impossible— but the skill of playing your B game when everyone else is playing their C or D game. The ends of Triton trips have a loopy feel; even the best players in the world are regularly playing hands terribly. Phil Ivey, normally a salmon with broccoli and white rice guy, grabbed a bag of pretzels from the poker room buffet. I said “You normally aren’t a pretzel guy,” he replied “I’m fucking steamed” and kept eating his pretzels. (NB: I was 0-23 on this trip and ate several bags of these pretzels. I took a picture for POTD subscriber and salty snack enthusiast Steve O’Dwyer because they were very good. That picture is the header image of this post).
One reason I have always leaned on having a strong technical game is because, if I am tired or tilted or otherwise unable to play my A-game, my autopilot game will be based around strong fundamentals, which will allow me to play poker that might not be great, but usually won’t be terrible. Given that this post is titled “My Punt of Jeju,” you can guess that despite this preamble, today’s hand is not one where the high floor of my game— a high floor that I’ve built through studying and preparation— prevented me from punting. In fact, I tried to do a fancy play that I had recently been doing some independent study on, and I totally miscalibrated what sorts of hands can play like this. Fortunately, I got lucky and doubled up, which is not really within my control, but if it were, it would be just as valuable as playing your A-game.
Triton Jeju II $50K Turbo Bounty Quattro
(5k/10k/10k) (SB/BB/BBA). 200k Starting Stack. Registration is closed.
I (180k) am UTG7 with A♣️9♦️ and make it 20k, it folds to Daniel Rezaei (545k) in the HJ who makes it 45k, stacks of 133k, 361k, 150k, 176k fold behind, I call.
Flop (115k) K♥️9♣️6♥️: I check, Daniel bets 20k, I call.
Turn (155k) 3♠️: I check, Daniel bets 35k, I call.
River (225k) A♦️: I check, Daniel shoves for my final 80k, I call and beat A♠️J♥️.
This hand is free to read for all, if you like the analysis below please consider becoming a paid subscriber to POTD by clicking the link at the top of the post or the button below.
What I Was Thinking
Raising first in with A9o is a standard play off 18bbs from EP. Once I get three-bet, I usually have an easy fold. There are two reasons for this: One is that A9o is not a good hand, the other is that Danny’s three-bet range should be very strong. However, since he is deep and there is a 36bb stack behind for him to worry about, I thought that he might not be playing any shoves here, which weakens his three-bet range quite a bit. It gives him more hands like AKo and 88. That means he has very strong hands like AA or KK less often, and his range is relatively weak given the circumstances. Facing a linear three-bet range and a small three-bet size, I thought I was priced in and could call a three-bet.
On the flop, I knew I had flopped such a strong hand that I needed to stack off, given we only had pot to play. The only question was if check-calling was higher EV than check-raising. I thought that I was either way behind hands like AA or AK or way ahead of hands like AJo or A8s and decided to slowplay. On the turn, my logic remained the same: If I am behind I often only have two outs; I’d occasionally have five outs vs. hands like KQ or KJs, but that’s a best case scenario vs. his value bets. I remain in very good shape vs. his bluffing range, so keeping his bluffs on the hook made sense. I rivered a very strong hand and snap called, doubling through a turn bluff that turned into a river value bet.
What I Got Wrong
I am generally right that I get to call small three-bets wider when his range is linear compared to when it’s polar. However, I am not actually sure if his range is linear here. There are three sub-18bbs stacks behind, four if you count me, and the “deep stack” is still only 36bbs. I could totally see Daniel shoving hands like AQ, 99, or KJs here. Deviating because I am against a linear range, when I might not even be up against a linear range, is not ideal.
So I made a pretty wild deviation based on a pretty specious assumption, but let’s say that I was correct. Daniel doesn’t play shoves here; he doesn’t have a split three-bet size where he three-bets to 4.5bbs with big pairs and bluffs, while pulling a big three-bet size from hands like 88 and AKo. He doesn’t split his range so his 4.5bb three-bet includes hands like AQo, KQs, and 88, and I can call. Well, in the sim I ran where Daniel three-bets to 4.5bbs with every hand he continues— he can’t shove and he can’t flat— ATo pure folds and calling A9o loses 1/4 of a BB. And that’s the best case scenario for me! What’s more likely is Daniel is playing some flats, playing some larger three-bet sizes, and my A9o is running into AA more than the “Prove Sam Right” sim I ran. The “Prove Sam Right” sim still declares calling A9o a -0.22bb loser.
If Daniel makes it 4bbs, I still fold A9o; if he makes it 3.75bbs, I mix calls with it; and if he makes it 3.5bbs, I pure call it. Calling a raise when you’d call a raise one BB smaller is never the most expensive play, but there is no way my call here is winning, and my logic while playing the hand was off. My postflop line is okay. I could raise-call the flop or shove over his turn bet, but calling twice is the most common play. However, the problem is, in order to make my preflop call good, I need Daniel to have a lot of hands like QJs/JTs/77. My preflop play is designed to exploit a tendency, that I think he is too linear preflop and sizing too small, well on the flop if he’s too linear and sizing too small, I should raise to make hands worse than mine put more money in the pot or fold equity.
He probably thinks he can size so small preflop because he’s repping KK+ a lot, which means he will c-bet this flop. The more combos of hands like QJ/JTs that c-bet the flop, the more inclined I am to play my hand so aggressively, since those hands have so much equity vs. me. If I want to call preflop, I should probably assume he’s c-betting the flop too much and raise the flop. However, this opens up another inconsistency in my thought process: Calling my entire opening range preflop probably does not work out too well vs. someone who will c-bet too often when we have pot to play on the flop. Basically, I called preflop because I didn’t think he had KK+, AK as much as he should, and then I played postflop as if he had AK+ a lot, the kind of piss-poor logic that creeps into your head on day 13 of a long trip.
Grade
Sometimes, you make a good read on your opponent’s hand and can outplay them by doing something crazy with a weak hand. “I think he’s bluffing the river, so I’ll call him down with king high.” But sometimes you’ll just be dealt eight high on the river, and there’s not much you can do with you read except to wait for a better hand. Similarly, sometimes you make a good read on your opponent’s range, but you need to wait for a better hand. I think I was right that Daniel’s small, polar three-bet size was actually full of too many linear hands and he didn’t have enough very strong hands in his range. The problem is, A9o is still getting a bad price, is still dominated by many of his bluffs, and is simply not the right hand to fight back with. I could call with suited hands like Q8s and try to outflop hands like AK, but A9o is dominated far too often. Calling is lighting money on fire.
This hand is about learning a concept— Daniel should three-bet to a larger size, and when he doesn’t I get to call wider— but blindly applying it without calibrating for his actual size or range. Yes, I was right about his range, because him sizing down and showing down AJo confirms my overall thesis rather well, but being right about his range doesn’t make calling with A9o good. I am still putting in ¼ of my stack dominated and behind, but I’ll be dominated by AJo instead of KK or AKs. That’s not much better. My postflop line is fine; even if I think I should have check-raised on the flop. For every other hand I wrote about this trip, I screenshotted the hand in the Triton App and shared it with you all, for today’s hand I appear to have deleted the screenshot and can’t find it anywhere. This was likely a subconscious attempt by me to “burn the tape”. A stupid hand.
C-