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I have caught up with all my hands from Jeju and this week will be our first normal week in POTD in almost a month. So I figured, let’s start with a normal hand in a normal format: a Monte Carlo Monday hand from the middle levels of a $30,000 tournament. I recently wrote about how the best poker players are ones who have strong fundamentals and rarely punt themselves; if you don’t make big mistakes and play well on the margins, you’ll succeed in the long run.
Playing well on the margins is a tricky concept in poker, because when you have a marginal spot, there are often alternative strategies that have the same EV. If you’re between c-betting or checking on the flop, your hand might be a mix and all your fretting might be for naught. However, if you’re thinking of value betting the river and you’re shoving one pip too wide, it can be very costly; if you’re facing a preflop shove in a spot that’s supposed to be called by QQ+, but you call JJ, it can be very costly. In today’s hand, I had three marginal spots, I made a couple errors, but also I didn’t lose all that much EV. Was my hand poorly played, or was I just dealt two cards where it was hard to make a large EV error without doing something really foolish like shoving for 10x pot? It’s tough to say, but I think “any play is fine” is a cop-out when you are in a marginal spot; you want to find the best play, even if it makes you pennies.
Triton Monte-Carlo 2023 - Event #7 $30K NLH 7-Handed
(2.5k/5k/5k) (SB/BB/BBA) 200k Starting Stack. Registration is Open.
It folds to David Yan (259k/52bbs) on the button who makes it 12k, it folds to me in the BB (300k/60bbs) and I call with Q♣️8♠️.
Flop (31.5k) K♠️6♣️2♠️: I check, David bets 9k, I call.
Turn (49.5k) 6♠️: I lead 12k, David calls.
River (73.5k) Q♥️: I bet 15k, David calls with K♣️7♦️ and I lose.
