A format I’ve occasionally returned to on POTD is “Winning Wednesday,” where I write about a small hand from the early levels of a tournament I ended up doing well in. A problem with finding hands that fit this format is that on long poker trips, days tend to blend together, which means it can be hard to remember what tournament a certain hand took place in. Today’s hand is one I definitely remember playing, but it felt like a hand from one of the first tournaments of a trip, a $25k, maybe a $30k. I think part of the reason it felt this way is because the Triton Main Event is a deep-stacked tournament, which means in my memory, a hand that I started with under 40bbs probably did not take place in a Main Event.
I don’t remember how I lost half my stack leading up to this hand and I don’t remember how I busted my first bullet after this hand. It looks like I had the nut flush draw in a three-bet pot, check-raised, bet the turn, and gave up when I whiffed. Then I lost the pot I am writing about today, and then I made top pair with AT vs. Isaac Haxton’s AJ in an interesting hand that I’ll write about in this space next week. After busting bullet 1, I re-entered and lost 1/3rd of my stack on the third hand I played, and things were not looking good for me. Then Orpen Kisacikoglu raised the button, Sosia Jiang flatted the SB, I shoved Th9h for 40bbs from the BB, Orpen folded, Sosia called 88, and the flop was AhKh5h. That double-up would lead me to the end of day 1, into the money and to the final table, where I’d come in second place to Jason Koon, but before all that, we had a hand that reminded me a little of POTD #307.
In that hand, Malcom Trayner called down Lucas Jumalon with pocket queens on an AJ4 board in a three-bet pot. The consensus around that hand followed conventional poker wisdom: If you have KK or QQ and the flop is ace high, do not get married to your pocket pair. A good hand preflop is not the same as a good hand postflop. However, my conclusion in that hand was that Malcom’s call was not all that bad. If you always fold QQ-KK on ace-high boards, especially if you regularly c-bet with them, you’ll probably be leaking EV with them. Today’s hand is one where I’m looking at a spot where I folded QQ on an ace-high board in part because I defaulted to a basic heuristic of “don’t call with QQ on an ace-high board”, but the hand turned out to be much trickier. My fold might have been a punt, a mistake or neither, but that’s something you’ll find out about at the end of this post.
Triton Poker Series Cyprus 2023 - Event #11 $100,000 NLH - Main Event
(1.5k/3k/3k) (SB/BB/BBA) 250k Starting Stack
Chris Brewer (279k/93bbs) makes it 7k in the LJ, it folds to me (112k/37.5bbs) in the HJ with Q♣️Q♥️ and I make it 19k, it folds back to Chris who calls.
Flop (45.5k) A♠️7♠️7♦️: Chris checks, I bet 9k, Chris makes it 22k, I call.
Turn (89.5k) 3♥️: Chris shoves for my final 71.5k, I fold.
