In POTD #300 I wrote about a hand where Ben Tollerene correctly turned flopped bottom pair into a bluff on the river, but was called down by Dejan Kaladjurdjevic’s top pair. An advantage Ben had in finding that bluff was that he raised the button and the flop was K53, meaning the only bottom pair hand he had was A3. When it’s rare for you to have a hand of a certain class, it often makes for an appealing hand to bluff with. You don’t want all of your bluffs coming from the same class of hand, especially when you regularly need to bluff with hands that don’t necessarily block your opponent’s strongest hands. So when you have an odd hand, like Ben Tollerene’s bottom pair, it usually makes sense to go for it.
Today’s hand is from the FT of a WCOOP $5k in 2021, a hand where I had the opposite problem. I felt that my hand had no showdown value, but I also felt that I had so many hands like mine and I did not want to bluff with all of them. I feared that if I always bluffed with my no-showdown hands that I’d be bluffing too much, and my opponent, Daniel Smiljkovic, could always call me down with any reasonable bluff-catcher. “Sometimes you gotta bluff with nothing and sometimes you have to give up with nothing” is accurate, but not particularly useful, analysis. So, 51 punts after I wrote about Ben finding a tricky but correct solver bluff with bottom pair, one where he was worried that he had punted, I am revisiting a hand where I checked the river with bottom pair and immediately regretted it. Was this a case of me being mad that I lost a pot to a hand barely better than mine? Or did I correctly assess what my range looked like, and waved the white flag and regretted my play once I saw that my bluff would have worked?
2021 WCOOP-42 H $5K NLHE Final Table
(100k/200k/25k) (SB/BB/ANTE) 250k Starting Stack
5th: $53k, 4th: $68k, 3rd: $88k, 2nd: $114k, 1st: $147k
Daenarys T (3.4M/17bbs) folds, SmilleThHero (3.7M/18.5bbs) makes it 400k in the CO, Colisea (2.8M/14bbs) folds the OTB, elliottpet (16.4M/82bbs) folds the SB, I (7.6M/38bbs) call in the BB with 6♥️4♠️.
Flop (1.025M) A♠️J♣️4♦️: I check, Smille bets 256k, I call.
Turn (1.537M) 9♠️: I check, Smille checks.
River (1.537M) K♣️: I check, Smille checks and I lose to 5♣️5♦️.
