An unfortunate effect of the increasingly fractured media environment is that it has become much more difficult to keep up to date with the work of your personal favourites. In my case this has been compounded by having two young children and dwindling free time, which means it’s rare that I can watch, listen to, or read my favourite podcasts, movies, tv shows, books, articles, paid poker strategy blogs, etc. [It’s a lot easier when you’re unemployed with no kids. There may be other drawbacks to that. -ed] I used to be the type of guy who’d see movies on opening day; now I am aware of all the things I want to watch, but I just add them to the pile and hopefully I’ll watch later. Recently, artists I consider myself big fans of, like John Wilson, The Avalanches, and John Early, have released movies and albums that I have not kept up with. And these are just the projects I know about. The other common experience of living in 2026 is learning that something in your wheelhouse was released six months ago and it took you all this time to learn it even existed. As a consumer, it’s hard to keep track of the flood of new releases, and now as a (shudders) creator, I know this experience from the other side. It is hard for me to keep the small group of Sam Greenwood fans aware of everything that I am doing.
So in today’s introduction, I am writing to tell you that in case you missed it, I am writing a weekly POTD on Octopi— a POTW, that is available to professional subscribers. They will publish on Thursdays, and my writing will be accompanied by preflop and postflop sims run by the team at Octopi that are posted in their Vault. I am quite happy with how the first five have come out and how they are laid out on their website. So I suggest you check them out. You can read the first six, including today’s hand, here.
The first POTWs were hands that interested me personally but gained very little traction in the broader poker world, but today’s hand is the first viral hand I’ve had a chance to write about for Octopi, and it is a doozy. One of poker’s more interesting new characters, Nicholas Palma, folded a one-card jack-high straight when he only lost to a two-card queen-high straight, and he was right. The last time I commented on a big fold Palma made, it ended up with him blocking me on social media, so let’s see if I am more or less charitable to his fold in today’s hand. Perhaps he’ll read this and unblock me, or perhaps he’ll never even see this post, given the fractured modern media landscape.
Poker Masters 2026 Event #4 $10K NLH
(20k/40k/40k) (SB/BB/BBA) We are 6 Handed.
6th: $40k, 5th: $56k, 4th: $76k, 3rd: $104k, 2nd: $144k, 1st; $224k.
Jamie Dwan (1.84M/46bbs) folds, Nicolas Palma (1.19M/30bbs) has A♣️J♥️ and makes it 80k, Erik Seidel (210k/5bbs) folds, ,Clemen Deng (2.775M/69bbs) folds, Andrew Lichtenberger (790k/20bbs) folds, Vitalijs Zavorotnjis (3.08M/77bbs) calls with Q♥️J♠️
Flop (220k) 9♥️8♦️7♦️: Vitalijs leads 60k, Nick calls
Turn (340k) T♥️: Vitalijs leads 180k, Nick calls
River (700k) 5♣️: Vitalijs shoves for Nick’s final 870k, Nick folds.
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What I Think (No Cheating)
When this hand first went viral, I posted about it on Twitter, and I’ll link to those thoughts for the Octopi crowd and block quote them for the Substack crowd:
When people make heroic plays and are right I tend to give them their flowers. That’s especially true when their opponent takes zero reach lines (I’d guess flop is a pure check from Vitalis).[sic]
I’d guess Nick’s logic on the river is that Vitalis [sic] is never bluffing and only shoving chops. Nick needs 35.5% to call for cEV and with a risk premium of around 4.5% that means if he has QJ 20% and a chop 80% you need to fold.
The problem is 40% equity where you bust the tournament 20% of the time, but never double up >> 40% equity where you double up 60% of the time and bust 40%. So traditional RP underestimates how often Vitalis [sic] needs to have QJ for Nick to fold here.
There’s also a live read element here where if Vitalis [sic] looks like he has it, it might just be a chop. If I could buy Nick’s fold over a million hands, I would not do it, but kudos to him for the highlight reel play.
I’ll elaborate a little more here. Normally, the BB does not play leads on boards with three connected cards, unless the board is 876 or lower. This is because the HJ often raises JTo and has a nut straight advantage. They also have a lot of suited 9x, offsuit Tx and Jx, and overpairs/sets. Overall, 987 tends to favour the PFR in a way it doesn’t favour the BB. Things are different under ICM pressure. I do think Nick might fold JTo here when Erik Seidel has 5bbs in the CO; however, I also think Vitalijs might fold offsuit connectors like 65o and 98o, so this board is not quite as good for his range as it appears. I’d guess Vitalijs pure checks the flop, but playing a leading strategy is fine, and if you play leads, QJ is a perfectly fine hand to lead. Once Nick faces a lead, I’d guess he does very little raising with range. Normally when you face leads on connected boards under this sort of ICM pressure, you play defensively in position and wait to see how the board runs out before putting a lot of money in the pot.
Normally when the BB leads on a flop that is three straight connected cards and the turn is a fourth connected card, the BB leads the turn a lot as well. I think this hand is an exception. If the BB is leading the flop often here, it’s because they have a lot of hands like K8 or Q6 in addition to hands like 65/95/77,etc. Well, this turn is a great card for Palma. It’s unclear if he has JTo pre, but he certainly has QJ, KJ, AJ, JJ, a bunch of nut flush draws, combo draws, sets, etc. If the turn were an offsuit 5, I think Vitalijs should almost always lead, but I think he should mostly check on the turn. Once Palma faces a large turn bet, it is tempting to shove with the Jh… if the turn were the Tc, I’d often shove with the Jd in my hand, blocking his freerolls and praying I am not up against QJ. On this board, he can be getting freerolled by Jdxd and KJ, so maybe just calling is the wise play even with the Jh in his hand. Either way, calling the turn can’t be a bad play.
The river is pretty simple to me. I think stack-to-pot is small enough that I am not 100% sure Vitalijs is only shoving QJ or bluffs. If he is shoving a bare J either for value or as a freeroll to get a J to fold, it’s very hard to fold a jack yourself. Even if you think he’s only shoving QJ or bluffs, it’s very hard to fold when you have a jack in your hand and block 25% of his value range. If you want to hit some sort of min defense frequency, it’s also tough to fold a jack-high straight when you will reach the river with a lot of hands worse than a jack-high straight, such as two sets of missed flush draws, QQ, QT, 77-TT, 66, A6s, and some two-pair combos, and that’s not even getting into hands that might call a turn bet like KK or AQ. You need to call with a jack here, but if you think Vitalijs should pure check on the flop (as I do) and that his flop, turn, and river leading strategies might be unbalanced, you can make a big fold if you believe he has the goods too often.
What I Got Wrong (What the Vault Says)
The Vault has Nick playing much, much tighter than I anticipated. He’s open folding KTo, QTo and JTo, and he’s mixing with KJo and QJo. It also has Vitalijs playing much looser than I expected; he’s defending hands like 63o and 52o. This leads me to believe that Nick should likely be raising larger than min preflop. It also means I am not surprised to see that Vitalijs frequently leads the flop. He leads 68% of the time in the Octopi sim, and he splits between a small block size and a larger size. I was correct that vs. either size, Nick does almost no raising. When facing a small size, the tightest folds Nick makes are with hands like A5s, AK, AQ, KQ without a backdoor flush draw.
Even as Nick folds a lot of weak offsuit broadways preflop, the Th turn is still rather good for him. He has 56% range-vs.-range equity. He has a straight slightly less often than Vitalijs, but that’s in part because Vitalijs has a bunch of ten-high straights. Nick’s straights are better straights, even if he has them slightly less often. They both have a straight around 1/3rd of the time so they both need to be careful without one. In the Octopi sim, Vitalijs either blocks with a jack-high straight or overbets with a queen-high straight (and occasionally KJ); he never bets a middling half-pot sort of size. Versus either size, Nick does very little raising, but he can raise any straight if he’d like. A turn overbet is enough that it gets Nick to start folding some jack-high straights right away. The solver playing this turn split is not great for our purposes, of trying to figure out if Nick’s river fold was good. When the BB plays no medium bet on the turn it means the stack-to-pot ratio on the river either much too large or much too small, which means either Vitalijs never overbet shoves the river because we are too deep, or Nick can never fold a jack because the shove is too small.
When I reran the sim only allowing Vitalijs to bet the 53% pot he chose, Nick responds by basically playing shove, fold or call; he never raises small. He occasionally shoves a bare straight to a half-pot bet and he never folds one. On a brick river, Vitalijs can bet quarter pot or half pot with jack-high straights. A quarter-pot bet is called by sets, two pair, AA, etc. When he overbet shoves, he is never doing it with a J. AJ has 85% equity on the river as Vitalijs; that’s far too strong a hand to bluff to try and get chops to fold. So his bluff-shoving range on the river is specific AQ, KQ and Q5s-Q2s combos. However, even vs. a polar range that we know to be QJ or no pair with a queen in it, and under immense ICM pressure, we still can’t fold a J. Even the worst AJ hands that mix vs. Vitalijs’s shove still have 55% equity vs. his shoving range and mix calls. My guess for Nick’s risk premium was around 5%, but it is closer to 20%, He’s under immense ICM pressure, and it is a pretty sick spot with AJ, but in theory basically every jack-high straight still has more than enough equity to call. It’s a much closer spot than I thought and folding is a reasonable deviation if you really think he has QJ.
Final Thoughts
I’d have opened looser than Nick preflop and defended tighter than Vitalijs is supposed to from the BB. The flop play all seems pretty normal given the Octopi preflop ranges, heavy lead for the player with the big stack and the nuts advantage. The BB doesn’t have a range advantage, but when the PFR co-operates by almost never raising over a flop lead, it makes betting the flop very attractive. The turn seems to favour Nick, but the solver still thinks Vitalijs can play some low-frequency bets, and QJ is a hand that has to be included in the BB’s betting range. Nick can stack off on the turn with any jack, but he decided to play cautiously, which is the most common play.
There are two ways to view the river. On the one hand, Nick has a pure call because he blocks QJ and doesn’t block any bluffs. If he wants to call the river ~40% of the time, that’s a hard thing to do if you start folding Jx. It’s also not the hardest spot in the world for Vitalijs to be bluffing. If he led the flop with AQ, KQ or a queen-high flush draw, he can bluff on the river. The other way to think of this river is that, blocking value combos be damned, Nick simply doesn’t think Vitalijs is bluffing here often enough, and Nick will see QJ more than 45% of the time when he calls, so he can fold.
My other concern here is that if Vitalijs ever shoves a bare jack on the river either for value or to fold out a chop, it’s very hard for this fold to be winning. It’s a specific enough line in a specific enough spot that I will return to my initial post on social media and give Nick his flowers for making the right fold in unique spot. Vitalijs needs to be bluffing here a lot to justify calling off vs a small overbet at this stage of the FT. Normally when you call the river with a bluff-catcher, you know that you’re more likely than not to see a winner and to be content with your pot odds. In today’s hand, Nick needs to be good more than half the time. He’s all-in and you’re good or you’re not. Nick really felt he was not good here, made a read, went with it and was rewarded for making the correct play.