In trawling through old hands I played, I remembered I made a five-part series on Run It Once about my deep run in the 10k SCOOP Main Event in 2016. I remembered that I came 10th in this tournament. I busted reshoving K9s into eventual champion Talal Shakerchi’s AQs blind vs. blind and bricking out. I also remembered the incredibly slow pace of play; this was an online tournament with huge time banks and long initial action clocks. Everyone was taking the maximum amount of time on every decision from 27 players down to 9. While the pace of play was slow, the play itself was action packed, with notables like Talal, Scott Seiver, Darren Elias, John Juanda, Sean Winter, Pablo Fernandez, and Chris Brammer all making the final 13. With the top two places getting seven figures, I was hoping to have my first million dollar cash, but things didn’t go as planned.
In reviewing the footage, I was reasonably impressed with how I played; it was 10 years ago, after all. However, I noticed two persistent errors in my play that were rather costly. I cared too much about equity denial, and I cared too much about the tippy top of a range when thinking about which player had a range advantage. To the first point, I’ll reiterate a thought experiment I give to coaching students that I may or may not have posted here (this is #360, give me a break): If you had AhKh UTG and were told the flop would be 7c6c5c, what would you do? The answer to me is rather obvious. Fold. You have a good hand on many flops, but not on this one. You don’t want to put money in the pot to protect a hand that will be bad on the flop. Similarly, if you raise AhAd, the flop is 9s8s2s, and you were told the turn will be the Qs, you can fold to a large flop check-raise. If certain cards kill your hand strength, playing passively makes sense, especially when you are out of position. Betting big to charge your opponent’s draws is a nice play on the flop, if you see a clean turn. When certain ugly turns and rivers roll out, you’ll have wished you kept the pot small. So it’s often the best strategy to play cautiously and wait for clean turns and rivers to roll out before you start putting money in the pot.
As for the second point, that I was more concerned with the very top of ranges when determining who had the strongest range. I find it’s often better to think of what you and your opponents’ weakest value bets are and how often they have that or better when determining range strength. If they have hands they can value bet more often than you do and a stronger range than you, it doesn’t matter that 3% of the time you will have a very strong hand they can never have. The frequency with which you have a hand that can value bet for all-in matters much more than the absolute strength of your strongest value bet. So let’s go back to 2016, where I was fighting for a career high score, one I might have gotten had I internalized the two lessons above.
2026 10k SCOOP Main Event
(50k/100k/12.5k) (SB/BB/ANTE) 13 Left. 7-Handed Avg 3.1M
I (2.66M) make it 250k with A♦️J♠️ UTG, John “LuckBox” Juanda (5.7M) folds, markovitsus (2.88M) calls, it folds to Darren “darrenelias” Elias (1.5M) in the BB who calls.
Flop (887.5k) A♣️T♣️5♥️: Darren checks, I bet 300k, marko, calls, Darren shoves 1.36M, I fold, Marko calls with A♠️T♠️ and beats Darren’s A♥️J♦️
