POTD #40 Final Table Friday: Jamil Wakil's EPT ME Bustout
And a similar hand played by me
Today’s POTD was scheduled to be a hand I played in the tournament where I won my first and only WSOP bracelet: Event #22 $1k NLHE in the 2015 WSOP. There are two hands I remember playing in this tournament: The hand where I won the tournament, I flopped trips, check-raised the flop, bet the turn, got shoved on by ace high, snap-called, saw his hand, and announced to my rail “he’s drawing dead.” A thrilling and easy way to win my first bracelet. The other hand, I remember playing in this tournament was with 19 people left. At 6k/12k/20001 I had AhJh; it folded to me, and as I was tanking, Angel Farrington, a recreational poker player who had never cashed a WSOP event or a $1k, announced a raise to 35k on the button. I thought, I have 15bbs, and AJs and am facing a large button raise, I know the rules: If I limp, her raise is forced to stand, and I can limp/raise all-in and win 5 blinds without showdown. I shoved, ran into her QQ, sucked out on her and proceeded to win the tournament.
In my normal blog posts, there would be a whole “What I Got Wrong” segment, but this one is pretty easy. I assumed that her range for raising out of turn on the button was the same as her range from raising on the button. She probably satellited into this tournament and has already 10xed the biggest cash of her life. If she is excitedly raising out of turn, she probably has an extremely good hand. I could limp/call AJs, but even that is probably a big mistake compared to open folding.
In this hand, we are likely facing one of two ranges; against one I never have the best hand, against the other I have the best hand ~90% of the time. It’s my job to figure out what range we’re facing, and I was wrong in a way that was costly and avoidable. Last week at the EPT Monte Carlo ME Final Table, Jamil Wakil ran into a situation that was similar and different. Let’s see if he can avoid a similar mistake to mine.
The HH as described by Pokernews
What (He) Was Thinking
Fortunately for me, I don’t need to do too much mindreading, he writes his thought process out in this Tweet
Prior to this [hand] taking place, the respect that I had for Aleksandr made me truly believe that he would not pull a move like this on such a big/prestigious stage, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, knowing that the entire FT is being recorded and that it would be extremely easy to look back at the stream and see exactly where he was looking, having no way of lying about not seeing me act.
He thought that Aleksandr wasn’t angling and that Aleksandr’s small three-betting range was the same as chip leader raise-first-in range from the small blind; a very wide range. Jamil thought he’d get a fold a huge percent of the time when jamming, so he jammed.
What We Got Wrong
An early lesson one learns in poker is “don’t be results oriented.” Usually what this means is some version of-- if you have KK and the other player has AA, don’t be results oriented; sometimes they will have QQ or A5s. Similarly, if you have a set and the other guy has a flush draw, don’t be results oriented because you lost; you got it in good. For the hands we are discussing today, we need to throw that wisdom in the garbage. In these spots, you need to be results oriented. You are not playing a normal poker hand; you are a detective who must determine why your opponent made a rudimentary mistake. In my hand, I was playing versus an amateur who was so excited she literally could not wait her turn. Even if she acted in turn, her excitedly 3xing the button reeks of strength. I could have deduced that she had a great hand.
Jamil’s hand is tricky because chip leaders play an aggressive raise-first-in strategy, so if he’s not angling, shoving is worth a lot of chips and is clearly the best play. The most common outcome is that you shove and he folds. If he’s not angling, a key question for Jamil is, does Aleksandr hero call ATs or KQs type hands because he thinks you are shoving most of your opening range? Even then, Aleksandr is folding 5/6ths of the time. The key exploitative concept in this hand is figuring out if Aleksandr is angling2 or not. The key technical concept in this hand is elasticity: We are in two worlds here. In one world, he’s not angling, and shoving is a dominant play worth around $22.6k, while calling (according to the limited postflop abstraction I ran in HRC) is worth around $21.2k. $1.4k is a lot of money to give up; it’s about as much money as Jamil makes open raising AT suited here, and I’d never suggest someone open fold AT suited here (unless the button excitedly raised out of turn).
The problem is, if he is angling and always has AA, KK, AKs, then shoving loses $108k and calling loses $1.16k. That means you need to be-- and I am saying this literally, not using an expression-- 99% sure he is not angling to make shove a better play than call. This is ignoring that this is a relatively soft FT, that you might play better postflop than the solver in this oddly specific spot, but also is giving Aleksandr a relatively tight RFI range and is assuming he calls off with hands like KQ suited and 99. If he starts folding 95% of the time instead of 83% of the time, shoving makes more when he’s not misclicking, but so does calling. Either way, you probably need him to not be angling 90% of the time or more.
P.S. I sent the first draft of this initial newsletter to Jamil and he told that he did “assign a mental probability of 90%+ that [Aleksandr] was not angling in this scenario”. For more of his perspective you can listen to Jamil interview on Poker in the Ears
Types Of Error
Bad Read
Grade
The previous POTD where I analyzed a hand that wasn’t mine, I felt fine grading Addamo’s play. I know and like Jamil, as a fellow Canadian, I feel awful for him that he made a big FT and it ended this way. So I don’t want to grade his play, but I will grade my play vs Angel Farrington that led to me winning a WSOP bracelet
D
I looked up the 2015 structure sheet and could only find the Main Event structure sheet and they have 6k/12k/2k. So I am assuming the same structure in 1k tournaments. We used to have tournaments where ante size varied from 1/10th to 1/6th of a BB, what a world. Remember to thank Cary Katz next time you play a BB Ante tourney.
I wrote the following before I read Aleksandr's response, but for posterity’s sake I am publishing my initial reaction. Perhaps my true POTD is being overconfident in my assessment that Aleksandr was angling.
I’m including this in a footnote because I believe the answer is so obvious it’s not even worth including in the main newsletter. Was he angling? Of course he was. His SB RFI range is supposed to have KK+ AKs in it around 5% of the time, and did something similar earlier in the tournament. The odds of him happening to misclick twice and having great hands both times is ~1/1000, and that’s before factoring in some of the other circumstantial evidence Jamil outlines in his tweet.