POTD #66 Monte Carlo Mondays Broadway in a Three Bet Pot

Vs Lithunian Legend Paulius Vaitieknuas

In this newsletter, I focus a lot on what is the best solver play, because I think it’s important to establish a quantitative baseline before giving my advice. There are enough people in the world, poker and otherwise, who are confidently spouting bullshit without backing it up. So I always want to provide a modicum of proof as a foundation for my analysis. However, the reality is, most poker hands played even amongst elite players are not a game of two players copying solver strategies vs. each other. They observe each other’s tendencies and try to exploit them within a solver-y framework. Today’s hand looks standard, and it is, but the thing that I really beat myself up about in today’s hand was my preflop play. I had a hunch that my opponent was slightly overbluffing preflop, and if you are 20bbs deep and someone is “slightly” overbluffing preflop, the equilibrium breaks down pretty quickly and four-bet shoving any reasonable hand becomes attractive quickly. I seem to recall this hand happening either right before or right after a break, and I wasn’t quite locked in enough to make what I felt in hindsight was the right exploit. Of course, it’s also possible there is another hindsight bias at play here: I saw my opponent’s cards and retroactively determined, oh of course he is overbluffing here, why didn’t you do the thing that would have won you the hand? It’s so obvious.

Either way, today’s hand had one decision I beat myself up over and another decision I didn’t even notice was a mistake until I started writing this newsletter sometime last week. While I would rather have won the pot, I am getting a small rebate in knowledge months later, which I will share with you now.

Triton Monte Carlo 2024 $50k NLHE Event #9 200k Starting Stack (3k/6k/6k) (SB/BB/BBA)

HH: Triton App

I (150k) raise t13k UTG6 with A♣️J♥️, it folds to Paulius Vaitiekunas (124k) who makes it 30k in the CO, it folds back to me and I I call

Flop (75K) K♦️Q♦️J♠️ I check, Paulius bets 25k, I call
Turn (125k) K♥️: I check, Paulius checks
Rier (125k) T♥️: I check, Paulis bets 34k of his remaining 69k, I call and much when I am shown K♠️Q♥️