POTD #74 2023 PCA: Our First and Hopefully Last Misclick

Not the misclick pictured

A requirement to playing high stakes poker at your best is being desensitized to the amount of money you are playing for. If someone goes all-in and you have thirty seconds to think, you cannot waste precious seconds thinking about how the size of the pot is a year’s salary for many people. At its worst, this agnostic attitude towards the stakes you are playing can veer into sloppiness. A novice to poker would be shocked at how much money is gifted from one player to another through elementary mistakes. Misreading hands, mucking the winner, misclicking, and other similar errors occur all the time, and no one is immune to it. Phil Galfond is famously deliberate and thoughtful; he’s mucked the winner on High Stakes Poker. Seth Davies mucked KK preflop facing an all-in because he thought everyone had folded. I’ve seen Adrian Mateos act out of turn and Stephen Chidwick misclick. Everyone does it. Daniel Negreanu misread his hand earlier this week. The reality is, you make millions of decisions in a lifetime in poker; sometimes you will short-circuit and make a tactical error, and sometimes you will short-circuit and make an error that’s the equivalent of putting your shirt on inside out or pouring salt into your coffee. It happens to the best and worst of us.

In yesterday’s POTD, I wondered if someone made a mistake-- if Bryn Kenney misread his hand or the card readers were off-- and as is the policy of the POTD, every time I criticize someone else’s play, I will find a hand I played that shares a theme with that hand. I could have chosen a hand like POTD #36, where I folded a hand with too much equity without thinking hard enough, but instead I am going to stretch. I picked Bryn’s hand because I thought he might have misread his hand, so I am going to pick a hand where I did not misread my hand but did something almost as bad: I forgot what the action was in the middle of the hand.

2023 Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure Main Event

Level 11 (1k/1.5k/1.5k) (SB/BB/BBA) around half the remaining field cashes. Starting stack is 30k.

It folds to me in the CO with A♣️9♠️ (160k) I raise t5k, Leonard Maue (covers me) three-bets the BU to 14k, the SB (100k) and BB (15k) fold, I make it 36k, he calls.

Flop (76k) J♣️5♠️4♦️: I bet 15k, he calls.

Turn (106k) 4♥️: I check, he checks.

River (106k) 7♣️: I check, he checks back and wins with T♥️T♦️.