POTD #91 Monte Carlo Monday: AI vs Aido with ATo

Pictured: Sergio holding what could have been my trophy (Photo: Neil Stoddart)

A piece of advice that POTD subscriber Nate Silver gave me about growing a Substack was, when something newsworthy happens, write about it immediately. In Nate’s world, this refers to Stephen Colbert getting fired, or Trump not releasing The Epstein Files, or Israel bombing Iran. In my world, that means someone didn’t go all-in with AK when they should have, but I still took Nate’s advice. Which meant that the turnaround for POTD #84 and POTD #85 was quick (shoutout to POTD copy editor Nath Pizzolatto, aka Captain Nath, or Cap’nJackpot if you’re an old enough online player to recognize that name). My analysis in POTD #84 was sound, but one thing gnawed at me a little in the “What Kenny Was Thinking” section of the blog I wrote:

If you think the Grinder’s four-bet range is linear and doesn’t have polar bluffs, and you still need to generate a lot of folds to make the shove good, the question becomes, can you get the Grinder to fold JJ, QQ or AKo?

The question I did not answer in that blog post is “How much is ‘a lot of folds’?” Six punts and two weekends later, I can report the answer is a very boring “around 50%.” If Grinder is four-betting a linear range, where his “bluffs” are hands like TT and AQo and not A5s, and calling a shove with QQ+ and AKo pure, and folding to a shove around 1/2 the time, shoving AKo breaks even according to Malmuth-Harville ICM.

So today, I am going to pair Kenny’s fold with a hand I played at a final table in Monte Carlo in 2019. We were three handed in the €100k, and instead of making a big fold in a top-heavy tournament when I thought my opponent wasn’t folding enough, I made a big shove in a tournament with a flat payout structure because I thought my opponent was folding too much. Kenny will never know if Grinder would have called off JJ or if he would have won the flip, but I know that I was called by KK, and instead of collecting a second EPT Monaco €100k title, I had to settle for a bronze medal.

Pokernews Update

EPT Monte Carlo 2019 €100,000 EPT Super High Roller

(60k/120k/120k) (SB/BB/BBA)

We are Three Handed: 3rd gets €731,530, 2nd gets €1,147,750 and 1st gets €1,589,190

I (3.25M) make it 250k OTB, Sergio (7.245M) makes it 960k in the SB, Jesus (2.405M) folds in the BB, I jam A♥️T♠️, get called by K♥️K♠️ and am eliminated.