POTD #97 Can My AJ Holz vs Fedor

An inequal stack spot from Triton Cyprus

One of the hardest things about playing tournament poker is, not only do you need to know how to play a variety of different preflop stack sizes and different tournament situations, you need to know how to play a variety of different pairings of different stack sizes and tournament situations. GTO Wizard is the largest public postflop solver output database; they have outputs for every board over dozens of stack sizes, but they use shortcuts. One of those shortcuts that mostly works for online cash games, but leads to some imperfect tournament outputs, is that they assume stacks are symmetrical preflop. The outputs are useful, but they can fall apart when there are some very deep stacks and some very short stacks. The hand I’m writing about today, from the Triton Cyprus Main Event in 2023, shows the limits of symmetrical stack outputs when you’re looking at a hand with asymmetrical stacks.

Today’s hand is a 15BB deep hijack vs. big blind single-raised pot. If we were all 15bbs deep, I would not have any postflop decisions, because I would be all-in preflop with my hand, AJo. Instead, I played a postflop pot where we had 14bbs back in a 5.5BB pot and I flopped a very good hand. This hand should be simple and hard to mess up, but this hand proved to be deceptively complex.

Triton Poker Series Cyprus 2023 - Event #11 $100,000 NLH - Main Event
(SB/BB/BBA) (5k/10k/10k) Day 1 250k Starting Stack

It folds to me in the HJ with 300k I have A♥️J♦️ and make it 20k, everyone folds and Fedor Holz calls in the BB with 150k total.

Flop (55k) A♠️Q♠️T♣️: Fedor checks, I bet 28k, Fedor calls

Turn 111k 9♠️: Fedor checks, I shove for 102k total, Fedor folds.