RERUN POTD #70 Final Table Friday: ClubWPT Adds A Million For First
What do you do?
One of my most read posts of 2025 was POTD #70, where I wrote about Jesse Yaginuma and James Carroll’s heads up match. However I don’t think many readers read about the hand history I analyzed that week. I am not going to make you scroll through a block of text relitigating one of the biggest poker scandals of 2025, if you’d like to read or reread my thoughts on ClubWPT Gold’s million dollar freerolls, you can do so here. In today’s rerun I will remove the paywall from the HH analysis and post it below. At the conclusion of the post there will be a #onemorething and a video of me analyzing the hand that I shared with Premium Subscribers in the Discord channel. If you’d like to become a Premium Subscriber you can do so here or you can pay for an hour of private coaching with me and contact me at any of the methods outlined here.
I’ve written over a thousand words[if you want to read them click the link above], but we are not done; we still have a poker hand to talk about today. Let’s look at a hand that occurred 7-handed in Event #20, the $1500 Shootout. Michael Lavin is playing a tournament with an extra million up top; everyone else is playing a vanilla tournament. What should happen?
$1500 WSOP Event 20, NLHE Shootout final table
Blinds 60k/120k/120k (BBA)
1st is $267,373, 7th is $42,080 The progression from 1st to 7th is pretty normal.
Preflop: Westmorland (4.615M) raises t240k UTG7 with A♥️A♦️, it folds to Lavin (7.97M) who calls 9♣️9♠️ on the button, everyone else folds.
Flop (780k) K♦️9♦️3♥️: Westmorland checks, Lavin bets 250k, Westmorland raises to 800k, Lavin calls.
Turn (2.38M) 8♠️: Westmorland bets 1.4m, Lavin calls.
River (5.18M) J♠️: Westmorland bets 2.2m all-in, Lavin calls.
Westmorland is eliminated in 7th place. Let’s dig into what he was thinking.
What Westmorland Was Thinking
I suspect his thought process was something like: I have AA. I only lose to 99, 33, and K9s. I’m playing against someone who has different incentives than me and is playing for first. I want to put money in the pot vs. someone who is playing looser than ICM and am happy fastplaying this for value.
I am sure he was not thrilled with the offsuit jack river, but especially with the Ad in your hand, there really isn’t a whole lot you can do with b40 to play. Lavin shouldn’t be value-shoving worse, you block some of his most likely bluffs versus a check, so you just shove and hope to get called by KQ or KT or JT.
What Sam Thinks (No Cheating)
I think Westmorland plays his hand in a way that doesn’t lose EV but is not optimal in such a specific situation. I might raise a little larger than min preflop with a chipleader playing for first on the button, but cheating and raising the minimum with AA when there is a short stack in the BB is fine. Westmorland could bet the flop or he could check/call the flop; however, once he check-raises the flop and has 1.5x pot to play on the turn, he needs to be prepared to stack off. All of the QJT rivers are pretty ugly for AA, but Lavin should rarely have J9s, and the only QT combo he has is QdTd. It’s unclear if he will have KJo pre, but the J river is not nearly as bad as a queen river, which fills JT (which never folds the turn with an open-ender) and KQ (which would never fold preflop).
However, I do not think this is the optimal line. As a medium stack, Westmorland should generally be playing passively vs. a big stack. If Westmorland were to bluff the river for chips, he would need Lavin to fold 29.5% of the time to break even, but ICM says he needs Lavin to fold 47.4% of the time for Westmorland’s bluffs to break even. Under that much ICM pressure, you should eliminate thin value shoves, because to balance your range you’d need to bluff more often, which means you end up playing more pots for stacks, which is bad for you.
Lavin does not have the same disincentive against playing small pots; he wants to win all the chips in the tournament. However, this is not like a bounty tournament, where Lavin might just call a flop jam with 6d5d to try and win a big prize. He’s trying to play +cEV poker. If your risk premium is basically 0 and you are just trying to maximize the probability you win the tournament, and your opponents are very concerned with laddering and need to fold +cEV bluff catchers on the river, your overall strategy should involve over-bluffing and putting lots of pressure on your opponents. For these reasons, I think check/calling down is the superior way for Westmorland to play his aces and take advantage of this specific situation.
What The Solver Says
Anyone who has read me discuss PIO ICM outputs or looked at PIO ICM sims knows how defensively these outputs play. You rarely raise the flop if you check/call the flop; AdAx mixes turn folds when facing an 80% pot turn bet, and even in the line played in this hand, AA can’t value shove with 67% equity, and it needs to check/fold the river even when it has 37% equity and is facing a 40% pot-sized shove. I think once the pot gets large after the flop check-raise, these outputs are too tight and probably a little wonky. There’s a lot of money out there, and this sim is suggesting Westmorland make some plays that cost a lot of chips and that to me are a bridge too far.
However, what the solver gets right, in my opinion, is that OOP should play very passively on the flop and try to avoid playing a monster pot. This is especially true when the two players have completely different incentives and one player is going to be over-bluffing. Whether it’s at a final table or in a cash game, if a player is over-bluffing, countering with calling down is a better exploit than expanding your value range, and that’s what I think Westmorland should have done in this hand.
Grade
It’s a tough spot for Westmorland, and to be honest, he was mostly dealt a cold deck. Had he check/called the flop, he’s losing a big pot no matter what, even if he could find a hero fold on the river. I don’t think his line loses much EV, but it’s not the optimal line, and part of being an excellent poker player is adjusting when faced with an odd situation— like being at a final table where one player gets 4x first place if he wins the tournament. I’m going to give Westmorland a respectable grade of
B-
However, I have some other grades to hand out:
ClubWPT F
WSOP F
Jesse Yaginuma D
James Carroll D
POTD #70 #onemorething
So I'm going to write about something that really irked me about James and Jesse’s heads up match. How bad they were at chip dumping. They should have just had James leave and had Jesse blind him out, it would have been less conspicuous than this. I'll highlight a couple of hands that irked me from the perspective of "if you're trying to chip dump at least do it well". They were in a tough spot because Jesse was so short he needed to win a lot of pots early such that they could avoid getting AIPF, but it their play left no doubt they were chip dumping.
https://www.pokernews.com/tours/wsop/2025-wsop/event-53-1500-millionaire-maker/chips.754311.htm
Hand 2: James raised 2.5x otb with A6s. A6s is not such a monster you want to avoid letting Jesse see a flop. You should limp and find a way to lose the pot to him postflop or at least give Jesse a shot to win it.
Hand 3: Jesse raises KQhh and James doesn't just fold 53o. It's a fold for chips (I think) Let Jesse win his 2bbs.
https://www.pokernews.com/tours/wsop/2025-wsop/event-53-1500-millionaire-maker/chips.754734.htm
Hand 7: Why does Carroll lead the flop with 86 on A53 and why does Jesse fold? For this hand I don't care if they are or are not chip dumping. This is a terribly played poker hand if they aren't.
Hand 8 Why doesn't Jesse jam KTo preflop over his button open?
https://www.pokernews.com/tours/wsop/2025-wsop/event-53-1500-millionaire-maker/chips.754305.htm
The next batch of hands features even stupider collusion here where James fold two pure preflop vpips/jams on the button after fucking up chip dumping several times in the previous batch of hands
https://www.pokernews.com/tours/wsop/2025-wsop/event-53-1500-millionaire-maker/chips.754320.htm
And finally the infamous king high vs king high hand. Why didn't Jesse just bluff shove the river over his bet and why didn't Carroll not bluff the river? If you're trying to mask what you are doing some hands will be boring check down pots. That's fine. If you're trying to end it as quickly and shamelessly as possible, why are you struggling to play this fairly simple game.