Week in Review #10 May 25th-May 31st
Pictured: Where I will be this weekend instead of the Horseshoe
The World Series of Poker has started, if you are reading this, there is a very good chance you are already in Las Vegas or will be soon. For the ninth straight year, I will not be playing a full schedule. There are a couple reasons for this, Canadians get subject to withholding tax and it makes playing a full schedule of high buyin tourneys a headache, but the main reason is simply that there is too much live poker. It used to be that if you wanted to play a poker series with some good tournaments $5k and higher you had the WSOP, WPT and EPT and that’s it. Now you have those three plus Triton, PGT, APT, Poker Dream, all the tournaments in Florida, tournaments at the Wynn… I could go on, but I’ll stop. The WSOP is a great series, especially for people who like mixed games, but at some point I needed to do some triage in my own poker schedule and the WSOP was the first to go. Don’t pick me in fantasy drafts or Main Event crossbooks.
I will be playing some live poker this weekend, for the 6th straight year, I will be attending the Hands Helping Hands fundraiser. It’s a charity poker tournament run by my brother Luc and his friend Hoang that sends children who could otherwise not afford it to summer camp. It’s hosted at the camp and it’s always a good time. I hope to bring home the trophy this year.
As always, if you like what you’re reading on this newsletter please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The subscription tiers and all the ways to contact me are listed here. However, I will highlight the two highest subscription tiers below because I interacted with several people this week who did not know about all the perks.
Premium Subscribers - Will get access to the Punt of the Day Discord server, a Google Drive folder where I post sims I discussed in the newsletter, additional bonus sims I ran just for Premium Subscribers, daily videos of me looking through the sims, extra strategy analysis, AND you have a chance to submit your own hands to be analyzed by me in the blog.
Private Coaching - Anyone who pays for an hour of private coaching from me will be gifted a premium subscription for one year.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
In addition to posting additional sims, I have also posted short videos of me going through the sims. A Premium Subscriber suggested that I record these videos and I am doing it now. I aim to please. In addition to 5 short videos going through sims, I have also uploaded the following sims
A PIO cEV sim of a 200bb three bet pot
A PIO sim forcing myself down the incorrect node I went down
A Rocket Solver sim of a three way three bet pot and a PIO solve from the turn
Three different PIO ICM sims with three different flop betting strategies for IP
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething I posted about POTD #46
POTD #46 onemorething will be about the early level deepstack meta in SHRs, but tournaments in general. In the early levels, I try to play good balanced poker as does Mike Watson, which means today's hand doesn't really involve any deepstack metagame analysis. However there are a lot of big pot players and small pot players. Small pot players usually don't want to risk firing too many bullets in the tourney and are happy to start the day off playing some gentle friendly poker. However there are a group of SHR regs who seem to play 400bb pots in level one of every single tournament. Sometimes I think they're consciously deviating against the small pot players, putting max pressure on them and hoping to get folds. Sometimes I think they're just jonesing for action and are doing a more sophisticated version of 5xing preflop to increase the probability you play for stacks. 200 blinds deep the CO opens and the BB is supposed to three bet ~8% of the time, it's really easy to overdo it with all the bluffs and get up to 10-12%. I remember studying all the deep 4b bluffs, so I could play back at Michael Addamo who three bets relentlessly from the BB. Then we played together in a big tourney at Triton Madrid, he three bet me three times from the BB and I had stone bottom of range every time and chose to fold. That's the risk of preparing for an uncommon node, most of the time you won't get to use the play you've been working on
Media
I spent hours of my week talking to Joe Stapleton and James Hartigan. I did two hours of SCOOP Main Event commentary on Twitch (my commentary starts around 2:02:30). I was also on their podcast Poker in the Ears, where I discussed a punt from Big Game on Tour episode 1: a PITE X POTD X BGOT collaboration. You can find the podcast on Pokerstars or Spotify, you should listen to the whole episode but my section becomes 38:00 in.
I am currently watching Severance and am midway through Season 2. I am starting to get impatient with the show and I am worried it will not stick the landing. Next week, I’ll let you know if I thought it did.
Clipse released their first song in a long time. I've liked Pusha T’s solo work, but when a band releases their first album in 16 years, I have doubts over whether it will be any good. I did not care for the first single, but here’s hoping the album is good.
Have a good weekend and remember I can be reached on