Week in Review #12 June 8th-June 14th
On News Stands Now
As someone who hasn’t spent a whole series in Vegas for quite some time, but has a sense of what is going on from social media, poker media and talking to friends. One thing that consistently baffles me about the WSOP is the sheer quantity of disputes. The WSOP is the only series where I regularly hear about there being a "color up controversy". There’s a great line from the TV show Justified: “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.” My question when it comes to the WSOP is who are the assholes? Are American recs so rude that harried dealers and floor staff need to turn into camp counselors who treat paying customers like they are toddlers? Or are the staff power tripping assholes who need to show their authority whenever possible. As is often the case in life it’s a little of both, however in my experience at the WSOP it’s more of the latter.
Poker operators need to run a fair game, but they’re also in the customer service business. The customer is always right, is a good rule of thumb, but what if the customer is insisting that his string raise is an actual raise and he’s been given several warnings already? I don’t envy the job of the floor staff or dealers at the WSOP, but that doesn’t mean players shouldn’t expect that the staff do their job well. There are lots of jobs I wouldn’t want to do personally, but where I expect competency and professionalism from the people who are working them.
At WSOP Paradise we were hand for hand on the bubble of the $50k NLHE. The floor told us that players weren’t allowed to look at other tables. In theory this could be an okay ruling1, but in practice it made no sense. It’s impossible to enforce. It gives advantages to players who are naturally seated in chairs where they can see other tables. It’s still possible to hear what’s going on at other tables, especially if players verbalize actions. This might encourage or discourage verbalizing actions as a form of gamesmanship to signal other tables. It’s stupid ruling and there is a reason why it’s not a procedure in any other tournament I’ve ever played. It also created an antagonistic relationship between the players (the customers) and the floor. It’s not a good use of anyone’s time to have the floor police what direction you are looking. The normal rule of “you cannot leave your seat” is adequate. When floor staff are respectful and kind and treat players like customers, which is not the same as being a pushover, it builds trust which allows tournaments to be run smoothly. If you are the tournament series that dishes out the most penalties, has the most disputes and is always embroiled in some sort of controversy. It’s probably not because so many of your customers are assholes, it’s more likely your institution is the asshole.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
A note about POTD #56, it was sent out via email only to paying subscribers, we apologize for the error and if you are a non paying subscriber and would like to read the hand history or my introduction, you can click on the link above.
As I wrote in Discord
Given the premise of my blog today was that ranging your opponents is more important than rigorously following ICM outputs, I did not think it was necessary to run a sim that shows exactly how much QQ is winning/losing in this exact set up, but will note that it's close anyway you cut it.
I followed that up by linking to a couple of public sims that were close approximations. The rest of the week was chock full of sims for Premium Subscribers to pore over, my “2-3 minute” daily videos are now stretching to the 8 minute mark regularly and the Google Drive folder is filling up.
On Tuesday I uploaded a rough solve from the flop, using alternative preflop ranges that gets a good shape for the flop strategies and then some deep dive solves on the turn and the river where I tested a lot of bet sizes to see which sizes were best.
Wednesday I simplified things a little. In game in 2020 I was probably not playing 5 different flop sizes like GTO Wizard so I tested to see how the outputs would change if I could only bet 1bb or check
On Thursday I did something similar, uploading five total sims, the first is a rough flop abstraction to show Espen i supposed to bet the flop. The second sim is testing for Jason’s ideal turn size, the third sim forces Jason to bet the size he used in game and then I uploaded two river sims, one where Espen plays leads and one where he does not.
Friday I posted two PIO ICM sims, one is a complete sim and one looks at the response vs the actual bet sizes used in game
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 #57
The editor of POTD (you can thank him that every post doesn’t feature sentences with missing subjects) commented on this post
“Personally I'm curious on the connectivity of this board, if you want to expand on how that might affect the decision to bet or check (vs. like if it was top set on a 952r board)”
So I did a bit of a deep dive on what types of boards does top set of nines check CO vs SB 100 deep. The obvious ones it never checks are boards where the CO is pure cbet, this includes a board like 955 rainbow. The boards where top set checks the most are boards where players tend to play cagey, boards where one player may have flopped a flush or a straight (especially 987). The monotone boards play heavy check a lot of the deck spoils our hand and we are only comfortable putting in a lot of money in the pot on the river if the board pairs. The other boards that play some check are boards that are big bet or check, for example 982 flush draw, it doesn’t feel right to check top set on that board, but it doesn’t feel right to bet two third pots either. However that is the size that makes sense with range and you often bet that size with top set; start charging those flush draws. Similarly you often want to bet when you flop quads, you have 15x pot to play you need to start getting those chips in the pot somehow and your opponent rarely has the key cards to put a lot of money in in x/x lines. The answer is always there are rules of thumb you can intuit, but ultimately it depends on a lot of different factors.
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Media
I was on the cover of Card Player this month. You can read the full issue in PDF form here. I remember reading main event updates on the Card Player website when I was a teenager, to me on the cover of the premier poker magazine, an institution that has outlasted many poker rooms, magazines, websites, tours and players is a real honour. I can’t wait to get the physical copy mailed to me and if you are in Vegas or any other cardroom, feel free to leave copies conspicuously open to page 59 so people can see the QR code to subscribe to Punt of the Day.
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I guess. I am being generous.