Week in Review #20 August 3rd - August 9th

I correct an error in POTD #97

Some hands I write about I remember clear as day, others were played on stream or reported on so I can look up all the relevant details of the hands. Other hands I write up require some investigative work, I remembered the hand I wrote about in POTD #97, because I blundered and learned a lesson from it, but in my mind the hand took place during Triton London 2022. I searched through my phone for the HH and found an old text message I sent myself on May 21st 2023

HJ vs Fedor BB inequal i cover and Fedor has 15bbs I have AJo

AsQsTc x/b50/c

Turn 9sss x/I played b90 AI

May 21st 2023 was day 2 of the Triton Cyprus Main Event so I figured I had either sent myself the hand on day 2 or after midnight on day 1. Fedor started day 2 with a little over starting stack and quickly spun it up, so I was quite confident the hand took place on day 1 and 5k/10k/10k seemed like a likely level for the hand to take place. Armed with this information I wrote POTD #97. After the blog was published I was informed that not only did I get the blind level wrong, but the hand took place ITM. How was I informed about this? The hand was played on stream. This meant my analysis in POTD #97 was not applicable to the actual hand that was played (but it still is good cEV analysis that is useful) So in this Week in Review post, I will analyze the hand as played under some ICM pressure. You can watch the hand below

The What I Was Thinking section remains similar enough that I don’t feel the need to rewrite it, but there is more to add to What I Got Wrong. I play a lot of b235 AI on the flop with my range (44%) and my hand (95%). My bluffs are J9/JT/JJ/KT/QJ and I get top pair without a backdoor flush draw to pure fold. When I bet half pot on the flop, Fedor leads the turn 95% of the time. If I force Fedor to pure check the turn, I pure check range myself and shoving loses $40k when my remaining stack is worth $640k. I think the shape of the cEV and ICM strategies are pretty similar, but my shove is much more costly under ICM pressure so I will downgrade my grade to a D+.

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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers

Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:

• Three different cEV PIO sims for POTD #97

• Three different PIO ICM sims for POTD #97

• A Rocket Solver flop sim for POTD #98 and a PIO turn sim for POTD #98

• Two IOUs where premium subscribers can request I run any sim and I will run it for them

Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers

Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething where I expanded on the footnote in POTD #96 about the viral Corey Eyring hand played at the Lodge

POTD #96 ⁠onemorething

I want to write a little (okay it ended up being a lot) about the Corey Eyring hand here. Before shoving the river 3 Coin asks if one card plays in NLHE or if he needs two cards to have a straight flush like in PLO. So if you’re Corey you know he’s representing a SF. Without the table talk vs a wild card you might not be sure if they’re reading the board properly, but we know he is. We need to be good 47.15% of the time and once we know 3Coin can have a straight here. It's a snap call. A straight is far too strong a hand to be bluffing with and if he can bluff a straight anything better than a straight is a snap call. I have not seen enough of 3 Coin’s play to confidently judge his table talk and live reads, but it seems like from preflop when he calls the three bet and says “I love how this feels” he was in the mood to play a big pot. Of course it’s easy to say that in hindsight, someone could just as easily say that his river table talk is consistent with someone who has a monster. I don’t think there’s a smoking gun timing/live readwise, but maybe others who play with him more will disagree– 3 Coin does engage in a common table talk move where most people who talk about their hand strength are telling the truth. At one point he says he's bluffing, at another point he asks if Corey can beat a straight. I think the smoking gun here is Bayesian, it’s really hard to make a straight flush and a guy who is several pips too wide preflop is representing one, I don’t think he has it half the time.

My other piece of advice for Corey is, you’re playing a monster pot with your bankroll on the table. Stop apologizing to the table and asking if you’re taking too much time! Focus on playing the hand, if you get clocked, so be it, if not use the time you have. I don't like flipping a coin to decide whether or not to call on the river, figure out if the VIP is bluffing and don't annoy him with your antics. Corey seemed more concerned with the content angle of the hand than the finances of the hand, which is wild to me given he has his life roll on the table.

Finally some thoughts about Bencb’s analysis from the Twitter thread. He engages in one of my least favourite bits of handreading, massively overweighting a small timing thing from an unpredictable player. 3 Coin is a chatty player who gives off all sorts of tells and fake tells. I do not think we can confidently eliminate QhJh,KhJh,JhTh from his three bet calling range because he took his time. Firstly some people always take their time, or fake timing tells. Secondly this deep, all of those suited broadways are totally reasonable hands to 4bet bluff with some frequency.

Ben continues this analysis when considering the weighting of JhTx and JhJx, I did not watch the whole stream but I’ve seen no evidence that 3 Coin snap calls every three bet without thinking or engaging in table talk. In fact it seems like he gives a little speech and thought before every single play he makes. Ben writes “1 out of 20 players will be maniac enough to bluff. But you need a player to bluff this spot around 50% of the time which is insane and almost never gonna happen.” I could not disagree more and we have the hand as evidence. I have not seen 3 Coin play poker before and am not sure how he usually plays, but we have a guy who raises a hand he shouldn’t, calls a three bet when he shouldn’t, leads the flop when he shouldn’t and shoves the river when he shouldn’t. It’s possible 1 in 20 players is bluffing over half the time here, but 3 Coin is part of the 5%. You have to call.

Ben ends his thread saying he “could talk about this hand and all its nuances for hours”. Look I am going to end up writing 1000 words on this hand, so I am not one to talk. But I really could not talk about this hand and its nuances for hours. It's really as simple as maniac is wildly overbluffing so you can’t fold any decent bluff catcher even when you don’t have useful blockers and he’s shoving 8x pot.

Media

No poker media appearances for me this weekend and also almost no media consumed by me this week. I enjoyed listening to Mike Birbiglia’s appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF, listening to Alex G’s album Headlights and watching Vicky Mboko’s championship run in the Canadian Open.