Week In Review #44 February 1st-February 7th
How to Play Charity Poker Tournaments
Last Saturday I posted “10 Main Event Lessons Part 1,” and promised that this week I would post Part 2 and it would coincide with me posting the last episode of my series on Run It Once, also titled “10 Main Event Lessons.” Unfortunately, I am bad at counting, and the final video of my series won’t be posting for a couple more weeks.
After posting my Week in Review, I had a nice relaxing Saturday and got ready to play my first live poker of the year. I played in a PokerStars sponsored charity tournament in Toronto for breast cancer research, and while it was not the most competitive or highest-stakes tournament I have ever played, I am a competitive guy and I always want to win. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m playing my best; I normally don’t have several drinks while playing poker, so I was not trying my absolute hardest, but I was not going to roll over.
The tournament was structured in the way many charity tournaments are, extremely short blind levels and a very fast structure. There are no 600/1200 levels in charity tournaments. Rebuys and add-ons are encouraged, and usually mandatory because the add-on chips are sold at a massive discount, which is a great way to raise more money for charity. Rebuy / add-on was also for a long period of my life a relatively popular online poker format; the same amount of money would get you 2,000 chips for a rebuy and 5,000 chips for an add-on, which meant you had to make it to the add-on portion of the tournament so you could buy those discounted chips. I’m glad it no longer exists as a form of real poker tournament, but it’s a little nostlagic to play this format in a charity tournament.
If you are reading POTD, you should not need strategy tips about how to beat up on dentists playing charity tournaments, but as someone who mostly plays poker versus very good players, I was intrigued by the charity tournament as a testing ground for some mass-exploit poker. The main leak I see from people playing these sorts of hyper-turbo charity tournaments is that they do not realize that when you have 5bbs you need to be all-in a lot. You cannot afford to wait for a good hand. This means if you want to maximize your chance of winning an all-expenses-paid trip to a Pokerstars Live Event, a really good strategy is just going all-in preflop a lot and hoping someone might fold A4o in the BB to your 5bb shove.
Of course, any max-exploit strategy can easily be countered, so you need to be prepared to get spite-called because people are fed up that you keep going all-in. Well, the good news about the strategy of shoving so much that you either steal the blinds a lot and build up a stack or tilt people enough to induce spite-calls is: You’re increasing the chance you or someone else gets knocked out of the tournament and rebuys, which means more money goes to charity. A very nice win-win situation for all parties involved. As for myself, my strategy was working like a charm, I kept getting great hands and was winning every all-in. I had JJ > AQ, A9s > KcQc and KdQd, A9o beats K9s. Then I ran A3s into 88 and A3o into 88 and 66 and couldn’t win either time. I didn’t cash for anything, which was still better than the 5th-place prize at the final table, a pair of tickets to see the 2025-2026 Toronto Maple Leafs.1 I want to thank PokerStars for forcing me to get out of the house on a cold day and actually interact with real people; it was a fun time for a good cause.
Speaking of donating to a good cause: If you’ve read this far, why don’t you donate to something just as important as cancer research, my bank account? If you’d like to become a paid or unpaid subscriber you can do so my clicking the button below.
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:
A PIO sim accounting for my large preflop raise size in POTD #221
A PIO sim using straddled preflop ranges for POTD #222
Two PIO sims one that forces Jesse to c-bet one that doesn’t for POTD #223
A Rocket Solver sim that looks at the flop strategy for POTD #224
Two HRC sims, one that uses FGS one that doesn’t for POTD #225
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #224, where I write about how even when you get heads up you can often size down in a multiway pot because your range is stronger and more linear.
POTD #224 onemorething
I think a common mistake in multiway pots is that once the pot gets HU players resort to their heads up sizings. In a HU pot the button vs BB on AKK, the button will c-bet wider, the BB might counter by check-raising hands like 96 with a backdoor, the button might counter by calling a check-raise wider. The ranges on the turn are then wider and more polar. So whether it's the flop check raise size or the turn bet size the OOP player might want to size up a little with their bluffs.
In a multiway pot as more money enters the pot one or both of the players have trips or better so often and if one has it they know it’s less likely the other one has it. In these spots everyone wants to bet a smaller size for two reasons, they’re afraid their opponent has a very strong hand, so they don’t want to bomb it without blockers into an uncapped range. The other detail is people bluff with higher equity hands, since the lower equity hands fold the flop multiway. When your bluffs all come from hands with equity, you don’t need to bet on the larger size because even your bluffs will often improve to a strong hand. In a hand like today’s, almost all my bluffs have straight draws or flush draws or even in the case of QT three outs to a crummy boat. If I bet 2/3rds pot or larger on the turn when my weakest bluff still has 7 outs vs Ax, Ax is a trivial fold for IP.
In multiway hands where you raise you still have “polar bluffs”, but the floor for what is polar is much higher compared to a HU pot. When your range is much more linear from the start, you don’t have many low equity hands so you can size down and still generate big folds, while also saving you money when you run into it, which will happen more often than you think.
Housekeeping
If you’d like to sign up for Octopi, Run It Once, or GTO Lab, you can get a discount using the following codes.
Run it Once use code: POTD for 10% off
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Media
My latest Run It Once video dropped 10 WSOP Main Event Lessons and we will have a couple more fun media appearances appearing in this space soon. As for now, perhaps with the NHL going on break for the Olympics, I will be able to catch up on the hockey related phenomenon going around the globe Heated Rivalry.
Have a nice weekend and as always I can be reached on
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