Week In Review #45 February 8th-February 14th
10 WSOP Main Event Lessons Part 2 (Photo: WSOP)
I try not to repeat myself too much on POTD, but when I reread my introduction to “10 WSOP Main Event Lessons” from Week in Review #43, I was happy with what I wrote, so I will share it below with some minor changes.
For Run It Once, I made a six-part video series inspired by my Punt of the World Series Main Event, titled “10 WSOP Main Event Lessons.” The premise of the series is that I noticed 10 very common leaks while watching the WSOP Main Event stream, leaks I’ve also witnessed firsthand when I play big-field main event tournaments. I picked individual hands from the WSOP Main Event stream to illustrate those leaks. Not all POTD subscribers are RIO subscribers (however, if you’d like to become one, sign up using code: POTD for 10% off). Some people might learn more from reading than listening/watching, and some people might not have ~5 hours to watch my whole series on RIO. So two weeks ago I summarized five of the lessons, and this week I will finish my summary of the other five lessons. I believe this week’s post will coincide with the final video in this series posting on Run It Once. I hope you enjoy this blog and the video series.
You Can Slow Play
This is one of my biggest gripes. Let’s say you have 50bbs look down at AA in the CO and raise; the SB three-bets you, what a dream scenario. What do you do? The cEV solver answer is rather simple, you call. What would you do if you were 50bbs deep and flatted an UTG open on the button with 22 and the preflop raiser bet 2/3 pot on Q92 rainbow? You’d call. The reason for this is pretty simple: You have a great hand, the stack-to-pot ratio is small, and you are in position and can easily get all the money in the pot yourself. You will usually end up stacking your opponent’s value bets, but you want to let them keep bluffing if they are bluffing.
What many people do is raise small. It’s rare to see someone, say, 5-bet shove A8s in this spot, and even rarer to see them 5-bet shove a hand like KTs. If you have AA you block your opponent’s most likely rebluffs, and it’s a spot where people rarely rebluff anyways. There are reasons to deviate from the solver answer— usually, if your opponent is so loose they’ll never fold to a raise, or if they’re so tight that they always have a strong hand once they’ve taken this action. However, you need to be very confident this is the case— loose players will also bet too often on later streets, and tight players can three-bet/fold AQo. There is a simple reason why the solver likes to slowplay in this spot; if you’re deviating, you better have a good reason. Oftentimes when people raise instead of slowplaying, it is because they are too excited that their hand is so good, and, in the process, they make it less likely they win the maximum.
If You Can’t Call a three-bet, don’t raise certain “cracker” hands
This is a very specific one, but it drove me up the wall watching the WSOP stream. People would raise a hand like pocket twos and fold to a smallish three-bet. The value in a hand like pocket twos is that it’s robust against tight ranges. It can call three-bets because it’s capable of flopping a very strong hand a large percentage of the time. If you want to pick a hand to raise-fold, start with offsuit big card hands that have blockers; if you want to sneak in opens with 22 or 65s type hands, you have to be prepared to call a three-bet with them. Otherwise you’re not capitalizing on a key property of these sorts of crackers.
Old players bluff
The second live $10k I ever played was WPT Fallsview, which I played days after my 19th birthday. I played a hand vs. a senior citizen where I folded TPTK to him on the river, and in my youthful exuberance, I said “If you were bluffing me, I’ll give you $500.” He windmilled over a bluff. I did not have $500 on me, and I needed to go around the poker room asking friends if they had $500 I could give this older gentleman.
A couple years later, I was ITM in the WSOP $10k 6-Max and a not-quite senior citizen kept three-betting a European pro. The European pro kept folding hands like AJo face up, and the older man kept saying something like “I had the best hand, a pair.” It was clear to me what was happening: This old guy kept three betting pocket 22-88, and this European pro thought he kept running into QQ+.
I tell these stories to say that “old players” have never been a monolithic group. If someone tanks for five minutes before saying “I hate flipping” and calling a 30bb reshove with AK, and has reraised preflop once all day, you can be confident he’s rarely bluffing, when he three bets you preflop, but the determining factor here is his play, not his age. Old players have never been universal non-bluffers, but that’s certainly not true now. We are ~5 years away from some online poker OGs hitting their 50s [Don’t remind me. -ed]; they’re capable of bluffing. I have private coaching students and POTD subscribers who are wizened and also regularly study with solvers. Stop being shocked that an old guy can three-bet ATo preflop or rifle it in on the turn with a draw or— gasp— check-raise bluff the river. These are not particularly complex plays, and they have spread throughout the poker world; just because someone has grandkids does not mean they’ll never bluff you.
Small bets carry a lot of weight in multiway pots
I think I made this the ninth of ten lessons because it made the most sense for structuring the series, given the timing and the individual hands I talked about, but it’s one of the most important. The general dynamic in main event type tournaments is, if four people see the flop and the flop is, say, JhTh5c, players want to bet on the larger size to knock people out of the hand. The problem with this is that once you bet on the larger size, you are to some extent turning your hand face up and making life for your opponents much easier. If someone bets 2/3rds pot on JT5, folding a ten is pretty easy; if someone bets 2/3rds pot on 987, folding to A9 or KK could be pretty easy. In multiway pots, instead of being concerned about denying equity from your opponents, you should be betting small, such that you can bet a variety of different hands and have a strong range on a variety of different runouts.
However, the lesson here is that “small bets carry a lot of weight in multiway pots.” What I mean by that is, in a heads-up pot HJ vs. BU, if you bet 25% on JhTh5c, you might see the BU peel hands like Ac2c, 3h3s, or 8d7d. In a multiway pot with the BB still to act behind, you’d probably see all those hands fold. The presence of another player behind forces the button to play a lot tighter, so smaller bets generate a lot of extra folds. There’s often no reason to bet big when the smaller size will work just fine.
Just go all-in preflop
I expand on this a little more in the video with actual hands, and I don’t mean … go all-in preflop blindly or with a garbage hand out of boredom, but there are times when you really just have to go all-in preflop. Tournament poker has a ton of variance, and in order to succeed, you need to be prepared to go all-in in a coinflip type situation and come out the victor. You might think, I’m much better than everyone else in this tournament and I don’t want to risk it on a coin flip, and what I will tell you is with all due respect, you are not that good. If you have AKo with 60bbs and you get three-bet, just go all-in. If the button raises and you have 22 and 20bbs, just go all-in. If you wanted to play a version of poker where you won’t need to regularly go all-in preflop with a so-so hand, go play deep-stacked cash games. You are not outsmarting the poker gods by finding a way to not go all-in and use your postflop edge. You are giving up a preflop edge because you’re scared to be out of the tournament. Just go all-in.
If you enjoyed this blog, feel free to check out the video series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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
Two RocketSolver sims one from the flop, one from the turn for POTD #226
A PIO sim accounting for the 1k/1.5k blind level for POTD #227
A PIO sim going down the exact betting progression for POTD #228
A PIO sim forcing one c-bet size from Tan for POTD #229
A HRC sim for POTD #230
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 #228 where I go down a line not taken in the hand
POTD 228 #onemorething
Today’s hand was one I needed to recreate from the PokerNews update and my initial inkling was that David picked a large polar size on the flop and bet roughly the same size on the turn and the river and that the PokerNews mixed up his river bet size with the pot size. David actually bet 74 into 87 not 87 into 74. Then I thought back on the hand even more and I remember being mad because I did not think David would get overbets with just an overpair on the river and certainly did not think he’d get to call a check-raise all-in with them. That’s when I accidentally stumbled on the true line hiding in plain sight in the initial sim I ran.
The solver only picks a big flop size for David 6% of the time, but it’s enough that it follows a real line. So on Discord, I figured I'd go down the line less taken. When facing that big flop size 76 raises the flop a ton; more than 73% of the time across all of the combos. The flop raise remains an info/protection raise, David never folds better , but he will do stuff like three bet fold QT with a backdoor flush draw and 76 is happy to check-raise induce those 3-bet bluffs, shove and get a fold often. I think almost no humans are finding the same amount of three-bet aggression as the solver and I think check-raising 76 with the plan of stacking off here is pretty dicey and pure calling is probably best.
Once we reach the turn something funny happens, 7d6d our beautiful hand that blocks all the 65s combos almost pure raises the turn non all-in and folds to a shove. The combos that don’t raise the turn almost all shove the river for 142 over a bet of 103 and are by far the most common bluff combos on the river. So I had the perfect “one bluff” combo if we go down another node. However, the “one” bluff combo here is actually more like 0.01 of a bluff combo given it raises the flop 70% of the time and almost always raises the turn. I’ll give myself credit for having a good bluffing combo if we go down one of the branches of this tree, but I still think it was very likely that I was over bluffing.
Housekeeping
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Media
I can use this as a dumping ground for some general Winter Olympics takes
There are too many events that are mostly repackaging already existing events: Team Figure Skating, Mixed-Doubles Curling, see ya later.
The group stage system in Men’s Hockey broken. James Mirtle explains it well here.
Hockey having 3v3 OT in elimination games is horrendous
Not many athletes compete in Luge/Skeleton compared to more popular sports. Most of the athletes are from cities that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics and have luge tracks. From a market-based perspective lugers are “worse” athletes than soccer players or sprinters. I don’t care. They are risking their life, that takes more skill than running a race 2 seconds faster than a high schooler.
Crotchgate is fun, but distance ski jumping is boring. People have gotten so efficient that it’s no longer about daring athletics, but aerodynamic optimizing. No thank you.
Have a nice weekend, and as always, I can be reached on
As an older player (age 57), I appreciate you acknowledging that some of us bluff. That said, you have done enough. No need to further publicize the fact. :)