With 13 players left and 12 making the money of Poker Masters Event #4, and a big blind of 30k and an average stack of 770k, Joey Weissman raised to 180k of his 190k on the button with AdKd, John Krpan folded the SB leaving 280k behind, and Clemen Deng just called with 3s3h in the BB. Joey was left playing 2.5% pot behind and he checked it down with Clemen on a 984TJ board. The next hand, Joey got all in for 10k with 88 and 6xed his stack to 60k. He folded the next hand, then shoved his 2BBs UTG with ATo and doubled through Clemen’s KTo. Then he got a walk in the BB with A3o before shoving the SB with J7o into John Krpan’s BB, stealing the BB and ante. In one orbit he turned 10k into 270k and the button.
At this point Krpan turned to Clemen and said “Disrespect the game. What you did disrespected the game. Didn’t put him all-in with 10,000 behind, that’s disrespecting the game.” Nicholas Palma and Neil Warren tried to explain why Clemen played the hand the way he did, saying “That’s just how the game is now,” and something about Risk Premium, at which point Krpan said “Then gentlemen, I don’t want to play it, because you’re disrespecting the game.”
So before I get into whether or not this hand was disrespecting the game, I’m going to explain the logic of the play for those uninitiated in modern tournament theory. There are two reasons why people might raise most, but not all, of their chips preflop instead of shoving. The first is that if they are in a tight range spot and there are several all-ins behind them, they might be able to fold. That doesn’t really apply in this spot: Weismann is shoving 6.33bbs OTB, Krpan has 10bbs in the SB and can easily call Joey’s jam with a hand like KJo, 22, or A5o, and Clemen covers them both by so much that he can call all-in multiway with 66 or A8o or QJs. Facing those ranges and needing to call 10k to win 600k, Joey could not fold to a three-way all-in even with a hand like A2o.
So why is Joey making this play? There are two reasons. The first is, if John just calls and Clemen overcalls, it should check down postflop some small percent of the time. Imagine a scenario where Joey shoves 22, Krpan calls 55, Clemen calls 66 and the board runs out AKQ99. Krpan and Clemen should check it down when they have 1/5th pot to play. By leaving some chips behind, Joey has saved himself from busting the tournament when they check it down.
What happened here is something slightly different. Joey does not want to get all-in, so he keeps checking and he hopes Clemen will co-operate with him and check it down. Why would Clemen co-operate and check it down? He’s either deciding his hand isn’t good enough to value bet or bluff, or he’s decided that he’d rather keep the bubble alive and steal the blinds and antes with a 10k stack kicking around. In the best-case scenario, Clemen can let Joey survive and steal the BB and the ante and win 60k the next hand, another 75k the hand after that, and another 75k the hand after that before Joey is blinded all-in. In some extreme cases, someone might even check with the nuts OOP as the big stack here. They’re deciding they’d rather have a shot to win 210k before Joey busts than 10k right now. That seems like a pretty easy decision.
Speaking of easy decisions, in the actual hand, Clemen has a hand that is a pretty easy check-down. His pair might be good enough on the flop that he could just stick in the final 10k right there, but it’s an ugly turn and river combo where he doesn’t have more than 50% range vs. range equity. He can’t value bet and has way too much equity to bluff for 2.5% pot.
The argument for this hand not disrespecting the game is a simple one. Joey and Clemen are both acting within their self-interest and within the rules. They are not co-operating to help their rival, but to help themselves. A side effect of their strategy is that Clemen is helping one rival (Joey) by hurting the rest of his rivals (the other 11 people in the tournament). His intention is not to help Joey, but to benefit himself. I think a fair heuristic is that, in competition, doing anything within the rules that increases your chance of winning is by definition respecting the game. However, while that is a fine heuristic, I don’t think it’s airtight. I remember playing with someone who wore a tanktop after working out, but they did not shower or wear deodorant. Making the whole tournament smell your rank body odor is not against the rules, but if one did it to gain a competitive edge, I wouldn’t say that “respected the game.” [I would define “disrespecting the game” as an angle shoot; i.e. something not technically against the rules but also not in the spirit of fair and honest play. -ed]
The nature of MTTs means there will be times where co-operative play is encouraged. If the chip leader opened and I flatted QQ second in chips, and the big stack responded by playing passively postflop because I have a tight preflop range, we are strategically co-operating with each other to play a small pot, but we are not colluding. We did not agree to play carefully versus each other; we just understand it’s in our best interest to do so. Hands where people leave one chip behind hoping to induce a checkdown exist in a grey area when it comes to collusion vs. co-operation. There are spots, like today’s hand, where both players’ hand strength makes checking down reasonable for both of them. However, there are spots where they should not check down. I believe most players checking down, even with very strong hands, believe these plays are in their self-interest, but I think they are often wrong.
Let’s use today’s hand as an example and say Clemen had KQ and rivered the nuts. It’s easy to say that Clemen should check the nuts because 210k > 10k, but I think that calculation is overly simplistic. For starters, that assumes we will play three hands before the bubble bursts, but we know that’s not true. In this tournament, Joey was all-in twice in three hands and easily could have busted before Clemen could steal 210k in blinds. The fact that Joey will often be all-in really hurts Clemen’s BB/100 win rate. You can’t steal the entire blinds when one player regularly calls all-in.
The way this specific tournament played out, instead of stealing 60k in blinds and antes in hand 1, Clemen won 20k from the BB and risked 10k to win 50k vs. Joey, he stole 75k in hand 2, and risked 60k all-in vs Joey to win 195k in hand 3. Assuming he’s 50/50 to win the all-ins, that’s 147.5k, not 210k. However, half the time Clemen busts Joey and hand 2 and hand 3 never happen, so now we are down to 76.25k. Finally, this assumes that Clemen’s win rate if he busts Joey is 0bb/100. Clemen will win chips in future hands when he busts Joey with 33. You want to look at his marginal increase in winrate with a 10k stack on the bubble, not his overall winrate. If Clemen is winning at a modest 30bb/100 from the UTG-Button1 when he busts Joey, that’s 9k in chips per hand, and now we’re down to 49.25k compared to Joey’s final 10k. Still a large edge, but not nearly as large as it might appear at first glance.
Now there is a simplification in the calculation above that greatly underestimates Clemen’s EV. I am assuming that Joey goes all-in twice before posting the BB. Every time Joey goes all-in, he’s stealing a lot of EV from the big stack because the big stack now needs to beat Joey to steal the blinds. However, that is also one of the side effects of leaving a 0.33bb stack still in the tournament. In the preceding paragraph, I make another, bigger simplification that really benefits Clemen here, the assumption that he can just steal the blinds every single time and no one will be able to play back at him. I ran the very next hand in HRC and Clemen plays 89% of hands from the SB. He plays very aggressively, only calling 29% of the time and raising 60%. However, when he raises to 3x, Palma calls in the BB 63% of the time. Palma plays passively and defensively, but he does not get run over. This is not a situation where Clemen automatically steals the blinds; it’s a spot where before the action gets to him, any of Neil Warren, Joey, or John Krpan might go all-in preflop. If it folds to Clemen, he’s not playing an empty seat, but a tight-passive second stack who will leak some EV to him, but nowhere close to 100% of the 60k in blinds and antes that he posted. If this tournament were one where Clemen had 30bbs, Joey had 0.33bbs, and the rest of the table had 10bbs, and Clemen could shove any two cards, then keeping Joey alive makes sense. With second in chips on his direct left, it’s hard to argue his marginal win rate will be much greater on the bubble vs. in the money. When a loose opening range can easily be punished by aggressive reshoving.
So did they “disrespect the game”? I think given their exact hands they did not. The only way they may have “disrespected the game” in this exact hand is by violating one of the cardinal rules in poker: Never piss off one of the guys you want playing in the game. As I always say, poker is both a competition and a customer service business, and the way they played this hand led to them dealing with one unhappy customer.
Had Clemen checked down with an extremely strong hand, I think he would be disrespecting the game because even if his intentions were fair, he would have missed the best play, which means to some degree he would not be trying his hardest to win. In some of these spots, some players do not think through the hand, or about how much their actual future EV is worth, or what the threshold for co-operating is. They just blindly check it down. I don’t approve of that. It’s notable that while Krpan was ranting, Joey shoved the button and this time left 5k back instead of 10k. Obviously he feels there is a difference between the two, and if you believe there is a difference between leaving 5k back and leaving 10k back, then it stands to reason there should be a threshold of equity where you decide to stick it in vs. deciding to check it down postflop with 3% pot to play.
I am not saying Clemen had the following thought, but if one had the most optimistic big stack view of “well, obviously I am going to steal the blinds three times before Joey busts,” that’s wishful thinking aligned with “I’ll just get aces and bust everyone.” Your EV from letting the bubble go on does not equal all of the dead money in the pot in every hand you play on the bubble. So when you decide to let the bubble continue, you need to correctly gauge the EV of letting it continue vs. ending it immediately. As these plays become more commonplace, I think we will see more behaviour that is, if not intentionally collusive, at least so co-operative that to an outsider it will be hard to tell the difference. So if you are regularly making these plays, I think it’s best to calibrate how you calculate the EV of these plays to ensure you don’t end up having a strategy that ends up being collusive. That would be disrespecting the game.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download 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. The past two weeks I uploaded
Postflop sims using inequal stacks for POTD #349
PIO sims and an attempt to trick Ike into betting 1bb OTT for POTD #350
Postflop ICM sims using a variety of different preflop ranges for POTD #351
A PIO sim including a turn size test for POTD #352
PIO sims using preflop ranges that account for my misclick for POTD #353
PIO sim from the turn that forces the right turn bet size for POTD #354
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 #354 where I talk a little more about Nick’s river strategy.
POTD #354 #onemorething
I’ll give one more reason in favour of Nick calling the river and one against. The reason in favour is it’s rather easy to bluff shove every time you have a Q on the river if you are the BB. The bluffs are not that hard to find, it’s pretty simple: if you have a queen in your hand and can’t beat a pair of sevens go all-in. There are no unusual bluffs, no over bet shoving the river with 3d2d. If you have a queen, go all-in. If you take that and couple it with the fact that he might shove a chop, bluff some pairs or bluff all-in with some wrong bluffing combos and you only lose to 12 combos, you need to call.
The reason against calling the river is that Q2-Q5 with a flush draw or backdoor flush draw lead the flop more than 90% of the time. They bet the turn around 75% of the time and they pure shove the river. There are so many ways to play any of those combos a little too passively, which means in order to get to a situation where OOP is bluffing the river enough, you need them to start leading the flop with KQ and AQ at a high frequency, something that many players would never do. People tend to build out their leading ranges with hands that interact with the board, so if obvious draws fill they don’t have enough hands to bluff with. If people aren’t leading the flop with no pair, no draw at some frequency, then the only way you can call AJ on the river is because you think you chop enough or you think overbet shove without a blocker in their hand and hit the correct bluffing frequency that way. So for me the key to this hand is thinking about his flop leading strategy if you think he’s the type of player who might range bet the flop because it’s good for him, then you can probably call down. If it’s someone who mostly leads when he has some sort of piece of the board, you can fold.
Media
So I finally saw You Can See Everything, and I have been consuming all sorts of media related to it. I’ve particularly liked Max Read’s discussions of the movie on Hard Fork, Wesley Morris and Pablo Torre’s conversation on Pablo Torre Finds Out, and the discussion on The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast. However, my favourite piece about this movie because it is a better articulated and researched version of my own takes is Mark Asch’s essay on YCSE and Primetime over at Defector. YCSE is a very good movie if you like Nathan Fielder’s work or are interested in Elizabeth Holmes or are interested in documentaries that blur the line between truth and fiction. I suggest you watch it.
What follows are my thoughts on the movie that I’ll try to keep as spoiler-free as possible, mostly because this handicap will prevent me from writing 2000 words about it.
I have a lot of thoughts on the movie; it is a rich text. It is not my favourite Fielder project, in part because I do not find Elizabeth Holmes all that interesting. I think she is a scammer, and the only thing interesting about her is the size and success of the scam she ran. I am a big Fielder fan, but hardly an obsessive or completist. I’ve watched Nathan For You, The Curse and The Rehearsal, but I have not rewatched them and have not searched out his deep cuts. [I’m closer to a completionist, which means I’ve rewatched some Nathan For You and introduced people to it, and I own a copy of The Movement, but I’m not familiar with his pre-N4U stuff. -ed] As a part of Fielder’s overall body of work, I think YCSE lacked some of the elaborate comic architecture his best work has, but it was a thrilling watch that ties into many of themes his work is preoccupied with.
My main problem with the movie is that I don’t find Holmes to be an interesting figure. Most of what I found interesting about the movie were the metafictional layers, up to and including that Holmes thought Fielder was a director that she could manipulate into making a sympathetic portrait of her. There’s a line in the film where Billy Evans, Holmes’s husband, says they chose Fielder because he thinks differently. Which I think is an accurate reflection of a lot of the current thinking in tech. That being innovative is in and of itself admirable and that two innovators are likely to be kindred spirits even if they have nothing else in common. Holmes is such a narcissist that she does not believe just any documentary filmmaker can tell her story, it needs to be a groundbreaking one, but she doesn’t care how or why he is groundbreaking.
The first half of the movie is spent with Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim embedded with Holmes in the month before she goes to prison. It’s shot mostly in extreme close-up, which is jarring. Seeing any face, with all their marks and blemishes and pores, on a giant screen is disorienting. It’s also an interesting choice in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, a genre that usually favours wide shots with lots of coverage because they don’t know what’s going to happen and want to capture as much as possible. Even if I knew nothing about Fielder, the opening shot is both very “realistic” (pores and all) and very artificial (extreme close up).
The question the documentary seems to be asking is, “Is Elizabeth Holmes full of shit?”, but I think the movie answers this question with a resounding yes. They edit a scene of Billy and Elizbeth pitching their Theranos sequel Haemanthus with a frenzied pace as if they’re working for NASA in 1962. The “Nathan Fielder” on screen might pretend their pitch could work, but Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim obviously know this pitch is a scam. In an episode of Hard Fork I linked above, someone mentions that Billy has only raised $3,000,000 for this company. No one believes in it. However, for a brief moment as Holmes/Evans were pitching their laser-AI blood testing device, I found myself wondering if it might work. I was briefly hoodwinked before, like I might do in a poker hand, I reverted to my Bayesian priors. They have proven to be dishonest; you should assume they are always lying and proceed accordingly.2
The second half of the movie goes deep down the metafictional rabbit hole by bringing in Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in The Dropout. I’ve seen many people refer to Seyfried as an audience surrogate of sorts, and I feel a need to scold these people: “Are you marks?”. In YCSE, Seyfried keeps defending herself, saying her portrayal in The Dropout was not real, it’s just TV. I don’t think that comment was necessarily scripted, but she’s smart and understands Fielder’s whole deal. She was also shown the entire first half of the movie before agreeing to participate in the second half. Questioning if a portrayal of a real figure on screen is real or fake is a large part of YCSE. Seyfried is not the subject in this documentary, but she is a collaborator. She says things that will look good on camera and reinforce the larger themes of the documentary.
To me, from her first appearance in YCSE, it’s clear Amanda Seyfried is playing “Amanda Seyfried,” a heightened version of herself who knows less than what the real Amanda Seyfried does. She understands the movie and, to her credit, is incredibly game to participate in it. The scene of her and Nathan driving to see Billy has the thrill of detectives or journalists in a thriller trying to get to the bottom of a conspiracy. Oppenheim and Fielder are smart filmmakers; they know the language of cinema and what they are doing. Even if the car ride is an unscripted part of a documentary, Seyfried and Fielder are performing for the camera.
This is what I found most remarkable about the movie. I feel Seyfried manages to play herself, “Amanda Seyfried,” and Elizabeth Holmes. It’s an incredible performance that shows the full range of her ability, including her ability to improvise as a lightly fictionalized version of herself in real-life settings, the way we’ve seen Nathan do for years. It’s a tour de force performance in a remarkable movie. You should see it.
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Bluesky
I know this sounds like a lot, but consider that in a 6 handed game you are posting ~41.6bb/100 in blinds and antes.
I think this speaks to one of the real themes of the film. I agree with Sam that Fielder and Oppenheim know Holmes is full of shit; with that in mind, though, I think a major point of the film is demonstrating, through Fielder, how someone could be taken in by a con artist like Holmes. -ed.