WCOOP Day 1 ($200 NLHE, $1000 NLHE, $500 6max PKO)

I’m once again in Quebec for the World Championship of Online Poker. This year, though, Emily is with me, and instead of Montreal, we’re in the Mont-Tremblant region, which is a sort of resort area in the mountains west of Quebec. We took a few days to drive up from Maryland, staying overnight in Plattsburgh on Saturday night in order to arrive the next morning in time to play the Sunday events on the first day of WCOOP.

Upon our arrival, I got probably my best opportunity ever to use all that French I studied some fifteen years ago. My experience in Montreal (and even in France) was that almost everyone spoke better English than I did French, but our host wasn’t comfortable in English, so she showed us around the house and she and I discussed some logistics in French. Fortunately she was patient and accommodating! To be honest, I don’t know how much the French even mattered, because Emily told me she was able to get the gist of almost everything despite speaking hardly a lick.

I max late registered the $200 Warm-Up shortly after our arrival and promptly ran my 20bb up to a top 10% stack. Then I ran AK into AA for most of my chips and lost the rest with 77 < 99 in a spot where we may have been close enough to the bubble for me to pass on my pair. Oh well.

The $500 6-max Progressive Knock-Out got off to a good start as well, with me collecting a bounty from a guy who just randomly open jammed 30bb UTG with A9o into my JJ. Then there was this hand, not a huge one but one of the more interesting I played yesterday:

PokerStars – 500/1000 Ante 125 NL (6 max) – Holdem – 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

BTN: 58.95 BB (VPIP: 24.65, PFR: 16.59, 3Bet Preflop: 4.35, Hands: 216)
SB: 156.74 BB (VPIP: 26.87, PFR: 18.22, 3Bet Preflop: 7.62, Hands: 524)
BB: 99.7 BB (VPIP: 30.59, PFR: 17.16, 3Bet Preflop: 12.05, Hands: 170)
UTG: 71.55 BB (VPIP: 39.06, PFR: 21.88, 3Bet Preflop: 10.71, Hands: 65)
MP: 41.68 BB (VPIP: 21.04, PFR: 16.61, 3Bet Preflop: 7.93, Hands: 933)
Hero (CO): 90.44 BB

6 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.25 BB) Hero has 2h As
fold, fold, Hero raises to 2.28 BB, BTN calls 2.28 BB, fold, BB calls 1.28 BB

Flop : (8.09 BB, 3 players) 4d 2c Jh
BB checks, Hero bets 2.43 BB, BTN calls 2.43 BB, BB raises to 9.27 BB, Hero raises to 17.98 BB, fold, fold

Hero wins 29.05 BB

I got a bit careless later, though, ultimately getting in too much with A9o on the Button vs a BB squeeze (in my defense, he had a decent bounty!) and then stubbornly refusing to fold Aces that I’d slowplayed pre-flop to a BB who’d pretty obviously flopped trips.

I want to save this hand from the $1K for the next time one of my students tells me he checked after flopping a strong hand because he wanted to induce a bluff:

PokerStars – 125/250 Ante 30 NL – Holdem – 8 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

SB: 215.8 BB (VPIP: 53.85, PFR: 15.38, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 26)
BB: 179.85 BB (VPIP: 16.02, PFR: 11.52, 3Bet Preflop: 2.82, Hands: 207)
UTG: 204.52 BB (VPIP: 14.11, PFR: 8.02, 3Bet Preflop: 2.53, Hands: 165)
UTG+1: 193.04 BB (VPIP: 24.62, PFR: 17.50, 3Bet Preflop: 5.99, Hands: 535)
Hero (MP): 175.49 BB
MP+1: 207.92 BB (VPIP: 15.82, PFR: 11.95, 3Bet Preflop: 7.65, Hands: 496)
CO: 241.58 BB (VPIP: 26.92, PFR: 15.38, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 26)
BTN: 132.1 BB (VPIP: 38.46, PFR: 15.38, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 26)

8 players post ante of 0.12 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.46 BB) Hero has 4d 4c
fold, fold, Hero raises to 2.28 BB, fold, CO calls 2.28 BB, BTN calls 2.28 BB, SB calls 1.78 BB, BB calls 1.28 BB

Flop : (12.36 BB, 5 players) 6c 4h 7d
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets 8.16 BB, fold, BTN raises to 20 BB, fold, fold, Hero calls 11.84 BB

Turn : (52.36 BB, 2 players) 6d
Hero checks, BTN bets 25 BB, Hero calls 25 BB

River : (102.36 BB, 2 players) Qd
Hero checks, BTN bets 84.7 BB and is all-in, Hero calls 84.7 BB

BTN shows Ah Jh (One Pair, Sixes)
(Pre 49%, Flop 4%, Turn 0%)

Hero shows 4d 4c (Full House, Fours full of Sixes)
(Pre 51%, Flop 96%, Turn 100%)

Hero wins 271.77 BB

Villain showed Ah Jh.

I chugged along with a top 15% stack for most of the first six hours before losing a big flip with JJ to AKs. I won a few flips after getting short to stay alive, but eventually lost AJ < QQ to finish off my first day in the WCOOP.

A few mistakes aside (which I don’t want to be too dismissive of – making fewer mistakes is a key tournament skill), I was pleasantly surprised with my play. I’d hardly played at all since WSOP, and although I’ve been studying a lot, there’s always the danger of either being rusty or making mistakes trying to implement new concepts that I’ve only studied in theory. I don’t feel like I feel into either of those traps yesterday, and in fact I was quite pleased with some of the adaptations I made after reading Matt Janda’s new No Limit Hold ‘Em for Advanced Players.

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