Saturday started early. Usually I deal with that by late registering, but the 7AM event was a progressive knock-out, and although Stars allows late registration in those, it’s a financial disaster to do so. So I figured I would play that and then see how I felt for the afternoon event.

It got off to a rough start. A guy put in a crazy amount with 22 against my AK, which wasn’t the end of the world since I covered him, but his pair held up so instead of getting his bounty I got short-stacked. I managed to make a recovery though (it’s easy to get your money in good as a short stack in a bounty event, because everyone else has incentive to call you very light) and after this extremely fun hand I had more chips than anyone else in the tournament (also on Boom if you’d rather watch the replay):

PokerStars – 1250/2500 Ante 325 NL – Holdem – 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

MP+2: 69.55 BB (VPIP: 19.40, PFR: 10.61, 3Bet Preflop: 2.86, Hands: 67)
CO: 88.92 BB (VPIP: 13.75, PFR: 7.50, 3Bet Preflop: 2.56, Hands: 81)
BTN: 17.37 BB (VPIP: 17.69, PFR: 4.65, 3Bet Preflop: 3.23, Hands: 131)
SB: 22.61 BB (VPIP: 26.74, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 16.28, Hands: 87)
Hero (BB): 166.42 BB
UTG: 85.05 BB (VPIP: 19.64, PFR: 12.50, 3Bet Preflop: 4.17, Hands: 57)
UTG+1: 54.64 BB (VPIP: 17.95, PFR: 10.26, 3Bet Preflop: 4.35, Hands: 39)
MP: 51.98 BB (VPIP: 31.34, PFR: 19.08, 3Bet Preflop: 9.23, Hands: 136)
MP+1: 129.68 BB (VPIP: 17.61, PFR: 13.81, 3Bet Preflop: 10.48, Hands: 517)

9 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.67 BB) Hero has 7c 9d
fold, fold, MP raises to 2.3 BB, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, Hero calls 1.3 BB

Flop : (6.27 BB, 2 players) Ts 9c Th
Hero checks, MP bets 2.32 BB, Hero raises to 5.59 BB, MP calls 3.27 BB

Turn : (17.46 BB, 2 players) 8h
Hero checks, MP bets 6.36 BB, Hero raises to 15.41 BB, MP calls 9.05 BB

River : (48.28 BB, 2 players) 4s
Hero checks, MP bets 28.55 BB and is all-in, Hero calls 28.55 BB

MP shows Js Kc (One Pair, Tens)
(Pre 65%, Flop 38%, Turn 23%)

Hero shows 7c 9d (Two Pair, Tens and Nines)
(Pre 35%, Flop 62%, Turn 77%)

Hero wins 105.38 BB

I’m not too pleased with the hand I busted on. I do think I should have gone broke given how the board ran out, but it would have been better to call the flop and get all in on this turn.

PokerStars – 6000/12000 Ante 1500 NL – Holdem – 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

CO: 6.98 BB (VPIP: 22.16, PFR: 13.23, 3Bet Preflop: 9.18, Hands: 194)
Hero (BTN): 31.1 BB
SB: 75.19 BB (VPIP: 27.27, PFR: 10.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 11)
BB: 135.17 BB (VPIP: 18.84, PFR: 13.43, 3Bet Preflop: 3.85, Hands: 73)
UTG: 165.89 BB (VPIP: 31.67, PFR: 17.65, 3Bet Preflop: 9.09, Hands: 242)
UTG+1: 44.35 BB (VPIP: 19.67, PFR: 14.66, 3Bet Preflop: 10.24, Hands: 606)
MP: 25.96 BB (VPIP: 16.70, PFR: 11.94, 3Bet Preflop: 5.09, Hands: 504)
MP+1: 35.16 BB (VPIP: 21.00, PFR: 16.26, 3Bet Preflop: 10.31, Hands: 501)
MP+2: 37.86 BB (VPIP: 22.22, PFR: 25.00, 3Bet Preflop: 33.33, Hands: 9)

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

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.62 BB) Hero has Ac Js
fold, fold, fold, MP+1 raises to 2.4 BB, fold, fold, Hero calls 2.4 BB, fold, BB calls 1.4 BB

Flop : (8.82 BB, 3 players) Tc Jc 9d
BB checks, MP+1 checks, Hero bets 2.65 BB, BB raises to 6.58 BB, fold, Hero raises to 28.58 BB and is all-in, BB calls 21.99 BB

Turn : (65.98 BB, 2 players) 2d

River : (65.98 BB, 2 players) 2c

BB shows 9c Qc (Flush, Queen High)
(Pre 40%, Flop 62%, Turn 43%)

Hero shows Ac Js (Two Pair, Jacks and Twos)
(Pre 60%, Flop 38%, Turn 57%)

BB wins 65.98 BB

I didn’t do anything too interesting in the $215 rebuy, but here’s a hand I screwed up:

PokerStars – 300/600 Ante 75 NL (6 max) – Holdem – 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

MP: 83.23 BB (VPIP: 33.46, PFR: 20.31, 3Bet Preflop: 6.56, Hands: 267)
CO: 51.64 BB (VPIP: 22.86, PFR: 22.86, 3Bet Preflop: 17.65, Hands: 35)
BTN: 49.94 BB (VPIP: 15.11, PFR: 8.73, 3Bet Preflop: 1.79, Hands: 140)
SB: 79.96 BB (VPIP: 20.26, PFR: 14.66, 3Bet Preflop: 6.86, Hands: 545)
Hero (BB): 96.56 BB
UTG: 37.1 BB (VPIP: 20.21, PFR: 12.43, 3Bet Preflop: 5.75, Hands: 189)

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

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.25 BB) Hero has 7s 8h
fold, fold, fold, fold, SB calls 0.5 BB, Hero raises to 3.7 BB, SB raises to 13 BB, Hero calls 9.3 BB

Flop : (26.75 BB, 2 players) 9d 4d Td
SB bets 12 BB, Hero calls 12 BB

Turn : (50.75 BB, 2 players) 6d
SB checks, Hero checks

River : (50.75 BB, 2 players) 7c
SB bets 15.73 BB, Hero calls 15.73 BB

SB shows Jc Jd (Flush, Jack High)
(Pre 82%, Flop 85%, Turn 100%)

Hero mucks 7s 8h (Straight, Ten High)
(Pre 18%, Flop 15%, Turn 0%)

SB wins 82.22 BB

I think I played the turn right, and maybe the flop? But pre-flop, I probably screwed up twice, and the river should probably be a fold. #TheyAlwaysHaveIt

Villain opens for $35 from the CO, I call with 7s 7c in the BB.

Flop ($75 in pot) Tc 5s 4s. I check, he bets $50, I call.

Turn ($175 in pot) 5c. We both check.

River ($175 in pot) As

What’s your play and why? Be sure to include at least a tentative plan for future action. In other words, if you bet, how will you respond to a small or large raise? If you check, how will you respond to bets of various sizes?

Leave your thoughts and comments here, and I’ll be back on Friday with results and my own opinions.

Prior to this hand, I’d really been hammering on the player in the CO. Mostly it was out of the BB, where I basically never folded to his button min-raises, sometimes 3-betting, sometimes calling and getting stubborn post-flop, but definitely not making it easy for him just to raise and take pots from late position.

It’s not that I think the BB’s cold 4-bet is weak exactly, just that there’s a little more room for it to be light than you might otherwise expect. My pre-flop and flop calls seem pretty unambiguous to me.

The turn is where it gets interesting. On the one hand, it’s a dicey spot for him to barrel. On the other hand, I’m getting 4:1, and he’s repping a really narrow range. I don’t see him betting AA here, with or without a heart. Even against that narrow range, I’m drawing pretty live. So basically on the turn I’m worried but don’t think I can fold.

In retrospect, I think that’s a reason to fold the river. Of course he’s still repping a really narrow range, and my hand is a decent bluff-catcher in that I block a couple things like AhQh, QhJh, and KQ that could play this way. However, I probably have enough trips, flushes, and boats in my range that I don’t really need to call with pure bluff-catchers like this.

My thinking is that even though my turn call is actually pretty strong Villain may just desperation shove the river with all his air once he gets that far. Probably that would be more plausible in a random $100 rebuy or something, but not so much in a $2K SCOOP event. Not to mention that I didn’t really think he had that much air in his turn range, though admittedly that was a weak read.

PokerStars – $2000+$100|250/500 Ante 60 NL (6 max) – Holdem – 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

CO: 67.91 BB
BTN: 59.46 BB
Hero (SB): 113.82 BB
BB: 91.59 BB
UTG: 24.84 BB
MP: 14.75 BB

6 players post ante of 0.12 BB, Hero posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.22 BB) Hero has Qc Qh
fold, fold, CO raises to 2 BB, fold, Hero raises to 6 BB, BB raises to 14.4 BB, fold, Hero calls 8.4 BB

Flop : (31.52 BB, 2 players) Kc 4h 8h
Hero checks, BB bets 11.11 BB, Hero calls 11.11 BB

Turn : (53.74 BB, 2 players) Kh
Hero checks, BB bets 17.78 BB, Hero calls 17.78 BB

River : (89.29 BB, 2 players) 5d
Hero checks, BB bets 48.19 BB and is all-in, Hero calls 48.19 BB

BB shows Ac Ks (Three of a Kind, Kings) (Pre 43%, Flop 87%, Turn 77%)
Hero shows Qc Qh (Two Pair, Kings and Queens) (Pre 57%, Flop 13%, Turn 23%)
BB wins 185.67 BB

Whereas big bluffs and hero calls offer the dual rewards of feeling like you made a great play and seeing a mountain of chips shipped your way, plus sometimes the oohs and aahs of your tablemates, the rewards of a heroic fold are mostly in your own head.

Yet these are some of the hardest plays to make in poker. Even great players commonly refer to themselves as “stations” and admit to paying off more than they should. If you’d had the discipline to fold every time you had that nagging feeling that you were beat, your bankroll would be a lot fatter than it is today.

Because you aren’t getting the external rewards that come with big bluffs and calls, the key to making better hero folds is to derive satisfaction from the feeling of knowing that you made a great play, which in the end counts for more than winning, losing or the respect of your peers anyway.

For more on folding, there’s my latest Learn.PokerNews article, “How to Make Money With the Worst Hands in Poker”

Proper, winning poker involves a lot of folding. The big pots are few and far between. If the adrenaline spikes of winning and losing is what you’re really after, my honest advice is to head to the pit for some craps or blackjack. Of course the house has an edge in those games, but not as much of an edge as your opponents will have if you get bored and start calling raises with trashy hands in a no-limit hold’em game.

and also “You’re Supposed to Get Bluffed”

There are lots of emasculating metaphors we use for getting bluffed, but the truth is that it’s supposed to happen. Somewhere out there is a poker player who has never folded to a bluff, but he’s probably among the biggest losers in the game. If you never fold to a bluff, then you’re going to end up paying off way too many value bets, and ultimately you’ll lose more money than if you just suck it up and let yourself fold a winner now and again.

Carlos Welch learned this lesson the hard way when he found himself “Hero-Calling Unexpected River Bets“:

When this guy comes out and leads the river, he means business. His range is incredibly strong at this point because the turn and river improved most of the hands I put him on after his flop call. The flush draws got there and the  hands are now trips. Not to mention the fact that a $100 bet in this game is big in an absolute sense. And big bets on the river in small stakes games are usually the gospel.

Carlos also brings us “The Ten Commandments of Online Poker“, featuring gems like “Thou shalt have no other gods before math.”

Last but not least, Nate Meyvis writes about “Checking Flops From Out of Position”:

Sometimes you get called by someone who has position on you. When the stacks are short, moreover, it matters less whether you will occasionally make a great hand. Great hands are great because you will be comfortable taking them to battle in huge pots, but when you’re short-stacked — such as often happens in tournaments — there won’t be any huge pots. In these situations it’s more important who has the better chance of making something decent, and that’s often the caller, not the raiser.

PokerStars – $1 NL FAST (6 max) – Holdem – 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4: http://www.pokertracker.com

BTN: 103.43 BB
Hero (SB): 112.01 BB
BB: 100 BB
UTG: 100 BB
MP: 90.3 BB
CO: 131.74 BB

Hero posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has Jd Js
fold, fold, CO raises to 2 BB, BTN raises to 6.5 BB, Hero raises to 18 BB, fold, CO calls 16 BB, BTN calls 11.5 BB

Flop : (55 BB, 3 players) 5c 7c 3d
Hero bets 26 BB, CO calls 26 BB, BTN raises to 85.43 BB and is all-in, Hero ?

Post your thoughts and comments here, and I’ll be back with my own on Friday. Happy WCOOPing!

I’ll begin with a small mea culpa: not only did I apparently screw up the pot size, but I think I also misremembered the board cards, because I’m pretty sure a straight flush was not possible. Thankfully I don’t think either of these mistakes affected the analysis much, but I do apologize for them.

Plan For a Raise

This is a big pot, and it may be about to get a lot bigger. Making a mistake when the seventh and largest bet goes into the pot would be extremely expensive, whether it’s a bad call or a bad fold. Even moreso than usual, then, you need to have a plan for how you will respond to a raise before you bet.

I think folding would be correct. A lot of you, Nate most insistently, made the same basic point that it’s a tough spot for Villain to check-raise as a bluff because the Ah is a healthy part of Hero’s range.

Moreover, it’s just generally difficult for people to pull the trigger on a 180BB river check-raise bluff.

Finally, as Rant 2112 says, “We know from his line that he has a value hand on the river 99% of the time. He’s not going to turn it into a bluff. He’s just going to show it down.” By “value hand” I take him to mean a hand with showdown value, ie a hand that could beat most of my bluffs. In that case, most players, live players especially, will prefer to call rather than check-raise bluff. People like to see showdowns, especially when it means risking a lot less money than a huge bluff into a nutty range.

That said, we shouldn’t read too much into the “primarily a live player” read. That was just a hunch, I didn’t have a lot to back it up. Regardless, whoever he is, it’s not too likely that he’s sick enough to check-raise bluff here with any great frequency, so I’m all for folding if raised.

How Often Do We Lose?

Given that we’re going to fold to a raise, any time that he does surprise us with a check-raise bluff, it’s going to result in a very expensive mistake. We have to determine just how confident we are that he won’t bluff and then allow for an appropriate risk of being wrong as part of our argument against betting. Here I think the risk is small, in the absence of extenuating circumstances which we’ll get to in a moment.

So let’s say that 5% of his raises will be bluffs, and the other 95% of the time we’ll be beat. Depending on how much we bet, that those bluffs would cost us $150-$200 in equity that we’ll need to weigh against the upsides of betting.

Of course he’s never folding a better hand, so next we should try to estimate how likely he is to hold the Ah and assume that we always lose the pot when that happens. There are three ways he could get to the river with the Ah: 1) slowplaying the flopped nuts; 2) calling down with AhX where X made a pair on either the flop or turn (we can put AhAx in this category as well); 3) calling down with AhX and no pair.

Given the depth of the stacks, I don’t see a lot of reason for (1). He’d need to raise at some point in order to get stacks in by the river, and I’d expect him to want to build the pot before the board pairs or a fourth heart comes, so I don’t think there’s a high risk of this. If he has a flush to the Ace, he almost certainly made it on the river.

Most of the scenarios for (2) would require him to call a 3-bet with an offsuit rag Ace deep and out of position against someone he probably assumes to be aggressive and one of the tougher players at the table. I don’t think we’re going to see A3 or A5 ever, and even AT would be a pretty bad call. AhQx would make a lot of sense. It slightly contradicts my read on his pre-flop range, but that wasn’t a strong read, so I think we can safely count three combos of AhQx and none of the others.

We also need to consider AhAx. That hand is more unlikely based on the preflop action, both because he may have made a larger opening raise and because he my have 4-bet it. Then again, this deep he may just choose not to have a 4-betting range pre-flop, so let’s count one of the three combos of this hand.

As with (2), the possibilities for (3) are constrained by the fact that Villain would have had to call the 3-bet from out of position with an offsuit Ace. Only AK and AJ are at all plausible, and as with AA/AQ both may have been played differently pre-flop. Unlike with AA and AQ, though, it’s less clear that he would take this line post-flop. Although I don’t think it would be awful, I wouldn’t call it standard either. Both AhKx and AhJx would be good candidates for check-raising the flop or turn. Generously, we’ll give him three combos of those.

The cost of betting then, is getting called by seven combos of hands with the Ah, plus a small risk of a bluff which amounts to much less than one combo (.35 to be precise, if we go with our 5% guess).

How Often Does He Call With Worse?

We estimated that he’ll raise with somewhere between seven and eight combos of hands, so if he calls with just eight combos of bluff-catchers, we have a profitable bet. These are harder to count, but we can get an idea by looking at both his and Hero’s range for getting to the river.

Villain probably doesn’t expect Hero to turn many hands into a bluff on this river that he thought were good enough to bet for value on the turn. If Hero expected to be good on the turn, then he’s probably still good on the river unless Villain holds a high heart, in which case he probably isn’t folding. That means Villain can only hope to beat triple barrel bluffs.

Of course if I’m 3-betting K2s my actual 3-betting range is quite wide, but I also wouldn’t 3-bet it if I expected Villain to realize quite how wide I actually was. My best guess is that he might expect my 3-bet range to look something like {TT+,A2s+,K9s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T8s+,97s+,86s+,76s,ATo+,KQo}. Even so, that leaves about 87 combos (according to my rough count that, historically, is likely to be inaccurate) that he expects me to 3-bet pre-flop that can’t beat a pair of Tens on the river, which is about the point where I think he’d expect me to take my showdown value rather than bluff.

Most if not all of those hands bet the flop. The turn is a pretty good barreling card, so even if he assumes that I’d barrel only half of my air range, that would still give me more than 40 combos of air that get to the river this way.

The one thing we haven’t accounted for yet is the fact that my barreling range ought to be weighted towards Ah, Kh, and other hands with hearts in them that improve on this river. So if I were actually betting half of my hands with trivial showdown value on the turn, much less than half of that range would still be air on the river. Let’s say then that I have 20 combos of air after seeing the river.

I’ll have about that many combos of Ah and Kh, depending on exactly how weighted towards Ax and Kx he expects my 3-betting range to be. The range that I gave above is pretty biased in that direction. This is a good bluffing card, and I’ve got plenty of air in my range, so if he perceives me to be aggressive, it’s a good bluff-catching spot, especially if he isn’t sure whether I’d bet the Kh for value (and I wasn’t sure myself!).

The catch is that his best bluffcatchers are hands containing the Kh, which of course Hero’s hand blocks but Villain doesn’t know that. So his bluffcatching range may be narrower than usual for that reason.

Ignoring the fact that we have the Kh, his plausible bluffcatchers are AxQh (3), KxQh (4), KhQx (3), AA (3), KK (6), QQ (3), TT (3), 55 (3), 33 (3), JJ (6), 9h9x (4), 8h8x (4), QhJh, KhJh. That’s 47 combos, of which 7 are blocked in this instance and some, like the big pairs, discounted based on the preflop action. We’d only need him to call 20-25% of his bluffcatching candidates for us to show a profit. If he only continued to a river bet with Ah or Kh hands, he’d fold to a bluff roughly 75% of the time, which is about twice as often as we’d need for a bluff of $1500 to be profitable.

If he bluffcatches with anywhere near the right frequency, and if he rarely check-raises bluffs, then this is a bet.

Bet Sizing

There was some interesting discussion on bet sizing as well, with some people advocating an overbet to polarize our range and deter a check-raise bluff and others advocating a small bet to keep his calling range wide. I incline towards the second camp myself, because I think that when we bet big, we should actually be polarized.

This is because the first hands in his bluff-catching range should be those containing Kh. The larger our bet, the smaller his bluff-catching range ought to be, and so the greater the ratio of Kh to other combos. In other words, when we have the Kh in our hand, he should call disproportionately more often the smaller our bet.

However, as swallsjr points out, “We want to size our bet on the river to maximize the chances of getting called by worse, without inducing a check raise by worse.” That means we don’t want to bet so small that he excludes the Ah from our range, because then we don’t know what could happen. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 to 1500 is what I should have bet.

Results and Lessons

Remember I mentioned extenuating circumstances? Obviously I couldn’t have thought through things so thoroughly at the table, but I still went into the tank for a while when he checked to me. At some point, I began to worry that the longer I tanked, he would bluffcatch less and check-raise bluff more, correctly putting me on a thin value bet.

That may have been giving him too much credit, but eventually I just gave up and turned my cards over. He mucked, and I collected the pot. There are a few lessons to take from this:

1. Do the work ahead of time. You may be looking at the length of this post and wondering how one could possibly do this sort of analysis at the table. You couldn’t, for lack of both time and tools. That’s what makes it important to do this kind of analysis away from the table, so that your instincts and rough approximations are better in the heat of the moment. No matter how much you try to balance your tanking range, you simply can’t avoid giving away some information if you have to think for several minutes about a complex situation.

2. Small edges matter in big pots. Don’t look at this, throw up your arms, and say, “It’s all so complicated, it’s a close decision anyway, just check it back and collect what’s already a nice pot.” If a $1500 gets called worse 60% of the time and raised 40% of the time (and very rarely as a bluff), then you lose nearly $150  $300 by checking back. That’s 6 12BBs, at least an hour’s two hours’ worth of work at a live cash table if you have a solid edge in the game.

Thanks for playing, and good on ya if you made it this far!

Edit: Corrected math error in the second-to-last paragraph.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 215 Tournament, 100/200 Blinds 20 Ante (9 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

MP1 (t6200)
MP2 (t4885)
MP3 (t18909)
CO (t8649)
Button (t9197)
SB (t18572)
Hero (BB) (t8618)
UTG (t4020)
UTG+1 (t10725)

Hero’s M: 17.95

Preflop: Hero is BB with K, Q
7 folds, SB bets t400, Hero calls t200

Flop: (t980) 2, A, 9 (2 players)
SB bets t400, Hero calls t400

Turn: (t1780) 10 (2 players)
SB bets t600, Hero calls t600

River: (t2980) 2 (2 players)
SB bets t1400, Hero calls t1400

Total pot: t5780

Results:
SB had Q, J (one pair, twos).
Hero had K, Q (one pair, twos).
Outcome: Hero won t5780

We know that at least early in the hand Villain’s ranges are really wide. He’s opening a lot of hands pre-flop and betting this flop with almost everything. The trouble is that most steal-happy MTT players aren’t good at balancing all that bluffing with appropriately wide value ranges. I’m not even sure he’d play AK this way, let alone anything less. That makes it very hard for him to have a value hand. Add to that that my hand looks a lot like a busted draw, giving him incentive to try to bluff-catch his medium strength hands, and I think we’re looking at a very polarized range here. Of course it’s a hell of a lot easier to have air than two pair, so call call call!

BB ($819.50)
Hero (SB) ($1000)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 6, J
Hero bets $9.60, BB calls $5.60

Flop: ($20.80) 2, 5, 5 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($20.80) K (2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks

River: ($20.80) A (2 players)
BB bets $12, Hero calls $12

Total pot: $44.80 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
Hero had 6, J (one pair, fives).
BB had 8, 10 (one pair, fives).
Outcome: Hero won $44.30

With my line, it looks a lot like I have either A-high trying to showdown cheaply or air that I declined to bluff. In either case, I’m likely to bet the river. Thus, it doesn’t really make that much sense for Villain to bet if he paired the Ace, and it makes even less sense for him to try to value bet a K. There’s also not much point in bluffing if he has Q-high, so my Jack starts looking pretty good.

Of course this all falls apart if Villain realizes how FOS his river bet will look and expects me to call with J-high

This isn’t the best example of a wet flop, but it is a good example of an opponent refusing to give me credit because I checked the flop:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, 162 Tournament, 150/300 Blinds 40 Ante (5 handed) – PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

BB (t13725)
Hero (UTG) (t6371)
MP (t9263)
Button (t14823)
SB (t15087)

Hero’s M: 9.80

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 10, 10
Hero bets t750, 3 folds, BB calls t450

Flop: (t1850) 10, 5, 2 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero checks

Turn: (t1850) 6 (2 players)
BB bets t300, Hero raises to t1500, BB calls t1200

River: (t4850) 6 (2 players)
BB bets t300, Hero raises to t4081 (All-In), BB calls t3781

Total pot: t13012

Results:
BB had A, Q (one pair, sixes).
Hero had 10, 10 (full house, tens over sixes).
Outcome: Hero won t13012

Some of you may have heard that Phil Hellmuth overslept yesterday morning and was getting blinded off in the tournament. Apparently Mike Matusow called security at Phil’s hotel and got them to enter his room and wake him up. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I was still at my starting table with Russel Rosenblum and Sorel Mizzi when Phil came dashing into the Amazon room, with a floorman shouting after him about whether he knew which table he was going to.

Russel: I wonder if the floor is going to scurry to get me to my seat if I show up late.
Me: I don’t understand why Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke aren’t getting the kind of shit that the Full Tilt guys are getting.
Russel: I don’t want to say too much here, but Phil and Annie are just paid spokespeople, whereas the Full Tilt guys may have been somewhat more that that.
Sorel: That’s… putting it very carefully.
Me: Yes, sorry, I know that. I guess I misspoke. I do understand why they don’t get as much shit as Lederer, but people still put money on UB because Phil and Annie were endorsing them, and those people are never going to see that money. I just don’t think Phil and Annie should be getting invited on stage at the WSOP like they’re the best and brightest in the poker world.
Sorel: But they’re just sponsors. They aren’t on the inside. They don’t know anything more about what’s going on behind the scenes than you do.
Me: Based on what I knew, I wouldn’t have worn a UB patch.
Sorel: But come on, if they are just throwing money at you…

I had to change the subject at this point, because the irony and Sorel’s total lack of self-awareness was getting too much for me, and I nearly said something pretty rude to him.

Security is Called

The table broke not too long after, which was very welcome, though my new table was still pretty tough. I went on a nice little tear and chipped up to 170K while acquiring a relatively aggressive table image. Blinds were 400/800/100.

I opened to 2200 with 33 in the CO. A loose French player called me on the BTN, the SB folded, and the BB, who’d been quietly chipping up with very few showdowns and seemed pretty table aware re-raised to 6800 with about 45K behind.

I wasn’t getting the right odds to setmine, and online I’d just fold this even though I suspect the guy is light. I don’t want to get it in pre, and it’s just going to be too hard to figure out where I stand post-flop. In live play, however, the added information available through tells makes it a little more feasible and call and evaluate, and that’s what I did. The BTN quickly folded behind me.

The flop came 742r. BB bet 7500, and I called. The turn was another 4, and he checked. At this point he had barely a pot-sized bet left in his stack, and I think there are a lot of hands he wouldn’t check, including big draws and vulnerable hands like medium pairs. This was either an elaborate trap with like QQ+ or he was giving up.

I had no delusions of getting him to fold a hand better than mine, but I didn’t want to give him a free card or a shot at bluffing a scary river, so I bet 9000. After a bit of thought, he moved all in for 24,500. Now I had to think.

This is another spot I simply wouldn’t get myself in online. Before I bet the flop I’d have a plan for whether I was going to call a check-raise. Live, though, there is more room to figure out exactly which part of his range he has and what he’s up to. I let him sweat for about 3 minutes and then counted out the chips for a call. He looked uncomfortable. I placed them gently in the pot. He tapped the table. I tabled my treys. He whistled. “Very nice call, sir.” He showed AQ. Q on the river.

Where it gets really crazy is that while he’s still stacking his chips, three guys from security walk up to him. Two of them stand back, flanking a third who taps him on the shoulder. “Finish stacking your chips and then we need to ask you a few questions, sir.”

Naturally the whole table is staring at this scene trying to figure out what’s going on. The player in question looks totally nonplussed. He stacks his chips and then leaves the table with them. “That beat was so bad it was criminal!” I quip after he’s gone, earning me a few groans from my tablemates.

The guy returned after just two hands and seemed unperturbed. Curious about what was going on, I said to him, “I wish they’d come a hand earlier.” He laughed. I heard the player next to him asking him what happened, and he said it was something to do with a friend of his and that everything was fine. He remained at the table until late in the day, when he shoved AJ over one of my raises. I called with 99 to eliminate him and win back about a quarter of what I’d lost to him in that earlier hand.

French Fish

As I previously mentioned, the guy on my left was a loose and generally bad French player. Blinds were 500/1000/100. A tightish player in the HJ opened to 2500, and I called with 77 in the SB. The poisson re-raised to 11,000 with 15K behind. I was pretty sure I was going to fold but gave him the old stare down first.

He’d been watching a movie on his iPad, and when he saw me looking for a read, he pressed play and turned his attention to his screen. I could see perfectly well that he wasn’t cheating, but I wanted to get a reaction from him, so I told him to put the computer away during the hand.

He removed his headphones and looked up at me. “What?”

“You can’t be on your computer during the hand.”

He sneered. “Whatchu going to do? Time.”

“You’re calling time on me?”

“Yes. Time.”

“OK. Put the computer away.” He made a point of putting his headphones back on and pressing play. I looked over at the dealer, who was doing nothing. She hadn’t even called the floor to clock me. Of course by this point I had all the information I needed to fold, but now I was upset that the dealer wasn’t enforcing the rules.

“Player has called time,” I informed her.

She turned to another dealer who was waiting to push her after this hand. “Am I supposed to call the floor if a player has asked for time?”

The floor finally got called and came over. I informed her that I twice asked this player to stop using his computer during the hand. She ignored me and started telling him that he would have 70 seconds to act.

“Time was called on me,” I told her.

“OK then you have 70 seconds to act.”

“Are you going to do anything about the computer?”

“First you need to act on your hand.” I folded without a second’s thought.

“You can’t be on your computer or phone while you have a live hand,” she informed him and walked away.

I thought there was some chance that his reaction was also an act and that he was trying to make me angry to get a call. He said something to me after the hand, though, which made me think he was legitimately upset.

The very next hand I got black Queens in the CO and opened to 2600. I was 110% sure that the poisson would at least call. He angrily threw 7500 chips into the pot. The blinds folded, and after a cursory glance at his stack (he had about 35K behind), I shoved a stack of orange into the pot. He snap-called and turned over TT like it was the nuts, which it pretty much was in that spot. I think there’s a legitimate chance that his angry chip tossing was an act and that he thought he was baiting me. I got no reaction when I showed the QQ.

The dealer went to deal the flop, and there was the Tc in the door. The other two cards were also clubs, so I had a lot of outs, but none of them got there. I calmly counted out an appropriate number of chips and passed them to him.

He finished the day with over 300K. I’ve got 135K, though, so no complaints here.

What sets these tournaments apart is that, unlike the $20 donkament, they also attract some of the best tournament players in the world. This means that if you run bad at table drawing, you could end up with David Baker or Tony Dunst on your left. Understandably, this is a stressful thought for less experienced players considering these events. I have a couple of pieces of advice for these players:

1. Take Advantage of the Opportunity. Presumably part of the reason you are playing this tournament is for the experience of playing at the WSOP. Well, part of that experience is butting heads with the best of the world. Of course you’d rather watch them from afar than from their immediate right, but you can’t control that now. Observe them closely and try to pick up a few things that you can add to your own game. Even if they end up taking your chips, at least you’ll have learned something in the process.

2. Don’t Freak Out. Not even the best pros are gods. Their cards are dealt from the same deck that yours are, and when the action is on them, they have the same three choices: raise, call, or fold. Don’t assume that they are capable of feats of superhuman card skill. In fact, the correct strategy for them is generally to play a relatively straightforward game when stacks are shallowish and the table is full of amateurs. If you make the effort to study them and think through what they are doing, you may be surprised at how much you can figure out.

3. Don’t Be a Hero. Any type of poker play that could be preceded by the adjective “hero”, as in “hero call”, “hero fold”, etc., is generally not going to be a good idea against a player who is better than you. As I understand it, this terms generally refers to making a play with the opposite extreme of your range, so a hero fold means folding one of the best hands you could have in a given spot, where a hero call is calling with one of the worst hands you could have. By definition, these are exploitive plays that seek to take advantage of a perceived glaring imbalance in an opponent’s range, ie that it will be either extremely bluff-heavy or extremely value-heavy. Also by definition, you will have trouble identifying such holes in the game of a superior player, if he even has them in the first place. Better not to get into a leveling war against such a player in the first place.

4. Re-read Rule #1. The bottom line is that you should just relax, play your best, and make the most of the experience no matter what happens.

I’ve been taking a beating in heads up games recently. There were one or two cases of bad game selection, but for the most part I don’t think I’ve playing or running all that badly. I’m losing to people against whom I’m pretty confident I have an edge, not because of bad luck or consistently bad play, but because I keep making like one big mistake per match. And the thing is, no matter how well you play 99% of your hands, you can’t afford to make a 100BB+ mistake, not even once. That just isn’t a handicap you can overcome.

Here was tonight’s. I was up about four buy-ins across on this guy across all the tables we were playing when this happened:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $50.00 BB (2 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Hero (SB) ($8949.50)
BB ($28887)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 7, 10
Hero bets $100, BB raises to $375, Hero raises to $950, BB calls $575

Flop: ($1900) 9, 6, 2 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $699, BB raises to $2750, Hero raises to $7999.50 (All-In), BB calls $5249.50

Turn: ($17899) J (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: ($17899) 6 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $17899 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
Hero had 7, 10 (one pair, sixes).
BB had Q, 8 (one pair, sixes).
Outcome: BB won $17898.50

I underbet the flop with the intention of shoving over a check-raise, and I don’t think that was a bad plan. What should have given me pause (what did, to be honest, give me pause, though I ignored it and shoved anyway) was the size of his check-raise. I was expecting a check-raise to about 2K with some mix of bluffs and value hand against which I have a boatload of outs. This larger check-raise, I think, is almost always a flush draw. And a flush draw is the only hand against which I don’t have good equity.

I went on to finish slightly down to this guy after losing a few more big pots that I think I played fine but that just didn’t go my way. Erase this hand and I’m up. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. The only way to erase mistakes like these is to stop making them.

For the sake of my ego, here’s one of my better played hands against the same guy:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $50.00 BB (2 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Hero (SB) ($7513.50)
BB ($10000)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 5, 5
Hero bets $100, BB raises to $350, Hero calls $250

Flop: ($700) 9, 7, 9 (2 players)
BB bets $375, Hero calls $375

Turn: ($1450) Q (2 players)
BB bets $900, Hero calls $900

River: ($3250) A (2 players)
BB bets $2900, Hero calls $2900

Total pot: $9050 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
Hero had 5, 5 (two pair, nines and fives).
BB had 10, 8 (one pair, nines).
Outcome: Hero won $9049.50

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $50.00 BB (2 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

SB ($17416.75)
Hero (BB) ($10049)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 2, J
SB calls $25, Hero checks

Flop: ($100) 9, Q, 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, SB checks

Turn: ($100) A (2 players)
Hero checks, SB checks

River: ($100) 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, SB bets $50, Hero calls $50

Total pot: $200 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
SB had 7, 8 (one pair, threes).
Hero had 2, J (one pair, threes).
Outcome: Hero won $199.50

Edit: Fixed the title. Was thinking this was 3/6, not 4/8.

First, the appetizer:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $8.00 BB (2 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

SB ($780)
Hero (BB) ($2215.50)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 10, 9
SB bets $24, Hero calls $16

Flop: ($48) 9, 7, 8 (2 players)
Hero checks, SB checks

Turn: ($48) A (2 players)
Hero checks, SB bets $28, Hero calls $28

River: ($104) 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, SB bets $75, Hero calls $75

Total pot: $254 | Rake: $0.50

Results:
SB had 3, 4 (high card, Ace).
Hero had 10, 9 (one pair, nines).
Outcome: Hero won $253.50

And now, the main course:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em, $8.00 BB (5 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG ($1338.90)
MP ($2520)
Button ($471.40)
Hero (SB) ($3060.10)
BB ($800)

Preflop: Hero is SB with K, K
UTG calls $8, MP bets $36, 1 fold, Hero raises to $136, 2 folds, MP calls $100

Flop: ($288) 8, 3, 6 (2 players)
Hero bets $199, MP raises to $468, Hero calls $269

Turn: ($1224) 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP bets $625, Hero calls $625

River: ($2474) 7 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP bets $1291 (All-In), Hero calls $1291

Total pot: $5056 | Rake: $3

Results:
Hero had K, K (one pair, Kings).
MP had Q, K (high card, King).
Outcome: Hero won $5053

Ship it.