In this post, I wanted to run through some good tournament hands that came up in a small stakes turbo tournament I recently won on Pokerstars.es with various different situations coming up I thought players of all skill levels could learn from, let’s take a look…
Playing Pocket Jacks
So we pick up Jacks in the Cut-Off with 12BBs, a dream situation, now we could just move all-in with this hand… it would definitely be +EV, but then we are not giving our opponents a chance to re-raise us with worse hands or call and flop worse pairs that will end up paying us a full double up.
So we elect to just min-raise and look to play some post-flop…
What a flop it is, we flop top set! Although we have a huge hand here this board is fairly good for our opponents too, with straight draws and flush draws in their potential holdings we want to bet an amount that will allow us to just play all in on most turn cards on the flop, so with a good lock on the equity here we can bet very small.
We opt to bet just $800 and get one call and it’s off to the turn card…
Gin turn card for us! We make a full house, now we have an easy play we want to check back and hope our opponent catches up in some way either by hitting a draw or maybe by bluffing the river even.
Three amazing streets of action for us! Our opponent does indeed catch up and this presumably beginner player now decides to lead out on the river with their two pair hand on this dangerous straight, flush and paired board, which is slightly overplaying their holding in my eyes.
Great news for us though, our plan works out perfectly and we get the full double up we wanted.
Making a Tight Fold
We are dealt AJo with around 16.3BBs and the player to our right raises it up, they use a big sizing which is more committing than a min-raise, so we have a few options here:
We could re-raise all-in… This just feels a little loose to me, I think with AQo+ and possibly some AJs+ I would be happy to risk this stack, but with limited information on this player and this raise from this position showing strength we would almost be hoping to be in a coin flip situation against a smaller pair like 77-TT
We could flat call… This is probably the worst of any of the options we have because we will be playing a large pot with a hand that could go multi-way with a holding that plays poorly post-flop.
We can fold… As this is the very bottom of our possible re-jam range we can easily fold this one, we don’t have to take every spot in tournament poker and it’s good to sometimes choose to deviate from nash re-shoving ranges and take into account things like raise sizing and player type to avoid bad spots.
We end up making the slightly nitty fold, fearing being dominated and move on to the next hand
Calling with suited connectors in deep stacked pots
This situation is a little different to the AJo hand in that we are deeper stacked and we are playing against a later position raise and we have a hand that has better post-flop playability.
For all these reasons we opt to flat call with this hand and play some poker…
A decent flop for our hand we hit a pair and backdoor flush draw, we face a small bet from our opponent which could be from a wide range of hands, so allow we are in bad shape if our opponent has an Ace in their hand this is only a small part of their range so we have to call here at least once.
Our opponent seems to give up on the turn card opting to now check, this could be because they have picked up some showdown value if say they have now hit a King and want to try and get to the River, so whilst we could bet this card with our decent equity against almost all holdings with us having a pair and flush draw I prefer to check behind and keep the pot small here.
Confusing River Bet! Our opponent now decides to bet out $4,000 which is around half pot, this makes little sense unless they are confident in their game to bet a pair of Kings on this River, which a good player might be able to do some of the time, however they can’t have a pair of Aces here too often as they would look to bet most of these hands on the turn.
I decided that this bet didn’t make too much sense and we opt to see what they have…
Ten High No Good! Our opponent was just taking one last stab at the pot with their zero equity hand, I don’t hate this attempt but I would like to see a bigger sizing from them to put hands like ours in a tougher position, the half pot sizing was just quite an easy bet to call for us.
Applying some ICM pressure
This is from one of the early hands on the Final table where we have a good spot to apply some huge ICM pressure to our opponent with a re-steal.
They are locked in second position with a big lead on nearly all the rest of the players on the table except us, so we opt to re-raise their button open and see if they really have a hand they want to risk their tournament life with in this spot, which would need to be a monster hand.
Our opponent doesn’t follow through with it deciding its better to stay out of trouble and save their chip lead on the rest of the field… a wise choice from them in general as it’s going to be awkward to play post-flop against my stack which I can apply huge pressure on later streets of action to their holdings.
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