In this post, we are going to look at a hand played on Live at the Bike where Mike “The Mouth” Matusow clashes with Garrett Aldestein in a huge pot where Mike has the Bullets and Garrett has his usual suited connector combo.
Stakes for the game are blinds at $50/$50/$100 with a Big Blind ante of $100. Meaning there is $300 in the middle with the blinds before any Pre-Flop action, plenty to get after so we can expect ranges to widen a little in this game!
Pre-Flop Action
Mike Matusow Opens up UTG+1 for $400 with A♥ A♣
Phil Hellmuth flat calls from the Cut-Off with 2♠ 2♦
Garrett picks up 7♣ 6♣ on the button and decides to 3-Bet to $1,700
The action gets back to Mike and he opts to 4-Bet to $4,800
Phil has to muck his 2♠ 2♦ as stacks are too shallow for him to be getting the right price to call to hit a set
The action gets back to Garrett who decides to make the call for $3,100 more with his 7♣ 6♣ in position.
Let’s break down this Pre-flop play from the Pro’s here…
Firstly Matusow’s open raise: Everything here looks normal, he opens for $400, with $300 to win in the pot so this a good sizing, as there is more money in the pot we can look to make our raises bigger, for instance, if there was a $200 straddle I’d like to see a sizing of around $800 from Mike here.
Phil’s Play: He decides to flat call with 22 from the Cut-Off which is a perfectly fine play, this is the type of hand that plays well post-flop by either hitting a set or missing and allowing us to get away without paying off any bets. Folding or Raising here would be a disaster of a play, just look to hit your set for the cheapest price possible with these small pairs.
Garrett’s 3-Bet: Garrett opts to squeeze the action up a bit in position choosing his suited connector to do so, which has some merits, for instance, if your opponent does have a big hand then your holding is disguised, however against a Mike Matusow UTG+1 open raise I would prefer to see a flat call, our hand plays well post-flop on some boards that we will look to continue with so there is little need for us to get this pot heads up with this type of holding.
Matusow’s 4-Bet: Once the action is opened back up, Matusow decides to 4-Bet Garrett’s Button 3-Bet and I like this play, the stacks are deep so we want to get more money in the pot with our premium holding. The danger of a play like this is that when we are a tight player and we come in with the 4-Bet we are pretty much never going to be fully balanced whilst doing this, so our range is skewed towards only nutted hands like AA, KK. This is going to allow an aggressive opponent to be able to outplay us in deep stack play post-flop.
Whilst I’m not suggesting that we should flat call the 3-Bet and play 3 ways with Hellmuth in the mix, be wary of being unbalanced in these spots against opponents that will look to exploit you on wet boards of later streets of action.
Phil Folds: This is the only play Phil can make with his short stack to this action. We are going to want to have around 9 times the raise size in our stacks to be able to call to hit a set profitably as we will only do this 1/9 times on average or around 12% of the time.
Garrett’s Call: Mike has around $37,000 Left for Garrett to win in his stack, so calling $3,100 is an investment from him to try and get all of this money in the long run, I don’t mind the call with this type of holding. It’s likely that Garrett believes Mike will play slightly worse than him post-flop and he thinks he can take advantage of this in a deep-stacked pot in position.
Let’s Take A Flop
With all this Pre-Flop action let’s take a flop with $10,000 in the middle…
A tough flop for Mike, we just aren’t going to have the nut advantage on this board as the 4-Bettor, we will just have AA, KK, QQ and AKs too often here compared to Garrett who can have 88, 99, TT, 76s, QJs, 89s & T9s.
So in spots like this, we are going to want to pump the breaks from the word go, Mike starts with a check on this board which is a good start, I’d like to see a check call on this flop and look to play some turn cards.
It’s important to note that boards like this are exactly why we should be balancing out our 4-Betting range to include some hands like AJs, QJs so that we can continue on these types of boards a little easier.
Garrett has an easy bet here with his hand, he has flopped the straight and Mike’s hand due to his strategy is almost face up, Betting around half pot with $5,000 is a decent bet here, we could even size up a little to make this a two street hand and look to shove the turn to protect our hand from poor run-outs that include some 4 to a straight cards hitting like a 7 or Jack that might kill our action.
Mike decides to call this and I think that it’s fine, we aren’t in love with this board, our opponent is either going to have us crushed or have decent equity on a board like this against us with their whole range in general, but our hand is too strong to fold just yet, so we have to call at least once…
Turn Action
Here we go… Action on the Turn heats up with Garrett Betting $10,000 into a pot of around $20,000 when the King of Spades hits.
This is when things get a little odd though, Mike Matusow now decides to min-raise this turn card, committing himself to the pot which really serves no purpose, choosing this line we are going to shut down any bluffs from our opponent, so if Garrett is ever just bluffing here and we are going with our hand we close them out of the pot and don’t win that extra money from their bluffs on the River.
The other option which is the case in this spot is that we are just bloating the pot when we are in terrible shape in the pot or even drawing dead against hands like straights in Garrett’s hand.
So Mike does make the Raise and then Garrett moves all in, looking to protect his hand with Mike having just $12,000 or so left in his stack.
Mike ends up burning through some time extension chips as there is a shot clock of 30 seconds for normal decisions… this is a huge error, we should be looking to play Poker with a plan for what can happen in future moves and streets and not just making a raise on a turn card and then when we get raised back wondering what we should do… this is not a good way to play Poker, try and play poker like it’s a game of chess and look ahead to future moves.
Mike ends up calling off his stack and losing the $84,725 pot to Garrett’s straight
Mike Matusow gets his Aces cracked
Whilst this is a tough spot, we are going to have to just fold Aces in some situations, this is one of the easiest spots we could get away from them. Our opponent just has so many hands that have us in bad shape including Kings that now got there on the turn versus us. So while it is a hard thing to do if ever there is a spot to get away from a one-pair hand, it’s a spot like this.
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