In this post we continue on from Part one of the Sunday Million Tournament Review and pick up the action approaching the money bubble…
We pick up the action with A9s versus a limp from our UTG opponent
Now normally we would probably look to attack weakness like limps, however due to our opponents stack size and just the nature of our hand we decide this is a good candidate for limping behind, we have a suited hand that plays well post-flop and our opponent has an awkward stack depth where they could easily be just limping to re-raise all-in.
So we take the less variance route of limping behind and trying to hit a flop…
And what a flop it is!
These are the types of hands you love to see in tournament poker, we have a draw to the nut flush, so we decide to bet around half pot, looking to push out some better hands like small pairs and better Ace high’s we want to win the pot here if possible and build a pot for if we hit our flush.
We get one call, sadly from the player who has position on us, so they can have a few different types of holdings, 57s would make a straight draw, so too would 79s, they could have two diamonds just like us and they have sets like 88, 66 in their range of hands as well as hands like K9o+ for a good top pair.
The turn card is a brick for our hand, with the 4♠ hitting.
We have options here, we could continue to bet with our Ace high draw, however, if we get raised we are in a tough spot against our opponents stack depth.
I think a good line here is to sometimes continue betting and sometimes look to check and evaluate. However with a draw to the nuts we are not looking to muck just yet with our opponent having an SPR of around 2.5:1 we have good implied odds of making more money if we hit the river.
So we decide to flat call here and see a river card…
We improve but not in the way we hoped!
With making a pair of Aces on the river we would happily call a bet, however, we weren’t looking to hit a nine in this pot, we wanted to hit the diamond and look to stack our opponent.
These can be tough pots to play once you make what is often a second-best hand, we have to evaluate if we can beat anything our opponent would choose to bet on the turn and river with…
What bluffs do they have?
Hands like QT in diamonds are possible, however, wouldn’t our opponent check these back on the turn and hope to realise their equity?
Excluding worse diamond draws which we actually block ourselves by having diamonds I couldn’t think of many bluffs our opponent could have to bet less than half pot on the river, these are tough pots to play in poker tournaments as we are getting such a good price here pressing call looks like such an alluring option!
However we need to think, what is our opponent actually going to have that we can beat in spots like this and make a tight fold most of the time. We can certainly look to deviate from this some percentage of the time especially against opponents that are capable of bluffing like this, however a general rule of playing very standard level poker players on river decisions like this is to play on the tighter side and fold as they will under bluff and under value bet light in spots like this.
Pocket Fives in the Big Blind Versus a player with 6.5BBs remaining
This next hand is a little bit of a pickle, we don’t love the situation when a player from early position limps in with 7.5BBs in their stack to start the hand and we have a pair of fives in the Big Blind… but let’s see what unfolds.
We get to check and see a flop here, hoping to hit a set and stack our opponents, there is little point in raising, our opponent from UTG+1 is likely never folding once they limp in with just 7.5BBs so our only option is to check and see a flop here…
One of the best flops for our hand
So we didn’t manage to spike a five on the flop but we hit a board with just one over card to our pair! Pretty hard to do that with just pocket fives and we also have a straight draw and back door flush draw, so against 6.5BBs we want to bet to protect our hand against our opponent when they have two overcards only.
If we check and they check there aren’t many good turn cards for our hand, so we decide to lead the flop with the intention of calling our opponent if they do make the all-in move, which they decide to and we have to run our equity…
Sadly for us we were up against an overpair, with our opponent choosing to limp with 88, if they are limping that they would also be limping hands like AT, AJ, AQ, AK, KQ… so I like our play of trying to protect our hand on this board and even when having to call off we still had 24% equity against one of the worst hands we are going to come up against.
So even though we lost the pot there are going to be times when you run into the top of your opponents range in spots, you can’t play differently moving forward, this was just one of those times when we got beaten in a hand.
Tough spot with Ace King
So if you know anything about blockers, you will know that when you have AK you reduce your opponent’s combinations of Aces and Kings in their hand by 50%… This was one of those times when none of that mattered and we got coolered!
The action starts with an early position min-raise, our opponent in the small blind then decides to 3-Bet to 30,000 or 6BBs leaving themselves 20BBs behind, against a 26BB stack we aren’t often looking to make a big lay down with Ace-King here, we are going to need to win all the chips to win the tournament and making nitty laydowns in spots like this is not how to amass big stacks.
With all that in mind, we pull the trigger and Cold 4-Bet all in…
Its a good old fashioned cooler for us, with AA in the small blind and AKo for us in the big blind, we flop a back door flush draw giving us a glimmer of hope, but it’s not to be with our opponent even making Aces full on the river.
We ended up making a little come back and got our money in good to get back to 20BBs in this tournament but ended up losing as a 4/1 favourite, however all is not lost, we played our ranges correctly and had a deep run and we will be back again to take on the soft tournament fields!
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