In this post, we will review some hands from the Sunday Million Tournament on PokerStars…
Flopping A Full House!
The first hand from the video is a fairly easy one for us to play! We open raise UTG with 77 a standard open whilst deep stacked and get min 3-Bet from our opponent to our left, the Small Blind ends up cold calling this 3-Bet too and we flat call…
Gin!
We flop the second nuts with 7’s full of 3’s… a huge hand we most likely have our opponents drawing nearly dead so we begin with a check to the preflop aggressor who made the minimum 3-Bet, however they decide to check back and we go to a turn…
On the turn we need to start building the pot for value, so we bet around one third of the pot allowing our opponents to make some mistakes by calling with weak hands like just overcards or draws like gutshots and flush draws… the problem with having a huge hand is that you block possible value hands however at the same time we need to try and build the pot to win a big pot for when our opponents are going to have something too!
Our plan all comes together with the wettest card in the world hitting the river, the Ace of clubs, completing hands like Ace High and flush draws… we bet enough to put our opponent all in hoping they have enough to call and luckily for us they picked up the flush draw on the turn and hit the river, so by this point it was a bit of cooler board for them.
However, if we can learn anything from this it’s that drawing to flushes on paired boards can be a dangerous task as hitting a flush when you were drawing dead anyway can be very costly.
Getting Aggressive in Position
This next hand is an example of using some discipline, the opposite to the previous hand where we had the near nuts! This is a close decision… We 3-Bet our Button with KJs against an aggressive opener who has previously played a pot with J6s from early position.
Why do we 3-Bet?
Whilst our hand plays well post from, we want to isolate weaker players and have more equity in a heads up pot in position rather than flat call and see a flop potentially 4 ways where we will have less equity.
Unfortunately, we get Cold 4-Bet jammed on for around 20,000 chips…
So we need to consider what our opponent’s range is to make this move in-game and look to make our decision.
Whilst we had a good plan for our hand against the other two opponents in the pot we did not want to see this move from the Small Blind, this stinks of strength! Our opponent is not going to do this with a hand we are beating, their range will look a lot like:
99+ AJs+ AQo+ which means we will be dominated by holdings like JJ, QQ, KK, AA, AKs, AJs possibly and at best flipping with hands like AQs, 99 and TT… for this reason we feel our opponents range is too strong for us to compete with KJs here and we make the tight fold.
Playing Pairs in Early Position
In this hand we have a good spot, a decent pair of nines against our aggressive opponent, but we are in early position, we are going to want to continue with caution even with the strongest of holdings in early position as anyone who plays behind us will be in position for the rest of the hand and thus able to realise their equity in the hand with greater ease.
With those thoughts in mind and a lot to do with stack depth of our opponents, we choose to just flat call a raise from our UTG opponent with 99.
Our reasons are that if we 3-Bet then we gain isolation of that weak opponent, however, there are stacks that have a perfect Cold 4-Bet jam against our raise, which would put us in a tough spot with 99.
Another thought is that by flat calling, we set up a squeeze spot for our opponents with less chips to move in with lesser hands that we have dominated like 22–88 and A2s-A9s for example.
We get the squeeze
We end up getting one of the best results for a hand of our strength and a stack that we are happy to set up to move all in makes the move, we are likely to have a good holding against a 13BB jam and are more than happy to put the rest of the chips in and see the holding…
The same hand!
It’s not too often that your opponent has exactly the same hand as you, but this was one of those rare moments and we both chop up the blinds, antes and the initial raise from our UTG opponent.
What we can learn from this hand is to think about what other opponents might want to do before we just blindly make a re-raise, we don’t want to be inducing action from a 20,000 chip stack to make a 4-Bet all in and then be in a tough spot with our nines.
Try and calculate what could possibly happen before you make a move and what are the benefits of making a different move, as in this hand we could benefit from re-raising our aggressive opponent, however we aren’t just playing against him, we are against 7 other players who have position on us and that also see the dynamic of the initial raiser playing too many hands. So in spots like this, it’s a good idea to play a little more conservative when in early position and get more aggressive in late position where you can really apply more pressure.
We continue these hand breakdowns in Part 2, coming soon…
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