In this post, we are going to look inside the mind of the very talented Poker player Jordan Drummond, who you may know as high stakes multi-table tournament shark “BIGBLUFFZINC”.
This amazing player doesn’t only play, but he teaches others with coaching sessions, so we have a few snippets of insight from the hand breakdowns to look into.
Defending with J6s in the Big Blind
In this first pot, Hero defends the Big Blind with J6s and gets a decent flop for his hand in the shape of a flush draw, making any diamond is the near nuts, so the action starts with a simple check call of a small bet, getting good odds to do so.
The tough decision in this hand comes on the turn and I think this is a spot where we can learn from this one a lot… it’s certainly a spot I have overlooked previously.
So we miss the draw and our opponent is now sizing up their bet, so what should we do?
We can’t raise this card, they just have too many strong hands that will call us, many people including myself opt to just muck this hand at this point, the object of calling the flop was to hit the turn or see a check on the turn from our opponent, but once this doesn’t happen it feels wrong to call again just to hit a diamond…
But let’s look at the math. Jordan states that we have 9 outs here as the Hero if we are facing a value bet, or 15 outs if we are against a bluff. This means that we will have around 18-32% equity depending on our opponent’s hand.
Calling this bet of 645 chips here into a pot of what will be 3,157 means we would need exactly 20% equity to be doing this profitably.
So even if we are against a value hand, which we won’t be all the time in this kind of spot we are getting the right price to draw still! Now we haven’t even factored in implied odds yet, the Villian still has another 2,327 chips left behind that we could possibly win if we make the best hand.
This is the defining factor in why calling is probably our best option here, in the long run, we will want to make the best decision according to the math of the situation and in this pot, the closest thing to a perfect play is to call here.
Folding is close too, but big stacks in tournaments aren’t made without reaching out in spots like this.
Bottom of our Range in a Limped Pot
This is a spot we need to think differently about too, we can just too easily think “We have a bad hand, we want to just check and keep the pot small”
However, there is another way of thinking, we can use this hand as a steal to raise the limper to balance out the times we will be raise calling with our strong hands like KJo, QJs, 77+ etc.
This will help us get value from a hand that is going to barely ever win us the pot post-flop. So pretty much our only chance of winning the pot is right here before the flop and because we have such a poor hand raise folding is fine too, we wouldn’t want to raise fold with a hand like 96s for example, we may just want to check this back and try and realise our equity.
It’s not to say that we will always want to make this move, we can sometimes check back against super aggressive opponents that we feel will be limp jamming here often, however it’s going to be our best option in the long run to win this pot.
Calling raises in the Big Blind in Bounty Games
So in this example, Hero calls in the big blind with a fairly poor hand, but there is the added incentive of trying to collect the Villians bounty on a good board for this hand. With blinds at 50/100 Villian makes it 320 chips to continue…
Now a good point to know here is that in this spot Hero will literally never have an Ace because all these hands would have pushed pre-flop with the bounty in place. So we have to rule out any hands containing an Ace in our holdings, however, we can have a huge 96 combinations of any holding that contains a 3.
This is huge, especially in a spot where we can almost have any two cards because of the bounty in place. So if we take away some of the least playable combinations of these that will still leave Hero with around 80+ combinations of 3x.
In terms of probability, this is a huge number, for example when there is a flush draw on board there will be 55 combinations of flush draws in our hands.
So whilst checking back here is fine some of the time because we literally have nothing we can go for a bet here as a steal too, it’s going to be pretty hard for our opponent to float this board with Queen or King high and if we want to make a move at a pot like this it’s always better to do it early whilst it makes sense because we would bet our trips here nearly all the time.
Sum Up
Whilst reviewing these hands it’s pretty clear that even good solid regs in MTT Poker are a little on the passive side whilst playing from the Big Blind, so look to get aggressive and make some moves in the blind vs blind battles and know your maths when you flop draws!
Tournament poker is all about getting huge stacks, making deep runs and taking down the top spot, it’s not about treading water and staying alive, so look to mix up your game and get creative in these borderline spots to give yourself an edge.
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