Classic Hellmuth Trap Gong Wrong

Hellmuth limped in early position, James Bord made it $4,000 to go, which you’d expect Phil would attack with a limp raise… but Hellmuth goes deep undercover with his holdings and just called.

The Flop was an ugly looking one for Phil, with an Ace a big part of Bord’s perceived range, he’s going to be in bad shape here a bunch of the time. But he came along for a look at one more card…

The Turn gave Bord a flush draw and all the more reason to try and blow Hellmuth off this pot. Hellmuth checked and Bord bombed it, overbetting the pot. Which doesn’t make a tonne of sense, because the six pairing is a little bit of a scare card now for any hands that are containing an Ace.

However Phil made the fold, Bord tabled the seven-deuce and we all get to see a little Hellmuth rant of how he will win all the money in the end, which to be honest, is probably true with the game selection he is currently enjoying with his Billionaire friends from the venture capital world.

Sickening River for Bord

Bord check-raised massive on this flush draw board with his set of sevens. A fine play, because anytime you have a strong hand with draws on board, your raises will be balanced by the times you have draws in your range. Meaning they won’t always be the nuts.

Bord bombed the Turn looking to play for stacks on the River, but Andress caught up on the end with a nasty two outer, making this a set over set ordeal.

Ace King against Jacks of Dwan

Tom decided he was going to go broke in the hand, playing on a pretty short stack, so rather than push it all in pre-flop, he decided he would take his feel game to the Flop.

When Steven’s small lead into this swollen pot didn’t look convincing he committed the rest of his stack with a fairly small raise.

It’s a pretty rough spot for Steven here, because a play as capable of Dwan could even be doing this with a hand like 67 and just taking the spot. He ended up making the laydown, but when you don’t do a good job of disgusting your weak hand, it can become a little bit of a meta-game whether you’re opponent is just trying to get you off your hand.

One way to play in this spot is to have a protected checking range, so rather than leading here, check a large part of your range, so that we can check-raise all-in with this advantageous stack to pot ratio rather than getting blown off our hand. We can also check-call a bet, or check fold, but for the other times we are checking here with JJ+ we can play for stacks.

The Best Fold of Poker Cash Game Television History?

Doug Polk actually played this session in the midst of his heads up battle with Negreanu, jumping in the mix due to the juicy line up and always being a fan of the show, he said he just couldn’t pass it up, so much for retired.

Doug’s play didn’t disappoint, he managed to bluff catch the aggressive Kenney perfectly in some earlier hands and then when he flopped the 2nd nuts in this cooler pot against Hellmuth he managed to get away from it after just putting in one raise.

This pot was pretty insane, players were betting on the side about whether Polk was going to fold or not and he ended up folding face up!

His reasoning was that Hellmuth just doesn’t do this with a set and when he started explaining Hellmuth responded with something along the lines of “I could have blockers” which kind of stank of strength if you were really trying to get a huge move through, you wouldn’t claim a bluff.

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