In this post we are going to look at some hands from a recent tournament played on Pokerstars.es, for those of you who may not be familiar with this software, it is the Europe Pokerstars software that used to solely be for Spanish, French and Portuguese players but now many more countries can play on it also.
These hands are taken from the recent SECOOP series where there were some big guarantees, this particular game was a €50 4 Max Turbo with just over €7,800.00 going to the eventual champion. We got off to a good start and had a big stack from the moment we started playing, we pick up the action with 20 players left…
If you want to take a look at the video that we recorded live of the tournament action, take a look here…
Bluff Gone Wrong
We started this hand with around 40BBs and we had given the Big Blind many walks, as we didn’t want to play too many pots out of position, with this in mind we choose one of our least playable hands to go for a steal and win this pot pre-flop hopefully…
To do this, we kick things off with a 3x raise, we don’t want to raise too small as we will be letting our opponent continue with nearly all their hands in position so we need to put some of these hands in a tougher spot pre-flop by choosing a larger sizing.
We get a decent flop to continue to be aggressive on, we look to make a challenging sizing against our opponent’s range which isn’t going to contain many large pairs as they would have most likely raised or moved all-in with these hands pre-flop against our big sizing.
However, the worst news for us… the Villian calls our flop bluff, the turn comes a meaningless 6, only improving hands like A6 and 66, so it makes little sense for us to try and follow through on this card, if our opponent is happy to call a large bet on the flop this card didn’t change much and whilst we may get them off hands like King or Ace high, in-game I felt like they where more weighted towards hands like 33-77.
The turn card goes check, check and then it’s off to the River which comes an Ace… This is our time to go for a bluff that will hopefully get folds from any hand with a small two pair like 33-55 and any hand containing a 2.
I don’t think we need to go for a huge sizing, we bet just below half pot as we are looking to fold out the bottom of our opponent’s range here.
Unfortunately for us, a second barrel may well have done the trick as our opponent floated the flop with Ace high and hit an Ace on the river. Even though their call is essentially a bluff catcher with them having an Ace with no kicker we are never trying to get them to fold an Ace, however our line makes it fairly believable that we can have a good Ace in our hand, so sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.
Come Back Hand
We ended up losing nearly all of our chips by getting our Pocket Kings beaten by our opponent’s Ace rag when they rivered the Ace, so we are then down to around 10BBs for some time. A nasty spot in tournament Poker where you are just one move away from busting.
We are dealt 36s in the small blind, whilst I would probably fold the offsuit combinations of this hand the suited version has a little more playability and with our easy to play stack size we can look to get all our chips in on good flops for our hand… with that in mind we complete from the small blind and look to hit a flop.
Hit the flop is exactly what we do, we smash this board with bottom two pair…
On this board we just want to get as much money in as possible, it’s a limped pot so we don’t want to run the risk of checking and seeing a bad card for our hand on the turn, to which there are many, any heart and low card like 2,4,5,7 is bad for us so too is any Queen rolling off as this would counterfeit our two pair.
So whilst we won’t often be very balanced in this bet, we decide to lead out and protect our equity in this hand.
Our limping friend on the button decides that pocket eights are good enough to move us all in on the flop and we snap call… We get a scare on the turn card for a second, but luckily for us we suck out on the river making a full house with our 10% equity of hitting another 3 or 6. PHEW!
Short Stack Pressure
We will want to know our correct shoving ranges, this player in the Big Blind had been playing especially tight, this means we will definitely want to be shoving correctly versus this player as they will very rarely wake up with a big enough hand to call us and in the time they are just folding we are scooping up $100,000 from the pot every time at this blind level.
We shove the 98o in this pot, which is a clear all in from the Small Blind against just one random hand in the Big Blind, we would shove as wide as 76o and even hands like 53s at this stack depth.
It doesn’t go too well for us though, our opponent wakes up with the absolute top of their range and we don’t get there with our 35% equity this time at least.
If at first, you don’t succeed…
Try, try, try again, so this time we once again have to move all-in with our 11BBs, we have a suited Queen high and it’s going to be the best hand enough to steal the blinds and antes and when we are occasionally called we will have good equity against our opponents range and surely they can’t find a monster 2/2 times?
How wrong we are… of course, our opponent is sat there with pocket tens, but this time we manage to hit our equity in the hand making a full house with Queens full of fives by the River! Lovely stuff, knowing our ranges paid off this time!
This lovely double up just at the right time see’s us progress on to the final table, we will pick up the action there in our next post on this tournament run.
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