We take you through some of the biggest action pots from Episode 3 of the latest High Stakes Poker Season 8! In case you haven’t watched the action yet, you can catch it on PokerGo… but if you don’t have a subscription and want a peek at the action, here is the place for you!
Boat Against Boat
It was the classic battle of whos got the bigger boat in this pot and when you’re up against a player like Bellande you’re not often going to be winning this pot.
Tom ended up paying off two $20k bets on both the Turn and River, with Bellande later saying “you have to give the math guys 6:1, because they can never fold”
A pretty true statement and it’s mainly because Bellande could make this same bet given Tom’s passive line if he had King Full himself in this spot, so Tom called hoping to see a bunch of chops as well as bad news a bunch of the times.
Tom Finds the Squeeze with 89s
Petrangelo opened UTG with his study pair of Kings here, in this action pot Kenny found the 3-Bet with his AKo, Salomon was in there splashing around with his suited A4, Steven came along with JJ and then with Salomon’s and Steven’s dead money in the pot Tom saw a spot to take the pot down pre-flop with his suited connector.
Petrangelo didn’t take too long to stick his how stack in the middle however with his monster and Kenney decided to go along with his AKo too, making it a half a mil party.
Chop it up
The pair decided to run it twice, with Bryn Kenney winning the second board once he spiked an Ace from Space. Unfortunately for Steven, if he had made it to this point in the hand he would have scooped the first and second board, hitting trip Jacks on both runouts!
The pair joked that they were just chopping up Tom’s $80k squeeze money, which is what the pair were doing when it was all said and done, with the addition of the $15,000 flat calls from the other pair.
Fool Me Once…
Shame on you, fool me twice! Shame on Me… that was the motto of this pot if there ever was one. With Ji coming out swinging in a previous pot and bluffing Steven off with her missed draw, she fired a River bluff in this pot for a chunky $80k.
It got looked up fairly quickly by the always deliberate Nick Petrangelo, who put her on a suited connector, saying “you have 56 suited down there or something”
This is a good lesson to be learnt here, Nick decided to make a pretty big call in this spot because his hand isn’t the best bluff catcher. He blocks hands like KT, JT, T9 of diamonds for instance… also given the line Ji took, this could be a better pair of Aces going for value.
The only thing is, if a player on the table has ever shown you that they are a little spicier on the bluffing front than your typical player, you have to widen their ranges to include many more bluffs.
Flush over Flush
Had this board run out a little cleaner, without the board pairing we might have seen a huge check-raise from Steven on the end here. With the fear of Bryn holding a set that filled up on the River the line happened to just be a check-call here.
I don’t hate this line, however, with Bryn betting around 40% I think we could get more value in this spot either by betting large ourselves because it would take a hand as strong as Jacks full to raise a large River bet here. Or a small-ish check-raise for value here.
We can’t lose value when playing higher stakes but it seems like these players were all playing scared money at these limits.
Dwan value owns himself
Yet another flush over flush pot to end the night… this time Bryn who check-called Toms bet on the flop Turned the second nut flush.
Bryn decided to lead out on the Turn and then once again, the board paired on the River and the better hand got a little spooked.
Bryn decided on a check-call line on the River and whilst it might miss value in spots like this where Tom has a worse flush, it will save money in full house, nut flush pots and win more money when Tom is bluffing. So whilst I like continuing to bet, we have to account for our opponents ranges in each spot.
