In this post, we are going to look at a hand from the Live at the Bike Poker stream where mysterious high stakes player WhoIsWho played a few out of the ordinary pots… We review one against the Los Angeles GOAT Garrett Adelstein where WhoIsWho makes a few lesser-seen moves.
We start the action with blinds at $25/$50 with a $100 straddle and a running $100 ante in play, meaning there is $275 in the pot before any action.
WhoIsWho picks up Q♦ 4♠ in the Cut-Off (CO) and raises to $350
Adelstein directly to WhoIsWho’s left then decides to isolate him with a 3-bet to $1,300 with J♥ 4♥
Action is folded back around to WhoIsWho who chooses to make the call.
Let’s look at these pre-flop plays for a moment…
If we consider WhoIsWho’s opening range here to include Q4o this means he is opening very wide from the Cut Off, let’s look at all the hands he will be opening…
This is what 63% of hands looks like, this is just going to be far too wide from the Cut-Off position… we can play a huge range of hands from the button and small blind, but out of position against probably the most aggressive player on the table on the button, we will want to be opening on the tighter side to counteract this.
Let’s look at a normal opening range when first in the pot from the Cut-Off…
This is a commonly used 27% raise frequency used by some of the best poker professionals in the world and it gets nowhere near opening Q4o… Even on the button when opening as wide as 51% of our hands the widest off-suit queen-high hand we will want to be using is Q8o… These off-suit combinations just aren’t going to play well post-flop so it’s better to have lower suited connectors in your opening range, rather than hands like Q4o.
Let’s look at Aldestein’s play
He chooses to 3-Bet and isolate with the monster J♥ 4♥ which is again way too wide, we are going to have so many better hands to do this with, even hands like J8s would be fine, however, J4s is just too low in our range of hands… having this in his range means he is 3-Betting around 50% of his range against this CO open.
Let’s look at a solid merged 3-Betting range from this position…
Anyway, that’s all the messy pre-flop range stuff out of the way, sometimes in these action games with straddles ranges get a lot wider and with the TV cameras on the sidelines, WhoIsWho decides to make the call of the 3-Bet to take a flop with his Q4o…
Flop Action
The flop is a great one for Garrett, giving him a pair and a flush draw on the board of…
9♥ T♥ 4♦
Let’s see how the action goes down…
WhoIsWho decides to come right out and Donk Bet with this holding, hitting bottom pair on this board…
Which against Garett’s actual hand ends up being a decent move, but in the long term inflating the pot with bottom pair out of position is probably going to cost you money, especially when you are playing the rest of the hand out of position against the most aggressive player in the game.
I would prefer to see a check here with a check-call line in mind to play some turn cards.
However this High Stakes Pro leads out for $1,300 I guess the only reason he would do this is that he feels his opening range hits this board much better than Garett’s 3-Betting range… but with both players with huge ranges on this flop it’s hard to even know who has an advantage on this board anymore.
I would like to see a raise with the hopes of playing for stacks on this flop from Garett’s hand, the reason is we are going to want to realise our equity on this board but we might face a difficult decision on a bad turn for our hand, I like raising to around $5,000 here to play for stacks and bet out some better hands that have decent equity against us but can’t stand a raise, however, that’s not the line chosen this time…
Garett makes the call and it’s time to play a turn card
7♦ Hit’s the turn giving Garett now a straight draw to go with his pair and flush draw…
This is where we would expect to see a check from WhoIsWho, but he doesn’t slow down at all, betting again for $5,000
This is where things get tricky with Garett not raising on the flop, he now just has a bluff catcher but still has good equity with 34% in this pot even though he is sharing his pair with his opponent and is currently out kicked.
At this point though his opponent is polarized to air or a monster, so there is little point in Garett raising now, he has a good draw to hit a flush, straight or two pair that will win him the pot so against this large bet he decides to make the flat call and as played I like this line, once flatting the flop, with this stack to pot ratio there is almost no point in raising the turn, we will always be getting action from hands that have us in bad shape and needing to hit our hand on the river and we can do this without risking the extra $10,000 or so in WhoIsWho’s stack by just flat calling and seeing the river.
The other decent side of Garett flat calling here is when he is against just a triple barrel of hands like two hearts or QJ etc he can bluff catch some rivers and get value he might have lost by raising this turn card.
Time to see what the River card brings…
9♦ Hits the end
WhoIsWho fires the last shell here, presumably as a bluff as there is near zero chance he could think his bottom pair with a queen kicker is good in this pot…
I hate this line on the river, we could easily check and try and get to showdown with our bottom pair and we just have so many hands that are better to bluff with like all our QJ, KQ, AQ hands any two heart hands…
We don’t need to be bluffing when we have a pair on this board, that will mean we are over-bluffing, we also lose value for the times that if we check and our opponent has missed and they want to bluff with their missed draws. Denying us winning bets with hero calls.
However, this value bluff ends up getting through as Garett reads his soul and makes the laydown…
In Garett’s eyes, it’s hard to even think of a hand other than KQ or QJ or two random hearts that get to the river to bluff with… So I like the fold on the end from G-Man.
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