In this, the second part of a look into how we played the $33 Big Fish Tournament on 888 Poker we will delve into a few more key hands that we feel are a big leak in many players games.
Take Stabs at pots in position
Especially with hands that have some potential but you wouldn’t mind getting raised off, this hand is perfect for firing off with as we have a backdoor flush draw to go with our gutshot straight draw, however, at the moment we only have six high, so betting and getting raised off our hand wouldn’t be a huge loss.
Play 3-Bet Pots in Position
It’s good to isolate players in tournament poker and take your hand to the streets in position with a strong holding… the perfect way to do this is to 3-Bet players when you’re in position on them.
In this pot a player min-raised from the Hi-Jack, if we flat call this we risk playing a 5-way pot where we will have much less equity against all these hands, so we isolate and get the pot heads up…
Once again we C-Bet the flop here, as we have a range advantage and we can win the pot right here. We could also hit a non-spade Ten to make the nuts with a Broadway Straight, or an Ace hitting is good for our hand, we can also just have the best hand a lot of the time beating hands like worse Ace highs that might call one small bet. So our bet is designed to protect our hand, bluff out some smaller pairs that will find it hard to call more than one barrel on this wet board and to build a pot if we hit our hand…
As it happens the Turn card is good for us, we hit the Ace, however, it is the Ace of Spades, which completes the flush draw on the flop, so this is a good spot to pot control, with nearly 3,000 chips in the middle and our opponent having around 6,000 they have a good SPR (Stack to Pot Ratio) to be able to check-raise all in with some value hands and some semi-bluffs if we bet this turn card.
Some benefits to playing slowly and checking back this Turn Card are:
We control the size of the pot.
We can get value from a bluff on the river that could never have called a turn bet.
We add strong hands to our check back turn range, meaning we can have some weak hands that we could check back with also and look to bluff rivers with.
Once our opponent checks to us on the turn and the River it’s safe for us to go for some value with our two pair…
We want to bet small in spots like this, because we are targetting a weak hand to call us here, hopefully some hands with a King or Jack in might call us here, so when betting against an opponent who’s hand is pretty face up as a weak holding, we want to bet pretty small for value exploitatively, to give them a chance at making a mistake and calling getting a good price.
Always adjust to table dynamics
Now in part one of this tournament hand post we mentioned making the pot huge with our best hands and not getting too tricky, however, there are times when we are going to want to break this rule, in this dynamic a player behind us had been giving crazy action and moving all-in with pretty much any two cards… We pick up the Aces in early position but we want to give them a chance to get in the pot so we just smooth call the UTG+1 player’s open raise, hoping for more action…
Luckily enough for us, the maniac does decide to 3-Bet again, just making it a minimum raise to which the UTG+1 player then decides to 4-Bet… Amazing news for us!
This is where we can now go back to plan A, the initial raiser has shown that they want to play for a lot of chips so we are going to allow them to continue in this fashion with a small 5-Bet, now this is not recommended against good players where you will want to be balanced, but this player had previously played a crazy pot with just K6o so once again we want them to get the money in pre-flop before they miss a flop or just don’t want to put in action post-flop.
We end up winning a huge pot here with AA vs AQo and Q5o from the short stack that decided to 3-Bet get it in with that huge holding.
This is a huge over-play from the AQo here, although these strange dynamics come up in tournaments where one wild player is just moving all-in with anything and ranges get a little wider 6-Betting all in with AQo is never going to be winning money, you will pretty much only be up against Aces and sometimes Kings.
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