We pick up the action here in Day 1 of the WSOPC main event, this was a $1,700 event on GGPoker that had 6,395 runners.

This is the first in a 3 part post, with all the biggest hands from the tournament Pro Paulius Plausinaitis’ review. We picked out some of the most interesting hands to look into in a little more detail…

AJs in position

This hand started off by 3-Betting an early position open, this serves well for a few reasons… we get the pot heads up, we charge worse hands to continue, we pick up the betting lead and we can easily fold to a 4-Bet from our opponent as they will likely have AJ crushed.

Paulius opts to check back this flop, it connects well with his opponent’s range of 66–99 as well as holdings like ATs and KTs, therefore I like checking back sometimes and sometimes betting small looking to fold out hands with equity such as KQ, 44, 55 etc.

On the Turn is where Paulius makes a pretty big decision… picking up a diamond the option is shall we semi-bluff with our draw, or look to check back and realise equity.

Paulius states that getting raised off the pot now would be a disaster and although we might fold out some better hands and protect our hand when we are winning, we want to get to showdown here.

The River was the missing diamond and Paulius went small for value, looking to get calls from one pair type hands and got looked up by pocket 4’s.

Play without ego

If there’s one thing I see at the poker tables is people making all kinds of fancy floats and moves, looking to out play people constantly.

Paulius avoids this completely in his pots, he calls the min-raise here with an offsuit Ace high pre-flop and when his hand has little value and almost no way of improvement other than hitting an Ace on future streets he simply folds to this Flop bet from his opponent.

That’s one thing to keep in mind for tournament poker, it’s about playing the fundamentals and putting in money with good hands.

3-Bet Bluffs

One move we will want in our arsenal at the Poker table is a 3-Bet bluff, without this we simply have too strong of a range when we 3-Bet.

Look to 3-Bet suited hands like this that will play well post-flop but find easy folds to 4-Bets. This way if we have to fold, our opponents will think that we don’t always have the goods when we get aggressive which will work out well for us when we do pick up some hands.

Trapping with Monster Hands

Don’t be scared to throw out some traps, so many people would either 3-Bet small here revealing a lot about hand strength or just move all-in where you might get some tight folds.

Look to slow play when you have awkward stack depths that can get a lot of value from post-flop action… in this pot, Paulius’ opponent flopped a draw and check-raised him all-in with a hand he might have folded pre-flop to a re-raise.

Playing Range

We’ve talked about this in plenty of strategy posts before this, but when we have the range advantage in a spot, we will want to bet our entire range a lot of the time.

In this pot, we see a horrible flop for our actual hand, but when it comes to our range against our opponents range we are just ahead so much of the time. Mainly because our opponent is playing off a stack of below 10BBs, so if they had any decent Ace high hands they would have just moved all-in pre-flop.

25% pot will get the job done a lot of the time here, there’s no need to bet large because our opponent pretty much only has one move if they are continuing here and that’s all-in, so we should look to preserve our stack with a small bet.

These were the key hands from Day 1 that we wanted to review, in the next post we look at some mid-game hands from Day 2’s play.