Wednesday
August 26, 2009
Over the last 3 days, Patrik Antonius and Tom Dwan (Durrrr) has played a further 2000 hands or so in their famed challenge, something that puts them near the halfway mark having played over 22000 out of their allotted 50000 hands. What has been significant on the last few sessions is that Antonius has dug himself out of a 700K + hole and re taken the lead by about 76 000 dollars.
As usual, there has been a number of big pots, and during the last few days, it has, as you can imagine, been Antonius who has taken down the most of these. Dwan won the two largest pots, but Antonius took down the next eight. Out of the 23 pots where each player put in a full buy in (40 000 dollars) or more 16 went to the Finnish player.
The hand that I will go through in some detail (14271727780) has a nice point to it, and is coincidentally the largest pot of the session. I think that Dwan played it poorly, but it also shows how evenly matched almost any hands, that are playable heads-up are. Dwans double suited gapper actually has a 45,3% EV against Antonius’ aces even though his potential heart flush is dead since Antonius would make a higher heart flush.
The preflop action is not too surprising. Dwan has a hand that can hit the flop in a number of ways, so his three bet before the flop is fully justified. Particularly since the stacks go 300 big blinds deep. I know many books on PLO state how dangerous small suited connectors are in this game, but heads up, it is a totally different situation. Antonius has two aces, and wants to put as much money in the pot as he can before the flop, so he makes the 4-bet automatically. That he is first to act on the flop is actually an advantage in this position, since he can get pot committed before Dwan has a chance to take any action, thus taking away any bluffing opportunities he might otherwise have.
On the flop, Antonius bets the pot, as I presume he would do 9 out of 10 times, and now Dwan had a decision to make. He flopped middle pair with no draws except a backdoor flush draw. He knows that if he decides to play the hand, it will cost him $82 380 to win $229 559, so he needs a pot odds of 35,9% to stay in the hand. If he could see Antonius hand, he would have seen that his EV was 40,3%, so it would make a lot of sense to get the chips in the middle. I am, however, fairly sure that Full tilt has not awarded Dwan a super user account, so he will have to make an educated guess on the reange of hands that Antonius might hold. I think that the hand in question is actually the best case scenario for Dwan. If Antonius held the king of clubs instead of the king of hearts, Dwans chance of winning would be reduced to only 25%. In addition, you have the hands where Antonius might hold a straight draw in addition or instead of the flush draw, and he might even have a set or two pairs where Dwan would be drawing close to dead. All in all, I am fairly sure that Dwan is not anywhere close to having a 36% EV against Antonius hand, and so he should have folded.
The second largest hand (14238394724) was also quite lucky for Dwan. He only had an EV of 36,1% on the flop, but unlike the previous hand, Antonious’ hand was an unpleasant surprise since he takes away quite a lot of his winners. It was, however, impossible to get away from it, and the money would always go in on the flop.
As I have mentioned previously, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Dwan, far from it. In hand (14270360623), he was cold decked with bottom set against top set, so he had almost $97K taken away from him just like that. Hand (14237681587) is very interesting, and shows the volatile nature of PLO. Antonius has top set, and still he only has 28,4% EV vs Dwan’s nut straight and straight flush draw. This time, Patrik got lucky and hit his full house on the river, taking down 160K in the process.
Another cold deck for Dwan was this hand (14237881800) where Dwan hit top pair and the second nut flush draw only to see Antonius having a better hand and a better draw. Antonius had a 86,5% EV which held up. In (14270008465) Antonius flops the nut straight which holds up, but was actually a significant underdog on the flop even so. Rounding off the top ten hands (by size) is 14270410555 14270351505 14270967466 which were quite evenly matched when the money went in, but Antonius won them all. Finally there is (14267762764) where it looks as though Antonius got very lucky on the turn, even though we are not shown Dwan’s hand.
As you can see, some very interesting developments in this challenge, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
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