Friday
November 27, 2009
Question: When does a $957K win feel like a loss? Answer: When you were up $2.5M 90 minutes before the day ended. This was the essence of Isildur1’s last day. After having really had his way with Patrik Antonius, and also had winning sessions against durrrr and others, Isildur1 hit the wall against Ziigmund. The Finnish player needed only 600 hands to take $1.5M from his counterpart from across the Baltic Sea.
As you can see from Isildur1’s graph, he was hovering around the break even part for the first part of the day, but then things really started to take off just before he reached half-way mark. Then, along comes Ziigmund and Isildur1’s results takes an unprecedented nosedive. He did manage to pick up some pots towards the end, but it definitely wasn’t the end to the day that Isildur1 wanted.
Isildur1 flops top two pairs and gets Antonius to pay him off on the turn to win a $552K pot.
This was the largest pot of the day, and a really interesting one at that. I must admit that the first time I looked at it, I couldn’t understand why Antonius pushed all-in over Isildur1’s check raise. If his aces are beat, he will be dominated in a big way, and if he is ahead, most likely Isildur1 will be drawing to a lot of winners. However, it often pays to analyze the situation more closely before passing a definite judgment, so that is what I did.
First, you have to make some assumptions. Mine are probably not 100% accurate, but close enough to see if the play was completely unreasonable or not. Firstly, I assume that Isildur1’s range can be narrowed down to two different categories:
- A drawing hand. Against this, I assume that Antonius’ hand is a 3-2 favorite on average.
- A made hand, ie. Two pairs or a set
Furthermore, I assume that Isildur1 is twice as likely to be holding two pairs as opposed to a set. Against two pairs, Antonius is a 4-1 dog on average, and against a set, he is either a 19-1 dog or a 39-1 dog depending on whether Isildur1 holds an ace or not.
After doing some calculations, I found that when Antonius was beat, he had on average 15% equity. So now it is just a question of calculating how often Isildur1 would have to be on a draw in this spot for Antonius’ play to be profitable. What we do know, is that he has pot odds of 35% on the play ($195K / $552K), so it is quite easy to make the calculation. With these assumptions, I found that if there is a 45% chance or better that Isildur1 is on a draw here, Antonius play is profitable. And since we have seen the semi bluff raise on the turn in quite a lot lately, it can easily be argued that the chances exceed 45%.
Of course, when it turns out that his opponent did have two pairs, Antonius’ play looks strange, but the result in one hand is not very relevant for the evaluation of the play. Not even when you have to see your opponent take off with a $550K+ pot.
Isildur1 turns to pairs, but is drawing very thin when Ziigmund flopped a set. $460K pot.
This hand I think Ziigmund played really well. Having flopped top set, he decided to start building a pot. Since the pre flop action was only a raise and a call, a check raise would not be very effective at this point. Now he is hoping that Isildur1 is going to make a raise so that he can make a big 4-bet to protect his hand.
This time, there was no flop raise from Isildur1, but when the jack fell on the turn, Isildur1 could not restrain himself any longer. He made a massive raise of Ziigmund’s pot bet, and when Ziigmund came back over the top, Isildur1 felt he was committed and made the call. Had he known what Ziigmund held, he would have laid down his hand, but getting 2-1 on the call must have seemed too good to pass on.
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