Friday
January 15, 2010
The seven games is where most of the action are this days, and yesterday it was durrrr who stepped up as the big winner. He didn’t play more than 587 hands, but was still able to win an impressive to $400K. Richard Ashby and Cole South had a lot less luck with the latter losing $277K and the former $458K.
Durrrr hits three of a kind on the flop and gets Brian Hastings to pay him off with an overpair. $164K pot.
durrrr won the largest pot of the day, and it is a very interesting hand. When playing shorthanded, and in particular heads-up PLO, paired boards are very tricky to play. In NLHE you will rarely give your opponent credit for hitting three of a kind, but in PLO it is hard to discount that possibility. That creates a lot of bluffing opportunities on boards like this , something that everyone will have to take into account when making decisions on how to proceed with a hand.
Obviously, on this hand, durrrr was not bluffing, but if you look at the hand from Hastings perspective, he has a very difficult decision to make. There are not a lot of draws out there, and with kings or aces, durrrr would probably have four bet before the flop. That leaves three of a kind or a pure bluff as the main alternatives that durrrr can hold, and this time Hastings apparently thought that the chances of durrrr bluffing were large enough for him to stick with his hand. This time, Hastings read was not right, but it might prevent some future bluffs so it might have some value nonetheless.
Brian Townsend moves in on the turn with third pair which turns out to be good. $139K pot.
When you move in on the third pair and get called, odds are rarely in your favor. On this hand, however, things were a bit different. Townsend didn’t have much in the way of fold equity when he moved in, so he must have thought there was a very good chance that his hand was good here. Oppenheim, with his flush draw and over card felt that he was priced in at this point, so he made the call.
The interesting question here is whether or not the call was as clear cut as it might seem at first glance. With the cards flipped over, we can see that Oppenheim has a little better than 27% chance to win the hand, and he has to invest about 23% of the total pot to make the call. The problem is that he cannot be sure that all his outs are live, so this call is marginal at best. What Oppenheims call does show, I think, is that even at these stakes players use approximations when they decide whether or not to make calls like this. They are probably just better at making these approximations than the rest of us.
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