Sunday
August 15, 2010
The start of the weekend did not present us with any of the most high flying action, though there were three players who managed to amass six figure wins. One of these players, NEKOTYAN, also was the proud winner of the two largest pots of the day, and I’ll have a closer look at these pots in this report.
NEKOTYAN makes an aggressive preflop shove and gets rewarded when he flops top pair. $49K pot.
NEKOTYAN turns a full house to take down Oppenheim’s Kings
Two hands where NEKOTYAN got his money in as about a 7-3 underdog and on both he got the necessary help to negate the odds. It would be very easy to just say that he was very lucky and to move on, but these hands are quite instructive, and since all the money went in preflop, they are not so difficult to analyze.
First off, can NEKOTYAN be criticized for getting himself into these situations, and if so, which of the hands should he have played differently? Looking at the hands, there is no doubt that his QQJJss in the second hand is optically more pleasing than the A6o he is holding in the first hand. But the most important difference between the hands is that he was able to make a big shove in the first hand, while he was basically calling all-in in the second one. His pot odds in the PLO hand is very easy to calculate: $25892 / $73 384 = 35,28%.
This means that NETKOTYAN hands needs 35,28% equity against Oppenheim’s range for his play to be correct. Against aces or kings, his QQJJ has about 30% chance of taking down the pot, and seeing that it is quite likely that Oppenheim holds exactly one of those hands, you will see that NEKOTYAN’s call on this hand is marginal at best. Obviously there is some value in showing your opponent that you can’t be pushed around, but in all this call is not as clear cut as it might seem when looking at the hand for the first time.
On the hold’em hand it might look as though NEKOTYAN is on wild tilt. After all, A6o is not a hand you should be showing with preflop, right? Well, truth is, you should probably not shove it every time, but to have it as part of your shove range here can be very effective. The problems you pose for your opponent are considerable, and it will be very difficult for him to figure out which hands he should call with in these spots. To calculate if this shove is +EV or not, we really need to know how often Oppenheim 3 bets in the BB when playing HU.
I don’t have access to that information, but let’s for arguments sake say that he does so every fourth hand. Which hands would then call with? Let’s say he calls with 99+, AJs+ and AQo+. The lowest part of this range is something that I think a lot of players would not be comfortable to call with, but the truth is that this range is way too tight. This calculation is a bit more complicated, but I can say that against the mentioned range, A6o has a 26,2% equity. But since this range consists of just between 5,4% if the total hands, it also means that Oppenheim would fold almost four out of five times to NEKOTYAN’s shove. In all, if this is the way Oppenheim plays, NEKOTYAN could expect to win almost $1500 dollars every time he made this play. In fact, if Oppenheim 3-bets 25% of the time, he needs to be calling twice as much as in the example above to make NEKOTYAN’s push a bad one. But that means calling with hands like A9s etc, and that is not exactly conventional wisdom.
Since I don’t really know all the facts about how Oppenheim plays in these situations, it is not so easy to say whether or not NEKPTYAN’s play was correct here. Nut it does go to show that there is a lot more to heads-up poker than you might see at first glance, and it is also a good example of why aggression is such an important part of poker.