An interesting match took place yesterday between Ziigmund and Cole South at the $500/$1000 PLO tables. It only lasted one hour and fifteen minutes and 337 hands but there was plenty of action. And even though the final result make this look like a rout, the fact is that Ziigmund was up more than $170K about 100 hands from the end. South’s $519K was not enough to vault him atop the leader board, however. That spot is occupied by deprimiert who is probably feeling a lot better today than after dropping close to $400K the day before.  He won $417K from Patrik Antonius and $138K from Phil Ivey in the $2K/$4K fixed limit game on his way to a $574K result for the day.

Both players flop a full house, but South’s is better. $411K pot.

No need to comment a lot on the play of this hand except from stating the obvious fact that it was a serious cooler for Ziigmund. It was one of the last hands played before the game broke up, and seeing how five of the six largest pots that Ziigmund lost came in the last 10 minutes of the match, it is quite understandable that he got frustrated and quit the game.

South’s bottom two pairs hold up twice against Ziigmund’s aces. $239K pot

A very daring play by Cole South here, and one that could easily brought him into a lot of trouble. His bottom two pairs are very vulnerable and will be an underdog against most hands that can stand his raise on the flop. In many cases he will be at a significant disadvantage, and he will be drawing dead at times. I think the standard play in this spot would be to call and see what the turn brings, but I suspect that South wanted to mix it up a bit in order to not be too predictable. Besides, there is always the chance that Ziigmund has to fold, in which case South will have picked up a nice pot without much trouble.

When Ziigmund decided to go with his Aces, South was about an 11-9 favorite to win the hand. The aces, though, are probably the very bottom of the range that Ziigmund can have to play back on this board, so you can see South’s predicament when deciding when to play his hand. If he has to play the hand for stacks, he will at best be involved in a coin flip while he could very easily be drawing dead. This time he was lucky that the hand fell into the former category and even luckier that he won both halves of the pot in the end.

Ziigmund’s aces hold up to win a $200K pot.

Finally I will just show this hand which was quite interesting to watch live. South was caught 3 betting and had to put most of his stack in preflop against Ziigmund’s aces, and when the flop came down he had to think a long time before committing his last $19K even though he was getting better than 9-1 on his call. Obviously the flop looks horrible for him, but if you look closer he has so many backdoor draws that virtually any turn card will give him a real draw at that point. Looking at the odds now, it turns out that South had 22% equity on this flop, which is a lot more than I expected him to have when I saw the showdown yesterday. Unfortunately for him, despite turning draws two times, it wasn’t enough to win any part of the pot.