Tuesday
September 07, 2010
As my colleague observed in his last report, Brian Hastings has had a really nice start to the month of September. On Sunday, however, he hit a roadblock when Ziigmund took $176K from him in the $300/$600 PLO game.
Ziigmund turns two pairs which fades Hastings flush draw twice. $179K pot.
The most interesting part of this hand is the preflop play. Ziigmund’s hand is very strong and you might expect him to 4bet in this spot. The problem with this, though, is that this puts so much money into the pot that it takes most of his positional advantage away. It is the flat call that made it possible for Ziigmund to float on this flop and put Hastings in a tough spot on the turn. Had the stacks been deeper, the 4bet might have been in order, but the main point is that you need to think about how you can give yourself enough wiggle room to make some plays on the later streets.
Jungleman12 flops two pairs, and gets paid off when Antonius bluffs the river. $102K pot.
When to bluff and when not to bluff is a very tricky subject in poker. The main factors might be to sell a credible story to your opponent, and on this hand I feel that Antonius failed to do so. It is difficult to put him on many hands where the running sevens would have helped him and in addition it seems quite likely that jungleman12 has a good hand in this spot. Antonius’ bluff needs to be successful about 44% for it to be correct, and to me it doesn’t seem very realistic to think that he can get jungleman12 to fold that often. Jungleman12 came out of this match a $170K winner in 120 hands, so this hand made a nice contribution to that result.
On a side note. I was interviewed by Mike and Adam on http://pokercast.twoplustwo.com/ this morning. The topic was highstakesdb, the players and some other stuff, so make sure you go there and download the weekly podcast. The show always has a lot of interesting guests, so if you browse through the archives you will find a bunch of nuggets.