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By the way am I the only one who feels slightly sorry for the guy who got all his stack in with the stone cold nuts and as a 65% favorite only to end up getting his coat?
Still a little bit of run good helps, nice river.
I learned this one the hard way in a similar pot in a WSOP PLO event. I was in the BB with TTxx and there were 2 limpers at the early stages (level 1 or 2). Flop comes down something like T2A rainbow and then one of the limpers says 'pot'. I repot right back at him without hesitation and he again says 'pot'. I think for a minute and my reasoning at the time is, the table has been fairly active and raisy preflop, if he had AA then he would have made some kind of raise preflop. I figure he 'could' have AT but more likely 22 and has maybe limped a double pair hand like 22kk 22qq etc and made bottom set. I therefore repot right back at him and the pot is like 400+ BBs. He flips his hand and shows the AA for top set, I am crushed, there is no miracle turn/river and I am out.
I feel there are a lot of parallels with this hand and your hand. I spoke to several other friends who are pros about the hand afterwards and they were in concensus that unless my opponent was a maniac (which he wasn't) then his range is so heavily polarised to AA in this spot.
You mentioned nothing much happened at level 1. If you don't have your opponent tagged as a maniac/complete amateur here then I think we have to be very worried later in this hand. The prelop call is a no brainer in my opinion. There is easily the implied odds there to call (although I would be slightly concerned about UTG 4betting but with these stack depths you can easily assess the hand again if this happens so I would therefore be snap calling the 900).
On the flop in this hand when faced with the 1800 bet I would be smooth calling this all day long for a few reasons. Firstly addressing the 'draw heavy' board. You 'should' be able to discount a lot of draws here. The flop is rainbow so no need to worry about flushes yet. I would be discounting 8T (yeah ironic I know), I would also be generally discounting TQ due to the preflop action. QK would be a bit of a strange one too, I can see UTG opening QKs maybe QKo (possibly 77 too) but I wouldn't have the original 3 bettor on QK or 77 but I guess UTG could have this and could have called the 3bet due to the pot odds offered (especially QKs).
All that said I think we can discount a lot of big drawing hands on this flop apart from maybe QK with the gutterball and 2 overs and maybe backdoor flush draws. In that scenario do we really need to massively chase out QKs for instance? I think we can let them catch up a bit and maybe hit top pair and extract a few chips. Hands like AA KK QQ 'shouldn't' be getting 330 BBs in on this flop. By flat calling it lets them offload more chips with these hands. They may bet a hell of a lot of chips if you flat call and they may try to 'chase you out' or protect their hand or value 2/3 barrel you with AA KK QQ even AJ but they shouldn't be shovelling in 330 BBs on this flop as played with these hands. Also even if the board straightens up or backdoor flushes come in, sometimes this will involve a paired board and if you have underrepped your hand then you could look to extrace a lot of chips regardless.
As played I would feel the villains 330 BB shovelling range is heavily weighted to JJ. If they got it all in I would be waiting to see the JJ. I mean 77 would have been possible for UTG or very aggro for UTG+1 as played (possible but quite aggro). JJ on the other hand would make complete sense and I think most of the time in such an event you manage to create a 660+ BB pot on the flop you are going to see JJ. If opponent has 77 then you would imagine he is flatting the 5400, either to let you fire off more chips or as they are concerned you have 99, JJ or overcalled with 8Ts.
Great it worked out but I don't think as played the chips are going all in on the flop with 99 ahead unless we are playing someone we have tagged as either a bit weak or a super TAG player.
Very interesting hand and again it is a great idea to post these!
P.S. I know he showed up with 8T here and I discounted this but I don't think you are seeing 8T here as played often enough to worry about it. JJ though is another matter as mentioned.
His only bluffs here should be 3 combos of QTs that have a back door flush draw and can semi-bluff jam the turn if you call their flop raise and they turn a FD.
Against that range anyway we only have 36.3% equity - which means we should probably just fold now although it seems v close. However, I disagree also that if we decide not to fold that we can only shove. Yes, it's a lot of our stack in the middle after we call. But we still have 32k left? Which at level 2 is still plenty. We have position and can see what he does again OTT before making our decision. Suppose he does have JJ too and the turn is a T, 8 or perhaps a K. Whilst he might still think he has the best hand, he will be wary of betting again since he's likely then only being called by better hands. So, we have a decent chance of saving ourselves chips and not losing our entire stack. Sure, we could call flop and end up being bluffed off the best hand on say a T turn - but if we think of his range, is that really likely to happen? Even if we call now and call a blank turn and he does have JJ - at least we've given ourselves some chance to get away from it or for villain to put his stack in on a bluff.
I've wrote all this now more for myself - I don't really want to hijack the thread with mine and other people's strategy for each hand you post, unless that's something you don't mind. So I'll post this now I guess and hope you (and othes) find the reply useful!
Preflop is fine / standard. Only negative to cold calling the 3bet is our range is pretty transparent. I expect u to have 88-JJ AQs / AK nearly always in this spot.
You made the comment "UTG+1 probably has a very strong hand to 3bet an UTG raise, at this stage of the tournament. So I put him on a range like, AQ,AK, TT,JJ,QQ,KK,AA".
I think this is too standard/dated a thought process. I disagree with the range you have asigned him. I think its completely standard for him to flat TT/JJ/QQ/AQ/AK. Some people wont even have much of a 3bet range at this stage of the torny.
But yeh i think suited connectors and decent stuff like A2s - A5s is definately in his range. See the 3bet as more of an iso, ESPECIALLY if utg is a weaker player.
Flop raise is good and hard to not stack off as played. The degree of "happy" we are depends on the villain. If your stacking off 300+ bb with the 3rd nuts in level 2 of a 1k against someone decent, were not loving life... However if ur staking off 300bb against ali malu..... well, u get the idea ;-)
On 2nd thughts, the flop raise is also player dependent. Vs ali malu, we wnt to be raising the flop to get it in, but vs someone decent i think i like calling the flop. Keeps our range wide and we dont get him to just fold AA face up (which someone capable will imo), ur range is SO STRONG on this board
What a great thread - well done Graham, thank you.
Note especially the comment by Marc - the Ali Mallu factor. Ali could have, literally, ANYTHING here.
Brilliant idea for game development which I will take on board for future live games.
I think the process of doing this will probably help you rationale any plays you make good or bad and move on to the subsequent hands with a more clear mind.
Looking forward to seeing your subsequent hands and thoughts behind your play, again thanks for sharing!
Hopefully everyone discussing/reading the analysis can take something from it.
I think pre-flop is very bad - particularly with your read. K3o is just really a bad hand that you do not want to be playing with OOP. There are lots of hands we can be raising here if we want to get more involved - all the suited connectors for instance. Even raising some garbage suited hand (like T3s for instance) would probably* be better than opening with K3o. If BTN was tight, then maybe opening it becomes fine - but with his VPIP, it's definitely not.
Anyway, I suspect you probably already know the open was bad
Turn - I think this is an OK move to make with your reads and your image. I would probably be intending to fire out a large bet on certain rivers though since I think just betting turn alone is probably not going to be enough +ev.
What was your plan on different rivers if he'd called the turn?
I can see what your thinking was and in the 'playing the opponent not the cards' sense, if you went with an informed plan that you could fire 2 bullets post flop and get him off then all good. I just would rather be doing it with hands that might nail the flop and provide a solid back up as obviously it will be hard to figure out how you stand in the hand on the vast majority of flops, even kxx.
As you hinted at, you were in the best position to judge the player etc considering you had been playing with him for a while.
In a vacuum where this is the only hand we have opened this size, none of your opponents will know what this means. They might assume you have a strong but vulnerable hand like JJ/TT, which suits us fine. Also, continuing on to future situations, there is no reason we can't be balanced with 2 opening raise sizes either here if you just split your ranges well. Just a very rough example: 3x: KK, TT, JJ, A8o-AKo, A2-A7s, KQs, KJo, 22-77, suited one gappers, garbage (like your K3o) And then 2.25x (or w/e your standard sizing) everything else (AA, QQ, 88,99, As8s-AsKs, KQo, KsJs, suited connectors.
You're not going to get all them hands in game obviously, so no-one is going to get much of a read on what your different open-sizes mean. But if they think your range is X based on what you've shown down, throw in a curveball