Sunday Hand Analysis from 2CardsCollege
Dmitry ‘Mozgolom26’ Zaytsev, a 2CardsCollege coach, analyzes three of his most interesting hands from the high-stakes Sunday tournaments. The hands were played in different tournaments that have one thing in common: in order to make optimal decisions, he had to estimate his opponents’ ranges correctly and take all of the necessary stats into account.
Hand #1
https://www.weaktight.com/h/569f6790d390433e188b4685
$109 freezout on PartyPoker. The villain is a weak regular who has an ABI of $37 with stats of 18/12/5.
We have a pair of kings in early-middle position, we open-raise happily, and we get called by the player on the button. Right off, notice that his calling range should be fairly wide due to the big gap between his VPIP and PFR.
The flop comes Q44 rainbow. A lot of players would probably make an auto c-bet here, but let’s take a look at the villain’s stats. His post-flop aggression is pretty high on all streets, but at the same time his fold to c-bet is 71%. If we bet, he would not float, but just fold most of his range (in fact, anything except a queen and a medium pocket pair).
Thus, the more correct play is to check, trying to induce a bluff from hands that have 0-3 outs against our overpair.
We check, see a slightly less than half-pot bet, and call.
The turn is blank trey and we check again. The villain fires a second barrel. Thinking “Come here, my precious,” we click the “Call” button again.
The river is an ace, which is no good for us because a decent chunk of the villain’s bluffs got there. Since he pictures our range as 99-JJ or a weak queen, the villain can value-bet all of his Ax hands on a river like that.
If we had gotten a third barrel, it would have been a saddening check-fold. However, we were lucky to have a weak regular, as our opponent did not manage to correctly assess how many Ax hands we could have after check-calling two streets or just got scared to bluff all the way and gave up.
The point of this hand is that by picking the correct play on the flop, we managed to get two bets from a hand that had a close to zero equity against our pocket kings.
Hand #2
https://www.weaktight.com/h/569f67a8d390433d4c8b460a
$209 Sunday Superknockout on Pacific Poker. My opponent in this hand was my colleague from 2CardsCollege, Pavel ‘SBGStyle‘.
A default open-raise with QTo from the cutoff and two calls, one from the button and one from the BB.
We hit an open-ender with a backdoor on the flop. The stacks are ultra-deep, so we make a default c-bet. The button folds and the BB reacts with a raise. We don’t really have any options but to call. We are slightly short of the direct pot odds, but have enough implied odds and there is also a distant opportunity to win a $100 bounty if we make the hand.
The turn did not strengthen us and brought a second flush draw, but the villain made an unexpected check. I think, after his check, we can eliminate all of the nut hands from his range with a decent probability. Of course, he might be trapping me and setting up an insidious check-shove, but it would not happen too often.
I would also add that Pavel would rarely play his flush draws like that, i.e. after his aggression on the flop he would continue betting any two diamonds or spades.
We have to choose between betting and checking here. Do we want to realize our hand’s equity for free or turn it into a bluff? Since the line of check-raising the flop and then checking the turn looks quite weak and we only have queen-high, I’m not generally opposed to taking the chips right now. Thus, I bet half-pot and the villain makes a somewhat surprising call.
The river is a blank. Before deciding what to do here, we should evaluate the villain’s range. Definitely there are no nut hands because he would either bet or check-shove the turn with them. Pavel probably has a hand like a medium top pair that he raised on the flop for value/protection.
How does our range look like for our opponent? We rarely have sets since we would re-raise the flop with these hands. We can have busted draws, but their frequency is somewhat decreased because we would sometimes check the turn with draws. Besides, our hand looks like TPTK or an overpair. The villain’s range is capped, which means we can value-push with TPTK+. We should push because it is a bounty tournament and we could get $100.
If we construct a range of our river bluff, I think QTo would be one of the primary candidates because this hand is at the bottom of the range and has zero showdown value.
I put the villain all-in. Pavel folds and I take down the pot.
Hand #3
https://www.weaktight.com/h/569f67d0d39043dc6f8b464c
A middle-late stage of the $90 Sunday Challenge on Pacific. According to Sharkscope, the villain does not have a significant playing sample, but is very loose. His stats are 38/28/10 over 118 hands.
We have AQo in early-middle position. Our tight opponent 15/11 open-raises and I don’t like 3-betting against him, but our hand is good for a call considering the stacks’ depth. We get squeezed by the aggressive button, the open-raiser folds, and, naturally, we call.
Our range does not hit the KJ4 flop really well. Against a tighter squeeze range, I would be inclined to fold on the flop, but against a looser one, it is okay to drag the hand through one street since not only a ten, but any hit, would be good for us.
We check-call. The turn is a deuce, which changes nothing. We check and the villain slows down, checking behind.
I think the villain’s range almost never contains slowplays and pot-controls. I would say his best hand after the turn check is KT. Besides, there are tons of second-third-fourth pairs, A-high hands, and complete nonsense that the villain gave up with.
The river is another blank. We have to decide if we want to go to showdown with AQ or turn the hand into a bluff. Let’s see how our range looks like on the river. Since the call-open in the early position is not capped, we have all of the nut combos (AA, KK, JJ, and AK) + KQ and KJs that we can bet the river for value. We might have AQ, ATs, and QTs for bluffs. If we calculate the combos, the value-to-bluff ratio is about 1.7 to 1.
We should not bet much; 35-40% would be enough. We are not trying to make the villain fold something strong. The only purpose of our bluff is to make him fold third-fourth pairs (sometimes second pairs) and prevent him from bluffing us since we would have to check-fold in this case.
I bet 42K into a 110K pot and the villain folds.
