Terrence Chan discusses his long career, from the beginning of the poker book and working at PokerStars to the current state of regulated online poker at the US and his stint with Ultimate Poker. All that plus his mixed martial arts career, his Life After Poker podcast, and his search for a new passion. Oh and Stud strategy!
Strategy Segment
Dead cards are Q, Q, 7, and a few I wasn’t able to write down. Other upcards are K and 5, who play with me.
Ante is $1 and we’re playing 8-handed. $3 bring-in. The 5 brings it in. I raise third to act with (Q9)A.
I get called in two places, by the K and the 5, which is unusual for the game.
Fourth street:
(Q9)A9
(xx)K8
(xx)5x
I bet, both call.
Fifth street:
(Q9)A9K
(xx)K88
(xx)5xx
K88 bets, 5xx calls, I call
Sixth street:
(Q9)A9Kx
(xx)K88x
(xx)5xx5
Now the eights check and the fives bet. Hero folds.
Thanks for the kind words on the episode. I’m thoroughly flattered.
I’m a much better Stud Hi player than I am a hold’em player. Of course, that doesn’t inherently make me any better than Nate.
With that qualifier, as a default, I’m almost always throwing this away on 3rd from early position at $10/$20. For one, the structure. At $10/$20/$1/$3, the ante is the lowest and the steal odds (11-to-10 at a full table) are the shortest of any normal Stud structure, implying a tight and snug 3rd street strategy. Theoretically, this should result in a tighter defending strategy, such that an equilibrium for stealing becomes available, but my experience is that, at $10/$20, if people are playing tight enough to make this a good steal, you are at the wrong table. Way more people in the player pool are making the loose errors than the tight ones w/r/t the structure, so your profits, I think, generally come from the value side here. The errors I’m looking to take advantage of are the horrible loose defends [small, pair, small kicker; low flush/straight] when we actually hold split Aces, not the tight folds when we are repping it.Stealing has to be part of the strategy, but without a live hand in early position, I’ll usually wait. But maybe conditions were correct in this situation.
I don’t know what to make of the K or the 5. I guess the K just doesn’t believe you, but doesn’t want to 3-bet. Maybe he’s just passive. Maybe he doesn’t think anyone else is coming along anyway, so there’s no reason (in his mind) to put in a raise to get it heads-up. The vast majority of his range is split Kings, but who knows. Loose and weak players show up with all sorts of -EV stuff here—[2d8d]Kd, [9sTc]Kd, [4s4h]Kd.
And the 5? Pure guess work at this point. One of the hardest things (IMO) about $10/$20 Stud games—at least when Stud was really popular—was that they had every kind of skill level you could imagine playing them. At $5/$10 it was basically all recreational weak players. And at $15/$30 or higher, it was much more disciplined. But $10/$20 had everything from Joe Wild Card Home Game all the way up to true grinders who were part of the furniture of those rooms. Some games every single hand was multi-way. Others you’d go full orbits without a 3-way 4th street. And so without history, it was often hard to tell if someone would overcall an Ace and King on 3rd with all the crappy split 5’s. Some guys would never do that. Others are like 100%.
I kinda think 4th is a give-up, but a bet is tempting. I think there’s zero expectation they both fold, though. You’re just committing yourself to betting 5th if you still have the lead. Which may be a viable strategy if the conditions are right, but is starting to sound spewy. You can’t improve in a hidden way on 5th, and they’ll fold (often correctly) when you hit an A or 9. So the idea behind a bet is to bulldoze them on 5th into an incorrect fold. It could work. Or not. I can’t think of a hand that the K8 wants to play multi-way on 4th. He almost certainly should be raising any hand he continues with, just to knock out the 5. I don’t think $10/$20 players think enough about getting people out of the hand.
I think I’m done putting money in on 5th. Even if you are somehow best at the moment, you have a horribly dead set of cards in your hand. More likely, you are currently in 3rd place, drawing to a make a vulnerable hand. If you were between the K and the 5, I could imagine raising to knock out the 5 and get a free card on 6th, but that’s not possible here. The K looks all the world like Kings-up or better, if this game is as tight as you described (“unusual to go multi-way for a raise”). Who the heck knows what the 5 is doing. It can’t possible be correct for him to *call* on 5th, given his actual cards or some reasonable other holding like two small pair, can it? He’s either got to raise or fold, IMO.
It’s hard to correctly fold 6th in Stud Hi—I like the old Stud adage “tight early, loose late”—but it could be correct here. I’ll probably take one off, hit the case queen, and then dump another $20 because I’m a notorious river pay-station, but I think folding is probably the +EV play vs. their range here. We are drawing awful thin, occasionally dead, and could improve and be beat in two spots.
And now I need to book a trip to Foxwoods.
Matt: Thanks for the response! You deserve all the praise you get.
(1) Not saying third street is correct, but the game was pretty tight. Certainly the K caller was not loose. Sorry that I didn’t make this clearer.
(2) Looks like I’m a stud fish! I put money in on three streets when you wouldn’t have and folded when you wouldn’t have (and when it was a FTOP mistake).
(3) I really like giving up on 4th in general after a steal, but in this case it’s hard for me to see why. I’m not going to get raised very often, I’m going to face a bet pretty often when I check, I’m not going to fold to that bet (right?), and having the lead is at least a slight advantage. I guess I might just be straight overvaluing my (Q9)A9 here? FWIW I also agree that the K should be raising more hands that John Q. Foxwoods actually will raise here.
(4) If you plan a trip to Foxwoods, please tell me when you’ll be there.
Nate:
Thanks for the comments. I doubt I’m any better than you at thinking Stud hands through, I could easily be the fish in this discussion. On top of that, I haven’t played a live game of $10/$20 Stud in almost 5 years (yes, I’m jealous) so I may be horribly out of touch with how it plays these days. I assume it’s mostly super-passive, with a mix of tight and loose old men?
(1) The thing to remember, IMO, is that if the steal is correct from this early position on 3rd (successful steal + win-the-hand-anyway > 10/21) it usually implies a *really* tight field, such that when someone *does* defend, their range is pretty strong. Opponent #1 here has Kx in the hole here a huge percentage of the time, I think. AQ and QJ are basically dead. He can have 22-44,66,88-JJ, but that’s still only 48 combos if he plays *all* of them, compared to ~120 Kx’s. And if he’s playing 3-flushes heads-up, or 55K with a dead 5, how tight can he really be? I think he’s playing Kx and 88-JJ, plus some random goofy draw-y things. So it’s like 80% split kings in my mind.
(2) What I wrote about 4th was not clear. At all. Sorry. No, you can’t check-fold for 1 small bet. No way. I was trying to say that I’d probably bet, but it’s tempting to check and get ready to abandon on 5th. Our Q is worthless, our A is visible. No way the K folds 4th. Unlikely the 5 does either, unless he was just taking a nice price on 3rd. We’re going to be out of position on 5th in most cases when the cards don’t fall in a way that ends the hand.
I feel like a lot of A-showing steals go this way. That K (maybe incorrectly) doesn’t want to fold split kings on 3rd. He’s never folding 4th. He’s never folding 5th once he hits two pair. And given that the 3rd opponent paired his door on 6th and the K went to showdown, he’s never folding, period, to single big bets on any street after 5th. So a lot of your perceived fold equity, I think, is an illusion, and would be better transferred over to thin value bets. But I could be very wrong about this.
(3) I was not being particularly serious about calling 6th, although getting ~7.5 to 1 immediate it’s pretty tempting if you think the 5 is much more likely to have a hidden pair than to have trips/draw, that seems highly player dependent. But ugh, our hand is just so dead. Gross.
This hand is also a good illustration of why I enjoy Stud so much. It’s complicated, and each street is almost a totally new puzzle. And as much help as 7CSFAP is (definitely my favorite poker book ever), it’s entirely possible that all three of you deviated (not without plausibly correct reasoning) from 7CSFAP’s logic right away on 3rd street!
I was looking at Bravo to check out the Stud action at Foxwoods last night, kinda sad how excited I was to see 2 5-10’s, a 10-20, and 2 20-40s running. I can remember the first time I went to Foxwoods, I think the *majority* of the tables were still Stud.
m
I just ran 5th street on PPT, giving the K Kings-up and the 5 either split 5’s or a live pocket pair from 3rd. You’re a 3.5-1 dog at showdown in this instance, and you are getting $111-$20 immediate and $191-$60 effective if everyone sees the showdown. I’m bailing, unless I think there’s a sizable chance the K has been horsing around with a 3-flush or whatever.
Stud Hi Simulation ?
600,000 trials (Randomized)
dead cards: QQ7
Hand Equity
K*|K88 60.71%
Q9|A9K 22.11%
5*,22-44,66,88-JJ|52T 17.17%
I’d be tempted to take the under on 100 people have *really* read The Mathematics Of Poker, based on the fact that I’d put myself in a similar spot to where it sounded like Nate was: the absolute target demographic, and yet haven’t really read it as deeply as I would have liked. I guess maybe the key is, as suggested, the possibilities of bored maths students grinding it at that age when you have the time and the inclination to really obsess about stuff.
Another great interview. I think TP is one of the finest podcasts around. Love Nate’s openness and Andrews honesty. Lots of guys give poker a bad name but you guys turn the trick around. Thanks guys. Many can learn from you.
I enjoyed this a lot. Terrence was a great guest.