My latest poker strategy article, “Lessons From the WSOP Main Event: Marginal Hands in Heads-Up Play“, is now appearing in Two Plus Two Magazine. It’s an analysis of some key hands from the heads up portion of the 2014 WSOP Main Event:
“The heads-up battle between Martin Jacobson and Felix Stephensen was perhaps the finest culmination to a World Series of Poker Main Event in recent history. In past years, the final showdown frequently occurred between a professional and an amateur player. In such cases, the professional can generally anticipate a large theoretical advantage and thus has a lot of incentive to keep pots small and pass on high-variance plays in order to maximize his chances of realizing that advantage. Such matches tend to look more like a game of cat-and-mouse, and while playing such a style is a skill unto itself, it doesn’t always prove strategically instructive for heads-up play between more evenly matched opponents. Jacobson and Stephensen, however, are both extremely talented professionals, and as a result their heads-up play exhibited many more thin calls, bluffs, and value bets than were seen in past years.
With thanks to Martin Harris of Hard Boiled Poker for compiling a list of the cards held by each player in each hand of the final table, here’s my analysis of some of the trickier decisions faced by Jacobson and Stephensen in the final hands of the 2014 WSOP Main Event”