WSOP $1000 NLHE

My second event of the 2016 World Series of Poker was the $1000 No-Limit Hold ‘Em. With just 100 big blinds to start, this tournament goes quick, which makes it great for the hourly rate but not particularly interesting, poker-wise anyway (the people watching can be extraordinary).

Still, I got into two spots that are interesting not because of the magnitude of the decision – in both cases, it was quite small – but because of the frequency with which they occur, as well as the fact that in a shallow tournament, even small decisions have a big influence on your ROI.

Both occurred at the 50/100 level. In the first, I opened to 250 with Qs Qc on the button, and the big blind called.

The flop came AT4, all spades (meaning I had a flush draw), and we both checked.

The turn was the 9c, and we checked again.

He quickly checked a third time, on a Td river, and at the time it seemed so likely that my hand was good that I threw out a small value bet, about a quarter of the pot. He called with A6o to beat me.

In retrospect, I’m not so sure this was a good bet. Maybe it’s a bit results oriented knowing that A6o in his range, but I don’t think that’s really so surprising (it would be in mine). The Villain is going to have so many Ax combinations in his range that even if he doesn’t check a pair of Aces at a high frequency, it still could add up to enough combos that I can’t put in a value bet on the river. There are, of course, a limited number of worse hands that will call a bet, mostly 9x, pocket pairs, and maybe 4x or K-high.

In the second hand, I was down to about 2300 and had 7s 4s in the big blind. The hijack opened to 250, and the CO, who was the only truly good player among my opponents, called. With 550 in the pot, I had the option to call 100 more to see a flop. Although I would certainly call in a heads up pot, I elected to fold here, a decision that I later discussed with fellow Tournament Poker Edge pro Chris Moon.

My argument was that there aren’t many flops I can feel that good about in a multi-way pot. It will be rare that I can commit with just a 4 or a 7, and even when I flop a draw, I can’t expect that much fold equity against two players.

Chris suggested an interesting way of approaching that: assume you have no fold equity and will always either fold or get all in on the flop, at your option. Put them both on ranges, and run a simulation on ProPokerTools.

After the flop, you’ll commit 2200 chips for a final pot of 5050, meaning you’ll need 43% to get it in. Pre-flop, you’re getting 5.5:1, meaning that you need to get a “good enough” flop about 15% of the time. Of course these are simplifications: sometimes you will win without a showdown, sometimes you’ll see a turn, sometimes you’ll cause one player to fold substantial equity.

Even under these constraints, I found it to be close. For some reason I’m having trouble uploading the image, but here’s a link, which includes the ranges I gave both players (given my stack size, I think the CO can cold call some big hands, though maybe not quite as many as I gave.

It seems to me that given how rarely I’ll end up all in against two players, I probably should have called and just taken my equity on the 15% or so of flops that are “good enough” for me. Live and learn.

Today is the $1500 bounty, which I hope will be a fun and more interesting event!

7 thoughts on “WSOP $1000 NLHE”

  1. I’m a little confused. Why is 15% a magic number? I get that it corresponds to the preflop pot odds you’re getting, but I don’t see why being able to continue on that many flops is an important threshold. If your average EV when you continued were roughly equal to the whole preflop pot, that would make a lot of sense, but the threshold for *continuing* is just that your EV on the flop is >=0.

    Edge case: let’s say that exactly 1 / 6.5 of the time you have exactly 2200 / 5050 equity on the flop. You seem to be suggesting that this is a breakeven situation (that your call would be 0 EV in this case). But in fact it’s:

    (5.5 / 6.5) * 2200 [<- you fold the flop]
    + (1 / 6.5) * 2200 [43% equity makes up for the 100 you lose preflop, and that this is presented as a rough-and-ready estimation technique.

    • Good point. I have nothing to say in my own defense. I’ll just add that only using PPT to see how many flops I’d have enough equity to get in on was Chris’ suggestion. The 15% was my own erroneous extrapolation.

  2. How did you have the option to call T100 in the BB to see a flop in the second hand? That would mean the BB is T150, but villain opened to T250 which would be impossible.

    • I had the same question…looks like a typo in the raise size. The rest of the numbers suggest it was actually raised to only 200.

  3. I notice on the PPT link you provided that the ranges for opponents had the same mistake I was making when I used it the other day, namely:

    Notes/Warnings
    ‘s’ does not mean ‘suited’ in generic syntax. Use x for suited hands (eg ‘AxKx’, ‘*x*x’)

    I assume you didn’t mean to include a bunch of hands where one of the cards was specifically a spade.

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