3 thoughts on “Episode 264: Ivey Bluffs It Off”

  1. Nate, as I said on Twitter, I thought you did an excellent job breaking down this hand, both from a theoretical and an exploitative perspective. I really appreciate the depth you went into. Also, it was a great solo performance!

    I did have a few points of criticism, however. I’ll break them down by street.

    Preflop: You mentioned that since Altman 3bet QJo in this spot, he could just as easily have any of the Broadway combos and is therefore at risk of 3betting way too much, especially using this somewhat larger 3bet size. But what this analysis fails to consider is that Altman — a very skilled and accomplished player in his own right — is likely controlling his frequencies in such a way that he is not overdoing it here. I’d bet he even has some kind of randomization method for live poker to control his aggression. Anyway, whether QJo belongs in an optimal 3betting range in this spot is another question entirely. I think it’s probably fine at some very low frequency, and especially when using a larger 3bet size that should be more polarized, QJo serves well as a hand that has good blockers but can also safely fold to a 4bet. But if you never 3bet QJo in Altman’s spot that’s probably perfectly fine, too.

    Flop: Nothing to say here!

    Turn: You said you’d lean towards a bet on the turn, and you gave good reasons for doing so. I think in a cash game, it’s one of those spots where we can happily bet for value, and begrudgingly call off a check-jam, knowing we have 4 outs to the nuts, and our Qs helps as well. However, in this tournament situation, Altman should be very interested in preserving his chips. It could be +cEV to bet-call the turn here, but it is not necessarily the best way for him to maximize his chances of going deep in the tournament. He’s a great player with a big chip stack, so he should be interested in maintaining that stack more so than getting into thin spots against Phil Ivey for essentially his tournament life.

    River: You said that Altman bet 40% pot on the river, but he actually bet closer to 70% pot (195k into 295k — you said 195k into 430k). I actually think that makes a big difference in terms of Ivey’s decision here. Against a 40% sizing, Altman would conceivably be doing that with a lot of strong value as well as thin value hands, so Ivey’s 9s9 does much better by check-jamming because it a) blocks Altman’s strongest hands, and b) can get a lot of Altman’s thin value to fold. However, against a 70% pot bet, Altman’s range is much more polarized. The 9s9 still has the same blocker value, but when it check-jams, it gets far fewer hands to fold as a proportion of Altman’s range than it would vs. the 40% size. The value hands in the range are still strong enough to call, and Altman is ahead of the bluffs anyway. Sure, the 9s9 decreases Altman’s value combos by quite a bit, but this fact IMO makes calling the river bet better than check-jamming. (Though I’m not sure calling is wise, either).

    Again, thanks for a great podcast. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say!

  2. Nate — I echo what Dan and everyone else has said: fantastic breakdown of the hand; extremely well thought-out analysis of every street and decision.

    There’s another element to this that I wanted to mention: not that Ivey is necessarily prone to tilt, but what happened to his stack 5-6 hands earlier was likely still weighing on his mind and he may have wanted to get those chips back. If you missed it, Nate, it went something like this…

    Vecino opens from the cutoff to 23k (575k stack), Ivey calls from the SB with Kh8h (having Vecino well-covered with 1,098,000 to start the hand). BB folds. Flop 8c7d4h. Ivey checks, Vecino checks back. Turn 3h, Ivey fires 40k into 65k with his top pair and second-nut-flush draw. Vecino flats. River Tc. Ivey bets 100k into 145k. Vecino raises to 265k. Ivey tanks and tanks and tanks and calls only to lose to a set of 3s.

    Many of us might bristle at losing 25% of our stack in a hand where we called a river raise with second pair (to a guy who had just put well over half his stack into the pot against Phil Ivey), but Ivey can likely take that in stride more than most. Still, he seemed visibly annoyed (probably at himself more than anything) and I feel like it had to *somewhat* play a part in his decision to take a high-variance big-pot line with his 99 the next time he VPIPed.

  3. Your analysis was well measured and I think captured some elements that critics of Ivey’s play fall short of. Igor a lot out of how you walked through each action, remembering that you can’t have known the exact state of mind of either player.

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