Particularly earlier in the year, running too many big bluffs in tournaments was a substantial leak of mine. I’ve made a concerted effort to confine the monster bluffs to the cash tables, and my tourney results have improved a bit. In the $300 rebuy 6-max FTOPS, though, I did pull off what I think was a big, good tourney bluff:
Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em Tournament, 80/160 Blinds (6 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com
UTG (t6916)
MP (t3171)
CO (t7325)
Button (t12320)
SB (t12015)
Hero (BB) (t6713)
Hero’s M: 27.97
Preflop: Hero is BB with J
, K
2 folds, CO bets t320, 1 fold, SB calls t240, Hero raises to t900, 1 fold, SB calls t580
Flop: (t2120) J
, Q, 5 (2 players)
SB bets t900, Hero calls t900
Turn: (t3920) A (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets t999, SB calls t999
River: (t5918) 5
(2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets t3914 (All-In), 1 fold
Total pot: t5918
Results:
Hero didn’t show J, K (nothing).
Outcome: Hero won t5918
Preflop is definitely good. The CO’s range was like 75%, and I doubt he’s capable of 4-betting light. I don’t know much about SB but it almost doesn’t matter.
Flop I think is close between shove and call. My hand is almost always best, and while I’m in bad shape vs. his calling range, there’s also a lot of value in picking the pot up now given the spades out there. I called only because I thought he’d give me the information I needed on later streets, and he did, though not in the way I’d expected.
I doubt he checks a good spade on the turn, but he may well have turned a weak flush or a better pair than mine. So I throw a little bet out there just to see if he check-shoves. When he doesn’t, I’m pretty confident the pot is mine on the river. For a second, I worried about the board pair, but then I realized that there were really no boats possible for him except for maybe a disastrously played A5.
So you’re repping like Ks with a A,K,Q, or J? Or maybe AdTs? If you did have those hands, would you be shoving the flop normally?
I don’t think I’d be shoving the flop with the Ks and a pair, but I also don’t think it matters that I would have shoved the flop with a lot of the stuff I want him to be scared of, including AA/KK/QQ. This is after all a random tourney donk, not the world’s greatest hand reader. If he doesn’t have much and the board is scary enough, he’ll fold, and that’s about as far as his thought process is gonna go.