Ak in the giant

[Ryan]

Just wanted to post this here to see what you guys thought on how I should have played pre flop. Was in the giant at wsop. Got in late, (hour before reg. Closed). Starting stack was 25k. In 2 hours ran that up to 230k. Running my table. Get moved to Brasilia. 3rd hand in look down at ak off. Blinds are 800/1600 I believe. Early position shoves for 30k. I reshove to isolate and I am biggest stack at table. Guy in late position with 120k shoves as well with ak clubs. He flops flush. Taking over half my stack. My question is should I have just called in that situation or did I make right move and just got unlucky. Thanks in advance. This is my first post to this forum. Looking forward to hearing from everyone and getting to know you all. I am from Oklahoma city. Been playing for about 12 years now. I’m 38 , married, and play poker as a part time job. My day job is I run a dinner theater and also act in it as well. Also I am a preacher, yea I know crazy. But obviously not the uptight religious freaky type.

[John S]

I think in this exact scenario you can’t really do much different than what you did. The stack sizes dictate the action after EP shoves.

When EP shoves, you can’t just call, you have to try and isolate. If you call, you give other players a price to call, which means you loose equity and you build a bigger pot for whoever wins. No matter what you raise, LP is going to shove and you are committed to call. I think even if you flat pre LP is jamming, then what do you do?

The question here is what do you do if you and LP are deeper? EP shoves for his 30k, but you have 600k and LP has 300k. What do you raise here to isolate? 75k? 90k? (This is why the hand always plays out like it did in your scenario, even if you raise smaller you have to call off LP’s jam).

Say you make it 90k to isolate, then LP jams for his 300k. That 4-bet is pretty strong, what do you do there? Against some players this is a call, and against others this is a fold.

But as described, that’s just a cooler. Don’t feel bad about your play, that’s pretty standard.

[Brad Owen]

Ryan, thanks for sharing. I agree with everything John said. I had very similar thoughts when reading through the hand. One thing you have to keep in mind about tournaments is that you want to build big stacks so that you can make deep runs. You can only make decisions based on the information you have at the time. AK is likely to have everyone behind you crushed. In this instance you happened to be slightly behind. If I were in that scenario and I knew my opponent had AKcc I might still re-shove haha. I think this is a very standard situation and you played it well.

If anything, the real question in this hand is what the LP player should do once he faces a shove from EP and a re-shove from what I presume is the biggest stack at the table in MP when he has almost 80 bb’s himself. It’s so unfortunate that he called and somehow flopped the nuts when a a majority of the time you’re just going to chop with him.

[Author]

Posts