Jonathan communicated with Alexsejs and Leon separately, posing the same questions to both. They did not hear each other’s thoughts during the analysis.
Jonathan Jaffe – Leon has an interesting decision. He's got in the lowjack, not a typical open for chips. What do you think about this spot with about 40% of the field left?
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Normally when you're covering everyone, you can be a bit more wide. Obviously, this is a very aggressive open, especially having me on the big blind. I don't think he really disrespects my game, but he might think I respect ICM too much and might overfold from the big blind. There were some tight guys behind him like Jonathan Jaffe and stuff. I think it's fine open in certain setups. I don't think it was amazing at that moment, but he has his own ideas for sure.
Jonathan Jaffe – You open Ace-3 offsuit lowjack, not a standard open for you. What's going on there?
Leon Sturm – I think Ace-3 offsuit open is at least going to mix in theory because we were approaching the money, and usually when we have some premium equity, high cards become more dominant. I think it's a reasonable standard-ish open, maybe a bit too wide, but I don't mind extending my range. Also, this was the Mystery Bounty tournament, so it makes sense to push variance a little bit, go for a big stack. There are a lot of arguments I think that make this reasonable and not too out of line open.
Huge surprise. I mean, he tanked, he was so desperate to get a VPIP in there, but he found his inner strength and... or maybe it was about the break being about to be on, so perhaps he just wanted to take a loo or something. Who knows?
Jonathan Jaffe – Mauricio peels Deuces in the small blind off 30. Pretty standard to you, or maybe folding because of the ICM? What are your thoughts?
Leon Sturm – Given that I basically have min-raised, I think it's a reasonable call. We were not that close to the money. I think when we get a bit closer, then Deuces would fold more often. Maybe here it already folds. I don't personally mind. Again, the argument also goes for him. Deuces is a pretty nice hand to push variance because he's going to usually have a very easy decision. Either it's going to flop a set and then you have good equity, or you just have a comfortable fold on most streets.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Normally in chipEV, it's a very standard call. In ICM, you should be aware of like, you can make your decision based on opponents sitting behind you. If you think your opponent is not squeezing enough or something, you can be wide enough defending small blind in this spot. If someone is pretty aggressive behind you, you should be careful.
Jonathan Jaffe – Got , not a standard three-way call. What's playing into this decision for you?
Leon Sturm – I think it's actually pretty standard three-way call. I just think I was deciding between calling and squeezing. Usually, when you have pretty wide open and someone defending small blind, you can defend pretty wide because you have position on one person. Calling in big blind is very close. Usually, you do benefit when the small blind plays here, in the sense that you have one player that you're in position against. This effect also goes down with increasing risk premium when you go towards the money bubble. Here I would assume that his hand doesn't perform as well anymore, but perhaps he thinks that he has an edge over Mauricio and maybe even against me.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Considering 3-bet or call. I spent some time, but I think for certain reasons, I think this spot can be over-bluffed by Leon as a 4-bet, and it feels fine to just call and play post-flop.
Leon Sturm – Maybe there was some indicator of him thinking that this was very close because he did indeed take his whole time bank before he, instead of just tossing in a chip, he verbally announced calling. I didn't read into too much, and I do think Alex is very good at that, being highly aware of how he's being perceived at the table, but maybe this was a sign of him actually thinking for the whole time and kind of going back and forth in his head about wanting to call or not.
Jonathan Jaffe – Any considerations for anything else after Mauricio folds?
Alexsejs Ponyakov – In general, I think he will be maybe even overbetting this board. It's a board when he has kind of advantage, and it's way easier to play this hand by c-betting, even though in theory he should be kind of careful with big part of his range, like skipping a lot of hands that block medium pocket pairs. Medium holdings like , should be hands that don't want to c-bet, but still he's going to c-bet as a bluff, like underpairs, weak Aces, some straight draws, gutshots, bunch of stuff.
Leon Sturm – I think in general, the wider our range gets or the later we are positioned when we play against both blinds on this kind of a board, we want to be more passive. The wider our range gets, obviously the small blind players have a very condensed, kind of strong range that hits the board relatively well, even though he's going to have auto-folds, no question about that. But yeah, we're going to be floated relatively often, so we need to be somewhat selective.
I would rather c-bet my hand compared to offsuit or something because we have better backdoors. I also did have decent suits in the sense that I blocked two of the backdoors, which is not super relevant but maybe makes it a bit higher frequency c-bet, but in the end, it's very close. You can go either way, and in-game, I would have sometimes checked as well.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Everyone can construct strategy the way they want. Usually, it's not going to change much. You can construct by a lot of checking and using like only half pot or 66% in this spot, or you can construct range by using only small sizes and go wide for a c-bet.
The Turn
Jonathan Jaffe – Right, so Mauricio gets out of the way real quick, and then we've got Panov's calling. Turn is the , and Alexsejs checks to you. What are your thoughts about this situation on the turn?
Leon Sturm – Yeah, Mauricio is in complete shambles because he sees that his fold was terrible. On my end, however, I do pick up some equity, so that's kind of nice. In-game, I was already very aware that it's very easy to overbluff here because there's just all the Broadway stuff that interacts with the King and the Jack, and then now we also have a lot of wheels. Even if I do have a hand like , it would even be unreasonable to barrel that hand and make his and indifferent and get called by some Ace-Ten flush draw or something. There's just a lot of potential barrels for me. I can also have , , . I mean, I did mention that those are not that nice to c-bet in the first place, but if I have the Ace of Hearts with those hands, then reasonable barrel spot.
Jonathan Jaffe – You check. Leon pots it. What are your thoughts at this point?
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Normally, he should be only using this size on a turn while he goes for c-bet, and I think he should be kind of polar, not going very thin for value. His range should be constructed mostly by strong holdings. Some of the flush draws, he should be kind of careful of. He should be aware of getting check-raised, check-jammed on a turn, and a lot of flush draws he cannot really bet-call. But there are some flush draws he can easily bet-call in this spot, like having roughly 25% equity or something because I also can have flush draw.
Usually, he will have like, I don't know, straight draw and flush draw or one overcard and flush draw. Some other hands like maybe , , he still can continue barreling too. Just having one in a hand is obviously very good for barreling in such spot because I have a lot of draws, type of hands, and maybe even lowest pairs if I decided not to check-raise them.
It's a spot where I kind of understand theoretical range, and I have my own expectations of his range in the exact moment.
Leon Sturm – If you do think that the spot is overbluffed, which one could assume, you could also just say okay, I'm not going to barrel here because I think Ponyakov is going to show a lot of resistance on the turn. I think that he gives me enough credit to be at least somewhat balanced in this spot, so I once again went with some frequency.
As for my size, I would just kind of bet GTO here. I sort of did not do that, but it was very close. But yeah, I would just bet GTO so that the turn size is the same as on the river.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – So for me, it's like a no-brainer call in such spot. I think I would be a bit aware of continuing some of the King-x in that spot. Maybe actually and becomes not sure if it's a call or fold exactly right now, but normally I think, as I said on the flop, on the flop my opponent is going to over-c-bet, and I think he will have enough bluffs in this spot, so I can continue any King. So I would be continuing some of the as well without any additional equity.
The River
Jonathan Jaffe – What are your thoughts on Leon jamming the with no heart for value?
Alexsejs Ponyakov – Yeah, that's obviously standard play. I think he can easily go in this spot with sets for value, and I think if he's not going to construct different sizes on a river, he probably should be jamming top two pair as well. This is the bottom of the value. I don't think there are any merges in this spot by, you know, betting like with a trying to get fold of and stuff. I don't think it exists in this spot. It's pretty big. It's late stage of the tournament already, so usually people are not finding any merges at that stage. Maybe they can find them like in chipEV, but not in ICM stages.
Leon Sturm – It's always a different process arriving at a decision whether I'm in-game or I can now look at it from an outside perspective. In-game, I wasn't 100% confident that I was going to shoVE, that this is that my hand is good enough to do so in-game. The and the were offsuit actually, and all the wheel cards were the hard ones, which means that he's going to have comparatively speaking more flushes, I think. He doesn't have all suited, right? So maybe it doesn't matter that much anymore, and perhaps it's even better now that I think about it because he's going to have more offsuit than he's going to have offsuit in his range, obviously.
Anyway, there are a lot of potential flush combos out there, and it's definitely something to be concerned about. However, in-game I did think that I personally need to be very careful on the turn with how I'm barreling my flush draws because I don't want to get pushed off my equity, and he's sometimes going to check-jam. In hindsight, his check-jam node is going to appear very very rarely because there aren't many hands that benefit from that. Perhaps there's like a or in particular, but like he's not going to jam pair plus flush draw, anything, or flush draw or something like that.
If I don't need to be careful about protecting my flush draws, then I actually do arrive on the river with a bunch of flushes. In-game, I thought it's very easy to overbluff the river once again because if you barrel turn selectively with blocking a flush draw, say A8, A7, A9, Queen-Ten, or even... I mean Queen-Ten offsuit was not going to be in my range, but all those offsuit combos or even with a heart, the population is always going to jam the river thinking they block a flush and that's quite relevant.
So I think it once again, it's very easy to overbluff, plus my value threshold is going to be... I mean if I jam a wheel, then I'm going to jam a set I guess, so it's going to be Five plus or in this instance I guess as well. It's rather narrow value range and once again just easy to overbluff. So I think it's a good spot to go thin for value anyway because I thought he was going to catch reasonably often.
Jonathan Jaffe – Your opponent is tanking for a long time and you're on the river with the value hand. What are you thinking? What's going through your mind? This was many minutes.
Leon Sturm – It was many minutes. I mean, it's interesting because the main read that people are looking for, I guess, when you've been in a time bank for a very long time is whether or not the tension or the nervousness of the guy who went all in or his betting goes up or down, or not up or down – if it stays high or if it drops. Because usually when the tension drops, that means that he's calming down and he usually has a value hand. The excitement of him potentially winning a big pot goes down, while if you're bluffing, then tension just remains high.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – So for me, it's usually I'm trying to use my time banks as efficiently as possible. Let's say I drove my hand from pre-flop to the river already expecting some kind of ranges. The range is becoming way tighter on the river comparing to the flop or pre-flop obviously, and I already have an understanding of the amount of combos that he probably gets to the river with that he's bluffing and amount of the combos that he's value betting on the river. So now I just need to calculate the pot, the ratio, how many combos I should be folding in theory. Do I want to deviate from theory?
Yeah, I was just trying to... let's say if I have six time banks, I can find a time to calculate all the spot in my head from the beginning, from pre-flop, from the flop, turn, and river. I can kind of delete from my memory everything that happened before and rethink about everything again. I think I had like six time banks or five time banks there, and I just decided to focus, to get rid of like all talks around the table, all get rid of all cameras, and I was just like focused on a board, focused on myself, and maybe I can find some live reads as well, you know, just like checking how my opponent is acting. I can tell Leon was not exposing anything. For me, I was not able to find any live read there.
The Fold
Leon Sturm – Actually, I think Alex's fold deserves a lot of credit in the first place in the sense that most players, when they call turn with a one-pair hand and they improve to a two-pair, they would never think about folding. I mean, this is a very like baseline or base level thing, and we're playing at a high level, so almost anyone in this tournament of the pros is capable of folding this hand. But still, it's mentally kind of hard when you improve to be like, "Okay, actually I did improve, but I only have a catcher here." He realizes that my value threshold probably is a set plus, perhaps , who knows. But in the end, he does have a catcher.
So is his hand really better than, say, King-Nine with the Nine of Hearts, King-Ten with the Ten of Hearts, something like that?
Alexsejs Ponyakov – It's probably profitable to... it's way better EV to fold, but if I will start folding all of my hands like that, I might get crushed by people who are overbluffing. So I need to be very careful who is my opponent. Yeah, I think it's not an easy fold for most of the players because they are scared to be overfolding. Like, I don't think people are expecting me to significantly overfold in this spot, so I don't feel by folding something I'm unprotected.
Leon Sturm – I think it's very reasonable for him to fold. Again, I said the population is going to overbluff here. He might realize that I know that may be a thing. Maybe I underbluff this, but I mean, I don't quite know what he was thinking. Either way, if I'm balanced here, I don't think this combo needs to call necessarily.
Plus, I mean, the argument I'm going to give kind of goes both ways. Once again, the argument I was going to give is with the Mystery Bounty dynamic. Once you are in the money, you suddenly access a whole extra 50% of the prize pool, which most players that were busted before that are not going to access, so that makes a big difference. However, if he calls and wins the pot, he obviously has a huge stack, which is also very good for, especially in Mystery Bounty tournaments. But yeah, it kind of goes both ways. He probably thinks he has some future edge as well on the field, and there's just a lot of factors that come into play.
Alexsejs Ponyakov – I played the hand, and after that, I was thinking like, "Oh, was it a good fold or was it a bad fold?" based on actual result, you know, based on his actual hand. And it was in my mind maybe for two minutes, and after that, I just asked Leon directly what he had because we went on a break. I think it was just before dinner break or maybe just before the day ended. Obviously, I will see it on stream, so yeah, he told me. But I think he didn't tell me right away that it was Ace-3 offsuit, and I was just like, "Oh, this is my..." When I saw that, my ego was like, "Hm, he probably has some reasons opening on my big blind," and I was like, "Not sure if it's good reasons, but he definitely has something in his mind."