Heads Up With Eric Baldwin

Eric Baldwin, also known as “basebaldy” online, is having a breakout year so far in 2009, and at the time this was written, he was second in the Card Player Player of the Year race. He surfed up the leader board after winning his first World Series of Poker bracelet in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event. During three-handed play at the final table of this event, he pulled off a huge bluff. He recently sat down to talk with Card Player TV about this momentum-changing hand.

Eric Baldwin: I had the chip lead at one point during three-handed play. I had 5 million of the 9 million in play. Each of my opponents had about 2 million. I turned a flush and got it all in against an overpair with a flush draw, and Jonas [Klausen] spiked the seven-outer on the river. If I’d won that, I would have been about a 4-to-1 chip leader going to heads-up play. I had to recover from that real quickly.

So, that turned the tables. Jonas had the chip lead, and James [Taylor] was third and I was second when this hand came up. James raised from the small blind, and he’d been doing that often. I was in the big blind with A-5 offsuit. I couldn’t fold there. He’d been raising a lot, I had an ace, and I was in position. I didn’t want to reraise, because the way the stack sizes were, he could have reraised all in with a lot of hands, and I don’t like calling off with A-5 there, so I elected to call. The flop came 9-9-2 rainbow, which is a very, very dry board. He expects me to miss that most of the time, so I’m fully expecting a continuation-bet. He bet, and I decided to call. I didn’t want to raise and give him the fold equity to shove over the top of me on a bluff or with an A-Q type of hand.

The turn was a total brick, a 4, but it gave me four outs to the wheel. He bet again, a little more than half the pot. It just didn’t feel like he had a 9, because I believed he would have checked one of the two streets; also, his bet-sizing was a little big. I felt like I could push him off a lot of small pairs and bigger aces, so I went all in. He went into the tank for like 10 minutes. It seemed like 30, and he finally laid it down. We went out with him later, actually, and he swore that he had two queens. That was a real pivotal hand. It gave me the chip lead and some momentum going into the rest of three-handed play.

Kristy Arnett: How important was it to keep in mind your stack sizes when making a bluff like that? Preflop and on the flop, you would have opened yourself up to getting rebluffed.

EB: It’s really important. If I reraise preflop with the intention of folding if he goes all in over the top of me, I might as well be doing it with 5-2 offsuit, because the only time you are ever getting called with those stack sizes is if he decides to slow-play a monster, so you are really taking the value out of a decent heads-up hand like A-5. The same thing on the flop. You have to plan the bet-sizing, so that you are the one who is going to be able to make the all-in bet with the fold equity, and possibly get the other player to lay down a better hand.

KA: That’s crazy that he said he had queens. Did he say that he put you on a 9?

EB: He didn’t really say what he put me on. I guess he could put me on fours, deuces, a 9, or slow-played aces or kings there. I don’t know, but that was a big sweat [laughing].

KA: And bluffing for your tournament life, to go out in third place, was that scary?

EB: It was scary, but the two guys were tremendous players and I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. You can’t just sit around and wait to make hands. You have to make some plays, and I was playing to win.