The Scoop -- Jason Mercier

Jason Mercier has accumulated almost $5 million in tournament winnings in the past three years, and he appeared on The Scoop to discuss a huge hand that he played against Phil Ivey on High Stakes Poker, and lost.

Adam Schoenfeld: I don’t want to bring back bad memories. I thought you played the hand great, by the way, and I agreed with Gabe Kaplan; I thought there was no way that Phil Ivey could call, and that you had represented an overpair very effectively. I would have folded at home, even though I saw your cards!

Do you think it was the amount of your stack, do you think he had a read, or do you think it was the last hand and Phil just said to himself, “I’m calling”?

Jason Mercier: I had been playing ridiculously tight, because I had been very card-dead and nobody I was playing against was exactly willing to fold a lot. I didn’t really want to make any enormous plays with J-5 offsuit.

Diego Cordovez: It was a loose game with loose calls.

JM: Exactly; and I wasn’t ready to go off for a million. I had only one bullet with me.

DC: Do you think the players knew that you had only one bullet?

JM: No. I mean, they may have thought that, but it was kind of weird, because when I showed up, the only people who knew who I was were Daniel Negreanu, Antonio Esfandiari, and Dario Minieri. I got up to get a water, and Phil Ivey said, “Who is that?”

DC: Just some guy who’s won like $4 million recently.

JM: Daniel was like, “He’s won every tournament!” I had played against Ivey like four times in tournaments, but he doesn’t really look to see who he’s playing against; he just tries to run everybody over. So, I had been playing pretty tight.

Gus Hansen opens to $4,200 from under the gun, Eli Elezra calls from the cutoff, Ivey calls from the button, and I had the A 4 in the small blind. I think I actually would have won the hand if I had just called here, because then I could have check-raised the flop, in which case Ivey probably would have folded nines. But, who knows? He may have just got it in for $200,000 in that spot, as well. Anyway, I decided it was a good spot to make a squeeze play, and made it $22,100. Hansen and Elezra folded pretty quickly, and Ivey called without even looking at me or really even knowing how much it was.

DC: And he had pocket nines.

JM: The flop came down 7-3-2 rainbow, with one heart. When he called so quickly, I figured he had a pair, fives through tens, and I planned on getting him to fold it on this board. I wasn’t planning on betting and then shoving over a raise, because I didn’t think he would ever raise the flop. There is almost no hand I would think he could raise the flop with, because with a set, you’d want to call because the board is so dry, and with fives or a 7 …

AS: It’s the driest flop ever.

JM: Right; of course, there is almost no reason to raise unless you are trying to get me to shove with a weaker hand, which I really didn’t think he would expect from me.

DC: Not based on the way you had been playing.

JM: Exactly; so, I bet $28,700, which was about half the pot, and he tanked for at least a minute — not in TV time, but in real life — with the $28,700 in his hand, and then he grabbed $50,000 and raised it that much more. And I was like, “OK, what the hell is he doing? It doesn’t make any sense.” I thought that he might just be raising for information. As absurd as that sounds that Ivey would do that, I thought that he decided to make the hand easier and would fold if I moved all in. So, I decided to shove and either just make him fold or put him to a very tough decision. And I have 32 percent equity if he calls with one pair. The thing about the hand is that when I’m semibluffing, like I was, I had 32 percent equity, and when I actually have aces or kings or queens, he’s 10 percent. It’s not a great spot for him when he runs into my value range.

AS: That’s why I was surprised he called.