Card Player Pro

My Cards: J 4
Opponent: Tough high-stakes regular
Situation: Three-handed in the $2,000 Full Tilt Online Poker Series no-limit hold’em event
Stacks Mine: 3,701,285; His: 1,110,758 (after the blinds and antes)

Most of what’s significant about this hand can be discussed before we even see the cards. In a vacuum, it looks like a bizarre, downright bad play, but there are important meta-game factors that led me to play it the way that I did.

The hand occurred at the final table of a $2,000 no-limit hold’em Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) event. Only three players remained. At the start of the hand, I had roughly 3,700,000 in chips. On my left was a player named “Palmao,” with about 800,000 in chips, and on my right was “psychobenny,” with about 1,100,000 in chips.

It’s significant that I have more than three times as much in chips as either of my opponents. This means that even if one of them doubles through me, I’ll still have the chip lead at the table.

The payouts for the tournament were $450,000 for first place, $285,000 for second place, and $211,000 for third place. The disparity between second and third wasn’t as large as I would like, but given the size of my chip lead, I still think there is considerable incentive for both of my opponents to avoid playing a big pot with me. Busting out in third place will cost either player more than $70,000, whereas even doubling through me will not make him a favorite to win first place.

The other significant factor here is that psychobenny is a far better player than palmao, and I’m sure that he knew that. That means that I have a very strong interest in making sure that palmao, rather than psychobenny, is the one I face in the heads-up stage of the tournament. Likewise, psychobenny has extra incentive not to lose a big pot to me, since palmao is very likely to lose to one of us eventually.

My strategy for this segment of the tournament was to exploit this by stealing a lot of small pots and making it hard for my opponents to do the same. To do so, I needed to cultivate an image of a bulldog, a player who was going to grab a pot with his teeth and refuse to let go of it without considerable pressure. Thus, my opponents would have only two options: show me a strong hand or run a big bluff. Of course, strong hands are hard to come by, and as I said, I think psychobenny in particular had a lot of incentive not to want to run big bluffs on me right now. So, this image should make my opponents very reluctant to tangle with me, and consequently enable me to win a lot of pots uncontested.

Let’s get on to the hand in question. The blinds are 12,000-24,000, I am in the big blind, and pscyhobenny is in the small blind. He opens with a raise to 69,876, and I call with the J 4. Even with position in a battle of the blinds, this is a loose call. Ordinarily, I would fold it without thinking twice. In this case, though, I didn’t want pscyhobenny to think that he’d be able to take future pots away from me just by raising preflop, so I called.

The flop came 9 7 6, no help to me. However, my opponent checked, and I decided to take a small stab at it, betting 55,555 into a pot of nearly 150,000. My “bulldog” reputation was already somewhat established, so I didn’t expect to get check-raise bluffed, despite my small bet. Either he has a hand that he’d legitimately check-raise for value, in which case this bluff costs me very little, or he has a hand that is just giving up, in which case I get away with a very cheap steal and further establish the table image that I want.

Sure enough, he folded, and I won the pot. The details of how the hand played out, though, are ultimately less important than the table dynamics that I discussed at the beginning of this column. After this hand, and I believe in part because of it and others like it, psychobenny did start open-folding his small blind to me. He also began defending his big blind less vigorously to my button raises, enabling me to win a lot of small pots and slowly grind down the stacks of both players, one of whom I’d eventually have to face heads up.

To my good fortune, psychobenny and palmao ended up getting all in against each other with 8-8 and Q-Q, respectively. Palmao’s pair held up to bust psychobenny. I went into the heads-up portion of the tournament with a significant chip lead, thanks to all of my stealing when we were three-handed, and I went on to win the tournament, a custom FTOPS avatar, and $450,000!