Hand 2 Hand Combat -- Jason Mercier vs Phil Ivey

Card Player’s The Scoop caught up with Jason Mercier at the World Series of Poker for a proper sit down chat, and during this chat we brought up Mercier’s experience on High Stakes Poker in season six. Now, Mercier is not usually one to talk strategy, in fact he doesn’t at all, but we wanted to get inside his head to find out his thoughts on a certain hand with Phil Ivey. Imagine one of those hands that you analyse over and over again in your head. Now imagine you played it against arguably the best poker player in the world. We had to know more…

Jason Mercier: I had been playing pretty tight; Gus Hansen raises to $4,200 under the gun, Eli Elezra flats cut-off, Ivey flats button, and I had A 4 in the small blind. I think I actually would have won the hand if I had just called because I might have check-raised the flop, at which Ivey probably would fold nines in that spot, but who knows, he might have just got it in for $200,000 in that spot too (smiles). So I decided it was a good spot to squeeze and made it $22,100, Hansen and Elezra folded pretty quickly, Ivey called without even looking at me or really even looking at how much it was.

Flop: 7 3 2

When he called so quickly I figured he had a pair, probably like fives to tens was what I was thinking, and I planned on getting him to fold it on this board. I wasn’t planning on bet-shoving because I didn’t think he would ever raise the flop. There’s almost no hand that I would think that he’d raise the flop with because like with a set, you want to call there because it’s so dry, and really there’s almost no reason to raise unless you’re trying to get me to shove light which I really didn’t think that he would think that I would do that.

CP: Based on the way you had been playing also…

JM: Right, exactly. So I bet like $28,700 which was about half the pot and he tanked at least a minute (not on television but in real life) with the $28,700 in his hand and then finally grabbed $50,000 and made it $50,000 more. And I was like, ‘Ok, what the hell is he doing?” Because it doesn’t make any sense to raise with his hand or with any hand really so, I thought that if he happens to have some hand like eights or fives or just a seven that he was just raising for information possibly, as absurd as that sounds that Ivey would do that, I just thought that maybe he decided to make the hand easier, and maybe would just fold if I jammed. Or maybe he had like J-10 suited and just didn’t want to float me again so with the raise he was just trying to get me to fold ace-high or something like that.

I decided that I could easily just shove and make him fold or put him to a really tough decision, and I have 32 percent equity if he calls with one pair anyways as long as he doesn’t have a set.

CP: You didn’t have a huge stack in other words, and he’s a good enough player that he’s going to assess the hand, but it was a situation where he could feel himself kind of trapped in by the amount of chips there were.

JM: Right, well the thing about the hand is when I’m semi-bluffing like I am, I have 32 percent equity against his nines, and when I actually have aces or kings or queens, he has 10 percent. So it’s not exactly a great spot for him when he runs into my value range. It was just a very weird hand.

He is the best player in the world so he might have just been leveling everyone, like was raising the flop, planning on tanking and acting like he didn’t know what he was doing and then calling, but I really don’t think so. I talked to Barry Greenstein about it and he said that he thinks Ivey just didn’t think about it.

CP: I don’t think I’ve every seen Phil Ivey Hollywood it for a second so when he looked tortured and super miserable and called, I really… now I’m not in a position to critique Phil Ivey, I do think he’s the best player in the world, but I do think he just got confused and called.

It may also be that as you mentioned he doesn’t know you and you hadn’t shown a lot of hands so at that point there is also some degree of a curiosity factor of “I don’t really know what range to assign to this guy”, so if he had more familiarity with your play then he’d give you more credit for having one or the other.

JM: I mean I think the hand would just play out differently. He’d probably just call the flop, and maybe fold the turn, maybe call me down.

Mercier lost the hand when the turn fell the 8, and the river the Q.

CP: What was that experience like playing in that game because when you came in those guys had already been playing for a while, you were like the new guy, you came in cold. There’s kind of a club there where those guys have played each other for years; were you comfortable?

JM: It was fine, it was fun playing on a show. I was a little nervous at first but I don’t think it affected my play really.

CP: If you had one bullet and you lose all your chips in the second hand, you just have to get up and go after two hands?

JM: Yep! I probably actually should have shoved in the first hand when I opened with twos and there was a straddle and [Tom] Dwan three-bet me. I could have easily shoved for $200k and picked up the twenty-something thousand that was out there and shown a deuce (laughs) and everything would have been different. But I was just on one bullet and didn’t want to get it in with twos against jacks and look like a fish.

CP: That hand concerned me a bit in the sense that it was your first hand. On the show, Tom Dwan had been raising and reraising constantly, and he raised and you didn’t call, and I think one of the other players made a comment like “not even a call”, and maybe in the other guys’ minds it put an image that you weren’t going to mix it up unless you had a certain hand, which should have played to your favour in the Phil Ivey hand if that was the case.

JM: You would think so…

CP: Anyway, we don’t mean to torture you about the hand.

JM: It’s ok I’ve talked about it probably more than any other hand by like four times as much. The amount of time I’ve talked about that hand… (smiles).