Head Games: Eugene Katchalov, Randall Flowers and Andy Seth

Sometimes it’s hard to get a straight answer from a professional poker player. Ask three players a question and you’re liable to get three different answers. Why? Because: It depends. On the situation, opponent, stack sizes, table image, tilt, metagame, etcetera.

Head Games will peer deep inside the twisted minds of today’s top players. We’ll reveal why they do what they do in sticky situations, especially when it comes down to making a critical decision for a major tournament title or calling a check-raise all-in on the river holding only ace-high for a $500,000 pot. Let the games begin.

The Pros: Eugene Katchalov, Randall Flowers, and Andy Seth

Craig Tapscott: Can you share a few situations that are clearly green lights for you to represent a hand to take down the pot because of your image, game flow, board texture, flop, etcetera?

Eugene Katchalov: A. If you’ve been playing tight for quite some time and the table has noticed, it might be a good time to throw in a three-bet bluff over someone’s raise, as the whole table is due to give you some respect and you can pick up a nice pot without a showdown quite often.

B.  Certain weak opponents fall into the trap of playing their hands almost face up where they will always check back weak hands and bet their strong hands. They may not understand pot control and slowplaying and that makes it easy to bluff them.

C.  Paired boards are generally quite tricky to play multi-way and even heads-up depending on who is in the pot. This is mainly because using a lot of pressure, you can bluff people off some very strong hands.

D.  If a player’s starting range is always really good high cards or big pairs it makes it easier to bluff them on middling boards such as 6-7-8 which aren’t supposed to connect with them and will even scare them if they have overpairs. A similar situation comes up on monotone flops if the opponent has shown weakness. 

Randall Flowers: The situation preflop that is most common for me is, after going card dead for an extended period of time, to squeeze aggressive players. Most aggressive players are going to reraise with their premium hands, especially with an aggressive dynamic that is today’s standard. Even though I’m just card dead, it appears to everyone else that I am just nitty and tight. “Squeezing,” or reraising after a raise and a call (or even multiple calls), is pretty standard for me here. It’s hard for the original raiser to four-bet bluff with everyone else in the pot. The flatter usually doesn’t have a good enough hand to call with and would be ambitiously optimistic to four-bet bluff there too often. Post-flop, my most common green-light bluff situations are when I have more value hands in my range than my opponent, or when I can think of lots of turn and river combinations that let my barrels move my opponent off one pair. If I’m going to bluff, I want to have some equity. A backdoor straight/flush draw, overcards to the board, and a hand that doesn’t have much showdown value all qualify for me. I rarely check behind when I flop a flush draw, so if I continuation bet with nothing and a flush comes in on the turn, I’m most likely firing since I bet all my flush draws on the flop. This is especially true with big flush draws that I can get all-in on the flop versus worse draws.

Andy Seth: There are two keys that I look for when I am thinking about trying to represent a hand I don’t have in order to win a pot. First of all, I need my story to be believable within the context of the hand. If my goal is for my opponent to fold, I want to take a line that my opponent can think about logically and conclude that it makes sense for me to have him beat. A simple example of this would be raising an opponent’s turn bet when a flush card hits and betting strong on the river to represent a flush (if instead I called the turn and raised the river my opponent would have a harder time giving me credit for a flush and might get curious with a mediocre hand). Secondly, I look for spots where my opponent’s range is weak or capped at a certain strength. It’s never fun trying to represent a strong hand that your opponent actually has, so I like to try to represent hands in spots where my opponents will rarely or never have something better than a medium strength hand.

Craig Tapscott: Now turn the tables. What are some things you pick up on to zero in on an opponent who is clearly trying to represent a hand?

Eugene Katchalov: I generally try to use my history with the opponent, also just seeing how he has played some of his previous hands to see if a hand that we’re in together makes any sense.  Sometimes they play their hands in a way that would only make sense if they had some sort of a monster and so even if you have a relatively weak hand, you can sometimes pick off bluffs if the hand just doesn’t add up or seems unlikely.

Also, if you see your opponent making big laydowns with overpairs and top pairs on scary boards or in weird spots, I suggest that you need to take advantage of this and continue applying a lot of pressure specifically on these people in situations where you might not do the same with others. Also at times when you have no hand but feel like your opponent can’t have much either and is still betting, it may be a good time to put in a raise as long as it makes sense and is plausible for you to have a big hand. 

Randall Flowers: When someone is playing a hand against me it’s kind of like they are trying to tell me a story. It’s sort of algebraic the way I look at their emotional state, body language, history throughout that tournament so far, bet sizing, and specifically what they did preflop, and on the flop/turn/river. A lot of times it is rather tough trying to decipher whether a withered loose-aggressive player is on massive tilt just trying to win a pot or if he got hit in the face with the deck. A lot of times there just aren’t enough value combinations that a player can represent. Even though your hand loses to a lot of hands, most of the hands a villain has would check with showdown value, not being good enough to get called by a worse hand on the river. So when a person bets, they represent a narrow range of value hands, often polarizing their range to the nuts or nothing. It’s fun to hero call when you win, but it is brutal when you call a player and lose to their bluff. It’s good to go with your instinct often but you can’t be afraid of looking silly.

Andy Seth: The easiest way to pick off an opponent who is trying to represent a hand is to look for stories that don’t add up within the context of their style/image. We all know the brash young kid who has no clue what anyone else thinks of him and sits around reraising and firing barrels until his pockets hit empty (I’ve been known to be this kid, no hating intended). Sadly, poker is not usually that easy and we are usually forced to rely on more nuanced tells or pattern recognition to catch an opponent bluffing. One simple example where you can catch an opponent representing a hand he can’t have occurs in pot-limit Omaha where you have the ace of a certain suit when there is a potential flush of that suit on board and no straight flush possibilities. Say you fire a bet after a flush hits on the river, and a tight opponent raises you. He can’t have the nut flush since you have the ace blocker, and even if he is value raising a strong flush, he will rarely find a call without holding the nuts, so that is a great spot to recognize your opponent is most likely trying to represent the hand you have blocked, and to steal the pot back from him with a reraise. ♠