Ed Miller’s WSOP Main Event Day One

I played the WSOP main event for the first time this year. Every year I have wanted to play, but it has always seemed that something came up and I couldn’t devote the time. The long, demanding schedule of major tournaments usually makes them a no-go for me and my family.

In general, I think people make too much of strategy differences between cash games and tournaments. This is particularly true in the main event with its glacial structure and deep stacks. All of day one, we played cash-game no-limit hold’em and I was well in my element.

Most people play these levels too loosely. Our table was nine-handed most of the day, and at nine-handed tables, good hands are dealt out too often to be constantly in there with junk. If you’re Vanessa Selbst, and your postflop play is absolutely razor sharp at almost all times, you can play loose at a nine-handed table and do fine. But none of my opponents was Vanessa Selbst – not by a wide, wide margin. And yet they were playing loose like they could get away with it.

My strategy was to play somewhat tighter ranges than whoever else had entered a pot, and then virtually refuse to give up on the hand after the flop. At least I wouldn’t give up until someone took an action that had me convinced that they’d hit the board well.

“Good” players who play loose preflop tend to try to bet their way through hands postflop to make up for their hand weakness. This works well against amateur players who play straightforwardly to their hand strength and give up when they miss the flop.

But it doesn’t work well at all against me. I give these bets very little credit, and I will respond to such a bet upwards of 80 percent of the time with a call or raise. This, of course, doesn’t mean I’ve hit the board well 80 percent of the time. I’m hanging in there with a lot of junk. But since I start with the stronger range of hands, I maintain that hand strength advantage throughout the hand, and I’m entitled to use that edge to my advantage postflop by sticking around and getting in the last bet.

This strategy worked well for me on day one, as I finished the day with nearly triple a starting stack. Here are a couple of hands I played.

Blinds are 150-300. My opponent and I each have well over 20,000 in chips. He opens from middle position for 700. I estimate he would do this with roughly 50 percent of his hands (or perhaps even more).

Everyone folds to me in the small blind. I make it 1,600 with A 10. The big blind folds, and the raiser calls. I think he never folds.

The flop came 7 7 2. I checked.

I check a lot when I’m out of position. My opponent has a 50 percent hand range. That makes me a strong favorite with ace-high on a very dry board like this one. If I bet, one of two things can happen. My opponent can just fold his junk. This is a fine outcome, but it doesn’t exploit my opponent’s willingness to put money in the pot with bad hands in any way.

Or, my opponent might decide to play back at me. At that point, I didn’t really expect my opponent to play back too often, so I would be unsure of how to handle a flop raise. Would I be getting the best of it by continuing on in the hand, or not?
As a general rule, I prefer to stay as much as possible in familiar territory. I knew I could get my opponent to bet his weak range if I checked, but I wasn’t sure how often he’d try to bluff-raise me if I bet out.

So I checked. He checked back.

The turn was the Q, making the board 7 7 2 Q. I checked again, and this time he bet about 2,200. I called. With ace-high and the nut-flush draw, I’d be crazy to fold against this player’s hand range and willingness to bet air.

Check-raising the turn would have been fine, but it suffers from some of the same drawbacks as betting the flop. I’m not sure what his range might be to reraise the turn. If I check-raise the turn, I also possibly miss out on some implied odds if I make my flush on the river.

After I check-call the turn, if I hit my flush on the river, I can make an oversized river check-raise. Given my action in the hand, someone who reads hands would easily suspect that I could be bluffing the river, and I might get even a large bet looked up light.

The turn was an offsuit 5. I checked. My opponent bet 6,500. This was a large bet for my opponent that I thought polarized his range to A-A, K-K, A-Q, trips or better, or air. Specifically, if he held a hand like Q-6 suited, I thought he would either check it back or make a smaller value bet.

I called, and ace-high was good.

My opponent was simply playing too many hands preflop. When you play 50 percent of all hands, especially against a preflop reraise, you are forced either to just give up on most pots or try to bet your way out of weakness. I expected this player to bet, and so my strategy was just to give him the opportunity to do so.

There was another player at my table who wasn’t as loose, but I noticed that he, seemingly at random, would break out bets that were oddly-sized. Way too large. I hadn’t been able to deconstruct exactly what his criteria were for betting large, but I decided nevertheless to try to get him to do so against me in a predictable, controllable situation where he would misread my hand.

It was 200-400 blinds with 50 antes. I had about 45,000 chips. A weak player limped in, and for the first time all day, I decided to limp. I held A-Q. My goal was to create deception in the mind of the target player, who was in the small blind in this hand. If an ace flopped, I figured he would not give me credit for holding one since I’d raised every ace all day long.

My target raised to 2,400. The weak player folded, and I called.

The flop came A-Q-2 rainbow. Nice when that happens, right?

My opponent came out betting for 8,000, one of his wildly oversized bets. I called.
The turn was a 7. He bet 20,000. More oversized bets. At this point he had only about 15,000 remaining, so I put him all-in hoping he had an ace and would call. Instead, he folded instantly.

By throwing some deception into my game, I got my opponent to make his signature overbets in a predictable, controllable way that I was then able to exploit. ♠

Ed’s brand new book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.