Know Your Edge

Over the last year, I’ve written about lots of wacky poker ideas. I’ve defended unorthodox plays (or at least the willingness to make them), I’ve advised learning from bad players instead of mocking them, and of course, I’ve championed taking every tournament edge you can find no matter how small. As it happens, I recently had a hand in the Borgata Winter Open main event where each of these concepts came into a play. It’s a hand you won’t see very often — in fact, I may never see a hand quite like this one again — but that’s why concepts matter. A good decision-making process enables a poker player to handle whatever bizarre situation comes up.

To describe the hand in question requires quite a bit of context, so bear with me. The tale takes place late on Day 1A, as I’ve just been moved to a new table. After folding my first few hands, I raised from the hijack and the player to my left three-bet. I folded. The very next hand I raised a limper, and the player to my left three-bet again. The limper folded, and this time I called with A-J offsuit. The flop came 8-7-6 with two spades. I checked, and my opponent bet 15,000 into a 7,000 pot. I folded, but realized I should start to pay close attention to what this particular opponent was doing.

At this moment, it was announced that we’d be playing five more hands to end the day. (This was a reentry event. Players who busted on Day 1A were allowed to buy in again on Day 1B.) The player to my left open-limped the first hand of the final five, and ended up winning the pot. The next hand, he folded, and I took that opportunity to chat him up a little. “You had kings against me, huh?” I said. He exhaled loudly. “I definitely had something,” he said. Then, unprompted, he added, “I was up to eighty thousand at my high point.” “How much do you have now?” I asked. “Fifty.” He pronounced this word with great sadness — as if having fifty thousand chips were an agony on par with waterboarding. I had 75,000 myself, but the average was only about 43,000. Most players would’ve been thrilled to end Day One with a 50,000 chip stack.

Next hand, the aggressive foe to my left was under-the-gun (UTG) plus one. He raised, and ended up folding before the river. Undeterred, he opened again from UTG. Eventually he lost this pot as well, when he revealed K-7 offsuit at the showdown. All of this brings us to the final hand of the night — the last hand before we would wrap up and move on to Day Two of this World Poker Tour event.

I was now in the small blind, which obviously meant my main adversary was in the big blind. The action folded around to a terrible player in the hijack, who open-limped for 500. The cutoff, a good player, raised to 1,800, while another good player flatted on the button. I didn’t think it very likely that I could get both the cutoff and button to fold, so I flatted from the small blind with A 9. The player to my left then leaned forward in his seat, arched his back and, using two hands, slid his entire stack into the middle. He had 46,200.

The action folded around to the button, who grumbled that he knew he had the best hand. As the button agonized over his decision, it became painfully clear to me that 1) the button had a much bigger hand that I did, 2) the button would eventually fold, and 3) I was about to call off 92 blinds with A-9 suited.

Sure enough, the button folded and with the action on me, I sighed, and then announced: “I call.”

Don’t get me wrong, calling off 92 blinds with ace-nine suited is a crazy thing to do. From a game theory standpoint, I only needed to call a raise that size with the very top of my range to turn my opponent’s play into a mistake. But I’ve preached in these pages that you have to be willing to do something crazy if you truly believe it’s the right play for the situation. And I believed it here.

I’ve also preached that having a lunatic opponent is not a good enough reason to make a crazy play yourself. I’ve seen too many maniacs disguise huge hands with huge bets. But here, I felt I understood this player’s immediate goal. He had shown that he was desperate to get back to his 80,000 high-water mark, and that he was willing to take outrageous risks to do it. I didn’t know why he felt so dissatisfied with his stack, and I didn’t care. I had enough information to make my read — which was that the big blind was moving in with about 75 percent of his hands. I didn’t need to know his innermost motivations for doing so.

Lastly, the tournament concept I’ve belabored most in all my poker writing is that small edges must be pushed. When discussing this hand, some players said they wouldn’t have called with A-9 suited even given the read I had. So I asked if they would’ve called such a raise with two queens if they thought their opponent’s range consisted of nines through aces and ace-king? Most said they would. It turns out that queens have 56 percent equity against the range I just mentioned. A-9 suited has somewhere in the neighborhood of 61 percent equity against the top 75 percent of hands. If I was confident in my read (which I was), then calling was the only justifiable play.

After I called, my opponent flipped over his cards — the jack of clubs and the six of hearts. I won the showdown, which allowed me to go to Day Two with one of the biggest stacks. As I bagged up his chips for safekeeping, he looked at me incredulously and said, “A-9?”

Yup, A-9. I guess I’m just crazy. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, and a three-time WSOP bracelet winner. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.