Final Table Takedown: Ian Johns Takes Home a Third Gold Bracelet and Second of the 2016 WSOP

Event: 2016 WSOP $10K Limit Hold’em Poker Championship
Players: 110 • Entry: $10,000 • First Prize: $290,635 • Finish: 1st

Ian Johns is married and the father of three boys. He is a professional poker player who primarily plays cash games and his main stay game is limit hold’em ranging from $40-$80 to $200-$400 limits. Each year he travels to Las Vegas to play the limit events at the WSOP. He is also a huge daily fantasy sports (DFS) fan and takes it very seriously during the football and basketball seasons.

John’s first WSOP gold came in 2006 for $291,000 in the $3,000 Limit Hold’em event. Before winning the 2016 $10,000 Limit Hold’em Championship, Johns won the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E event a few days earlier. Johns has more than $1.2 million in career tournament cashes.

Key Concepts: Hand ranges; Player vs. player dynamics at a final table

Craig Tapscott: Before coming in to this final table, did you have a plan? There are some very successful players and a number of WSOP bracelets between them at this table.

Ian Johns: My plan was similar to my general approach to limit tournaments. I’m mainly trying to increase my stack in situations that don’t bring a lot of volatility.

Throughout the final table, I tried to take low variance lines that would help me slowly chip up, until I was in a position to go for the win once we got short-handed.

Johns raises to 20,000 holding K Q. Rast calls from the big blind.

Flop:  A K 3 (pot: 45,000)

Rast checks. Johns bets 10,000

IJ: This is a pretty normal play here. I’m continuation betting my entire range on the flop pretty much, and I happen to have made second pair.

Rast raises to 20,000. Johns calls.

IJ: I have an easy call with second pair, top kicker. 

CT: Do you have him on a solid range in your mind at this point after the check-raise?
IJ: Yes. When I call the flop, I feel his most likely hands are top pair or better or a flush draw. There’s some chance he has a king, a gutshot, or air, but my read is initially focused on top pair or better or the flush draw.

Turn: 9 (pot: 85,000)

Rast bets 20,000.

CT: I am sure you anticipated that he would keep barreling. Can you continue to call him down?

IJ: On the turn, I’m expecting him to bet all of the hands he check-raises the flop with for the most part, and he obliges. I decide to call for a few reasons. For one, I feel that I’ll have the best hand a good portion of the time. Two, I have a five-outer plenty often against Rast’s hands that have me beat. And three, I don’t want him to feel like winning pots off me is easy in this situation so I wanted to get to the river.

CT: So the simple answer is you’re stubborn?

IJ: (Laughs) Well, limit hold’em is a game where stubbornness rules the day. If you’re playing properly, you should be getting to the river often due to the price the pot is laying you and your presumably strong starting hand selection.

Johns calls.

River: 3 (pot: 125,000)

Rast bets 20,000.

CT: Can you call this bet? He has kept the pressure on the whole way.

IJ: It’s definitely a situation where the ‘standard’ play is to call. However, I know Rast has likely concluded by this point that I have an ace or a king in my hand and I’m likely to make that ‘standard’ play. Knowing that, his bet signifies strength in my mind.

CT: Would he continue to bet a draw like this?

IJ: There is an off-chance that he has a small flush draw and desperation bluffs the river hoping I had a bigger flush draw. But I made my decision on the turn that he wouldn’t bluff the river hoping that I fold a king, so I was operating on the assumption that he would give up on his bluffs. So, in the end, I decided to make a very exploitable river fold and was just comfortable with the read I made. Matt Matros was in the booth commentating and expressed quite a bit of surprise that I folded.

Rast wins the pot of 125,000.

CT: Was it a good fold? Did you find out what he had?

IJ: Yes. He ended up having A-2, so I was happy I made the right read.

CT: So I’m curious. You and I only talk every few years when you are winning bracelets. This is your third, congratulations. I don’t think you are on the live circuit much. So what does World Limit Poker Champion Ian Johns do day-to-day? Are you in cash games regularly or just soaking in the sun on the beach in some exotic location?

IJ: Day-to-day I’m pretty much grinding, be it in limit hold’em cash games or working on DFS or both simultaneously. I wish I had something glamorous to tell you, but it’s grind, grind, grind, and then spend time with the family in the evenings.

Key Concepts: Blind vs. blind; Hand Reading; Deception; Pot control

Johns raises from the small blind to 100,000 holding A 10. Balynskiy raises to 150,000 from the big blind.

IJ: My preflop raise is standard, of course. When he three-bets, I have a hand that’s strong enough to four-bet in a blind vs. blind spot, but I’m calling 100 percent of my range in this situation for deception in general and also pot control in a tournament setting.

Johns calls.

Flop: 8 6 2 (pot: 300,000)

Johns checks. Balynskiy bets. Johns calls.

IJ: Both of our flop plays are completely standard. I fully expect him to continuation bet close to 100 percent of the time, and my hand is much too strong to consider folding, but not quite strong enough to raise, so I call.

Turn: Q (pot: 400,000)

Johns checks. Balynskiy checks.

IJ: My check is standard, and now the hand starts to get interesting. Balynskiy opts to check behind. At this point, I feel fairly confident that I have the best hand. I would expect him to bet virtually any pair. The only hands I’m concerned he could have that beat me are A-J and A-K.

CT: In limit is it ever a good bet to bet here after he showed weakness with a check?

IJ: Well, that’s pretty tough to answer. So much of whether a bet is good or not is dependent on your ability to read your opponent’s hand range, know his tendencies for folding, calling, or raising, and then aligning your actual hand with what the best approach is against his range. Against some opponents, checking to induce a bluff may have been a better play here. Against others, I could check and fold. It’s all situational like most things in poker.

River: 5 (pot: 400,000)

IJ: Since I decided I likely had the best hand when he checked the turn, I now had to decide what my optimal river play was. Throughout the day, Balynskiy had been three-betting his big blind against the small blind a fair bit, and he mostly had showdown bound type hands like pairs, king-highs and ace-highs.

CT: So can you bet for value now?

IJ: Yes. Having decided that I didn’t think he had a pair, but did have something like king- or ace-high, I thought that value betting was a better play than trying to induce a bluff. I figured that it was many times more likely that I would be called by a worse ace-high or a hand like K-10, than Balynskiy deciding to bluff with a worse hand. For that reason I opted to value bet the river with the ace-high.

Johns bets 100,000. Balynskiy calls and mucks when Johns reveals his hand and Johns wins the pot of 600,000 with ace-high.

CT: Perhaps share some limit hold’em blind on blind strategy for us. Any tips?

IJ: One thing a lot of novice limit hold’em players do in the blinds is play too tight. Doing some research and thinking about your preflop strategy is the first step to becoming a good player in the blinds. An extension of those widened preflop ranges leads to the post-flop ranges being widened as well.

CT: Anything else?

IJ: Well, understanding these two fundamental ideas should open people’s eyes to the fact that you just have to take a different approach to limit hold’em in blind versus blind play. Hands like ace-high or bottom pair are hands that you need a good reason to fold, as opposed to hands that you’re wary of showing down if you had raised from middle position.

CT: So what are you recommending?

IJ: I would say that once you’ve come to grips with these ideas, my best advice would be to figure out which approach is most comfortable for you. You should be aggressive, but do you want to be hyper aggressive? Do you want to be less aggressive, but extremely showdown bound? These approaches have merit, and figuring out a way to blend them into your blind play will help you out immensely playing blind versus blind in limit hold’em. ♠