Breaking Down ‘The Worst Fold In Poker History’

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Every so often, an epic poker hand goes down that creates a tremendous amount of buzz and widespread discussion amongst the community.

It probably started back in 1876 in Deadwood, when a grizzled vet was gunned down with a powerful holding of aces and eights before he could table the winner. And of course, in 2003 an internet qualifier pulled off the bluff of the century on his way to an improbable world championship that changed poker forever.

At the final table of the prestigious $50,000 WSOP Poker Players Championship, a pot went down that some have nominated as one of the worst folds in history.

Given the enormous amount of hands played throughout history, that’s some lofty title to be bestowed. So let’s see for ourselves if this hand is worthy of such a label.

The Poker Players Championship tests it’s participants in nine different poker variants (NLH, Stud, Omaha8, Razz, PLO, LHE, Stud8, NL 2-7, Triple Draw). With three players left, the chip counts and prize money left to play for were as follows:

The hand occurred during the Limit Hold’em round at the 150,000-300,000 blind level. The stakes were thus 300,000-600,000 which are certainly huge relative to the stack sizes.

Paul Volpe folded the button, and Ryan Leng raised from the small blind with A 5. Short stacked Dan “Jungleman” Cates chose to defend his big blind by simply calling with K Q.

The flop came down A J 7 and Leng decided to check his top pair weak kicker, even though this was a spot where the preflop raiser would normally choose to bet a very large portion of their range. Jungleman reacted to the check by betting his “nut no pair” with a gutshot straight draw, and Leng called.

The turn was the 9 and that street got checked through.

The river was the K and that is where the action got really interesting. Leng decided to lead out the 600,000 with his top pair, and Jungleman opted to put in his last 900,000, which was only 300,000 more or half a big bet.

If this was a cash game, the only consideration are the 11 to 1 odds that one is receiving to call the bet, and if you fold you must be correct in doing so at least 91.7% of the time.

In a tournament situation, different considerations apply since you can never trade in your chips for real dollars and if you go broke you cannot rebuy.

Therefore, we must look to the Independent Chip Model (ICM), which uses stack sizes to estimate a player’s overall equity in a tournament based upon how often a player is expected to finish in each position. Expected value in dollars ($EV) is the term most often associated with how much a chip stack is approximately worth, assuming all players are equal in skill. Certainly all players are not all equal, highlighting one of the limitations of the model. However, in this particular case all of the players left were supremely talented players so skill was probably not a big factor here.

Leng ended up convincing himself that there was no way his hand was good, and folded. He later on stated that he did not know Jungleman only raised a half bet more, but for our purposes we will assume he was fully aware of the accurate bet size.

As shown below, when making a correct fold, Leng earns himself $9,177 ($720,586 – $711,409) in $EV:

However, when the fold is incorrect, he loses a whopping $106,687 ($818,096 – $720,586) of $EV:

Crunching the math, Leng needs to be correct in folding at least 91.4% of the time, which is actually a little lower than it would need to be in a cash game. The reason for this somewhat surprising result is that the innocent bystander in the hand, Paul Volpe, shared in taking a hit to the tune of $44,480 ($725,552 – $681,072) in lost $EV.

That said, the mathematical loss in expectation that Volpe absorbed is probably not as much as many would have suspected. ICM only considers stack sizes, and since his chips were unaffected by Leng’s decision, the calculations assume he was still as likely to win the entire tournament three-handed as he would have been if Leng called and the match became heads-up.

However, unfortunately for Volpe he ultimately bowed out in third place, which is an enormous bad beat. Perhaps he may feel better knowing that he only lost $44,480 in theoretical money as opposed to at least the minimum of $185,385 in real dollars. But my guess is that he or anyone else wouldn’t consider this to be much of a consolation.

How often should Leng expect to hold the best hand? This is of course impossible to say, but Jungleman really shouldn’t be raising a worst hand for value as the times he wins an extra half bet are more than offset by the times he extinguishes his tournament life when he “value cuts himself.”

It also doesn’t seem as if Jungleman would often be bluffing when Leng only has to put an extra half bet on the river. Still, that does look strong and could be a desperation play with something like 8-6 in the hopes Leng has something like ten high. However, if Leng did hold such a weak hand he would have probably had just led the flop against a handcuffed shortstacked opponent.

It’s problematic that Leng played the hand in a somewhat unorthodox manner and whenever you do that while underrepresenting the strength of your holding, it’s best to not play guessing games on the river. Especially in a situation such as this, when the cost of being wrong extends beyond what we can measure from a mathematical perspective.

Here, we have a chance to eliminate a very dangerous opponent; one who could ride the momentum of a bad fold and further fuel his belief that he was foreordained to win. For those of you who did not see the event, Jungleman was dressed as some type of superhero (I’m too old to know or care to find out who) and often joked throughout the telecast that his special powers would ride him to victory.

Afterwards, Leng was very hard on himself in social media, however in my estimation probably a little too hard. If we take all of the emotion and “metagame” factors out of it and had the ability to run a simulation of a million trials, I would wager the fold would be correct more than the required 92.1% of the time.

Under that pretense, it’s therefore hard to consider it one of the worst folds in history. Had Leng made a correct fold, it wouldn’t have gotten the attention that it did.

It was just a momentous, but freak hand where the stars aligned and everything happened exactly as they needed to for Jungleman to win the hand in the manner that he did. The Poker Gods work in mysterious ways, perhaps this was their work and Daniel Cates was always destined to win this event. ♠

Kevin Haney is a former actuary of MetLife but left the corporate job to focus on his passions for poker and fitness. He is co-owner of Elite Fitness Club in Oceanport, NJ and is a certified personal trainer. With regards to poker he got his start way back in 2003 and particularly enjoys taking new players interested in mixed games under his wing and quickly making them proficient in all variants. If interested in learning more, playing mixed games online, or just saying hello he can be reached at [email protected].