$2.5K MGM Main Event Part One

The MGM $2.5K Main Event was one of the toughest field I’ve ever played in. Even the guys that could qualify to play in seniors events were seasoned lags (including the likes of Thor and Barry Shulman). Hell, even the one blonde chick in the tournament was pretty darn good if you asked me. ;)

My first table wasn’t actually horrible, because it had one fish at it. I picked up aces early and managed to get my stack up from 20k to 27k; we started 400 big blinds deep. Being as the WSOP Main starts 300 bbs deep, this was a very deep structure, with pretty much every added level imaginable. The dealers were also excellent. When 7-handed, I think my table saw almost 45 hands an hour.

I was moved to a new table that reeked of Black Friday—no one was over 30 and everyone seemed to know everyone’s name. One dude started talking about his various sunglasses purchases, including $3k on a pair (suddenly the $700 I spent on mine from Tiffany’s no longer seemed cool). I ended up playing a few hands with him.

Twice I bluff-check raised him on dry flops and got him to fold. His VPIP% was very high; even considering that he sat out almost an entire (60 minute) level.  Even just watching him play hands I wasn’t involved in was fun! His image got a call out of me in the following hand:

Blinds: 150-300/25

Action: Folded to me in the cut-off with J9o, I raised to 700.  ADZ called in the SB, everyone else folded.  We’re about 25k deep. The pot is about 2k.

Flop: J22

Action: He checks, I c-bet 800. One interesting thing about this tourney was that balancing was a more important consideration than normal because your opponents were for sure paying attention, and with the deep structure it was more likely you’d be at the same table for quite a while.  (I caught another well-known internet player that wasn’t balancing against me and was able to c/r bluff him on a wet-board because he bet ¼ of the pot, which he only did when weak.)

Turn: 2, check check. The pot is ~3,600.

River: A

Acton: He bets 3,100.

Obviously this river card sucks. Some real part of his floating range on the flop is Ax, but the flip side is that this is also a great bluff card in case he floated on the flop with something like KQ. If he had a jack, which he likely thinks is a strong part of his range, then a bet here could be an attempt to get me to fold instead of chopping, though most of the time I think he would check/call the river and likely lead the turn. It is similarly unlikely that he would bet a hand like 99, which he also would likely 3-bet pre out of position. His range here  is pretty polarized.

So am I winning this 32% of the time which would make the call good? I think that really comes down to how wide I think he called my c-bet. I had a pretty aggressive image, and I had bluffed him out of two similar dry flops before (though he didn’t know that they were bluffs). He had also shown a failed 5-bet bluff into quads earlier; so clearly he had a real bluffing range.

In order for it to be a good call, he actually only has to have a few bluffing combos in his range, assuming that he isn’t flatting all suited aces and a ton of off suit aces pre: KQs, KQo, T9s, 98s, T9o. I think that those hands are in his range the vast majority of the time (and since he also I think bets with a J some small % of the time) I think it is a close but good call, especially in a tournament where I’m not as concerned with having a large edge (due to the dense field).

So I called, and he flipped A6s.

After a couple of hours, the table was broken, and everyone was happy about this! Beforehand, some of the table talk had even focused on what an awful table it was. Four-betting pre was very standard; to stand out you had to 6-bet! It was like the pages of Raiser’s Edge coming to life lol.

To be continued! :)