This post will be about:
- A poker documentary shoot I was a part of that was shooting in Vegas
- Some interesting tournament hands from playing down there
So a few weeks ago, I was invited to be a part of a documentary that features the multiple world champion boxer from London David Haye. The documentary is about Haye trying to become a pro-level poker player. So they invited me to be in the doc to talk to him about poker tells. We sat down in his hotel room and reviewed some footage of him playing, and I talked about some probable/possible patterns he had. (Some press about David Haye learning poker here.)
All in all, it went pretty smoothly, which was nice because I have some pretty bad anxiety and am not at all an on-camera performer kind of person. It was a bit nerve-wracking to have six production crew members in a hotel suite with cameras and mics pointing at you and having to pretend that you’re just having a normal one-on-one conversation. But all in all, with the help of some on-camera practice beforehand and some anti-anxiety drugs, it went okay, and hopefully I’ll make the cut and hopefully the doc will get some exposure. I’ve heard it might be on Netflix so we’ll see if that happens.
I did play a little poker while I was down there and wanted to talk about a couple interesting hands that stood out.
One note before I begin: I’ve played very little poker in the last few years; I’ve played a couple times on The Poker Guys’ $5-10 game in Portland in the last few months and that’s been 2 of the 3 times I’ve played in the last three years or so. And I’ve also never been a tournament player, having only played a few tournaments in my life, and only like 6 over a $500 buy-in. But I played a couple when I was in Vegas recently and I’m actually back in Vegas right now and going to play the $1,500 Monster Stack tournament and probably at least one or two more similar buy-in events. So maybe I’ll have some more interesting hands to write about later on.
I played a $400 NLHE tournament at Aria and busted out not too long into it, but there were a couple interesting hands:
Aggressor immediately asking about opponent’s stack on river
I wasn’t in this one. Blinds were 400-800 w/ one 800 ante from the BB. A talkative, kind of blow-hardy guy was the PFR and had one opponent. The PFR bet the flop and the turn in position on like a Jc 6s 3h 8h Ah runout.
When his opponent checked the turn (fairly quickly), the aggressor immediately asked him, “What do you got?”, surveying his chip stack in a rather agitated way. I was confident at that point that he was weak and contemplating a bluff.
Why would that be? Because players with strong hands will generally be cagey and stoic, at least at first. And the flush possibility on the river makes this a pretty polarizing spot, making it so it’s unlikely he’d be betting without a pretty strong hand (or at least unlikely he’d be contemplating a bet that quickly.) While some players with strong hands will do weird, relaxed things, just out of not caring, that immediate verbal reaction of “How much do you have?” is IMO likely to represent some agitation/consternation due to being weak and feeling an urge to try to win the pot.
If I could add this to Verbal Poker Tells, I would, as I’ve seen it quite a bit over the years since I wrote that. The closest thing I think I have in there is the section on “Immediately asking ‘How much is it?'”, in which I described someone doing a similar thing about someone’s bet size. Here’s a short excerpt from that section, and you can see it’s a similar thing I’m describing.
The aggressor in this hand ended up checking and lost to a pair of 9s. He asked his opponent, “Would you have called a shove?”
A physically ostentatious bet causes me to bluff
This one was a pretty standard hand that is probably one of the most common kinds of behaviors I act on. Still worth including for some weirdness in the hand and just because it’s a common one.
Blinds were 150-300. A couple pretty passive players who’d been playing pretty tight limp in late position and the SB also calls. I have Q8s in the BB and I raise to 1200. All three opponents call (which is a sign I shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing).
The flop is J73r. The pot is 4800. I have about 30K or so and everyone’s in similar range of stacks. The SB checks, I check, and the fourth/last guy bets fast and ostentatiously, putting in 2200. If you’ve consumed much of my books/videos, you know that this will tend to make strong hands less likely, as typically if a player was very strong they’d be more stoic/cagey/thoughtful and instinctively not want to scared people off.
The SB folds and I then go to raise but put in a wrong chip and I end up calling (as I said, I’m rusty and not used to so many colors in the first place). The guy behind me folded and we were heads up.
So this created maybe a slightly interesting spot because I think my opponent knew I’d tried to raise. Not that that probably changes anything. The turn came a 5. I bet 4000 into 9200 and he folded.
A couple things about this hand:
I wouldn’t try this on a wet/draw-y board, even if I thought this guy was weak. Reason being: if there were strong draws he could have, he might go pretty far in the hand and might even shove on me. The fact that the board is so dry reduces hands he can call with and makes it more likely he’s got a medium strength hand that will be an easy fold. (And he didn’t raise pre, which makes AJ less likely, and that’s the main medium-strength hand I’m worried about him going too far with.)
Would this be a good move in the absence of a read like this? It could be defended, as typically the guy’s going to have a medium-strength hand and not a strong hand. But when you factor in the player behind me and the fact that the bettor had seemed pretty tight/passive in general, I think without the tell it’d be pretty spewy.
Quick check in 7-stud mix hand
I decided to enter a $400 7-stud mixed game tournament (7-stud high, high-low stud 8 or better, and Razz) at the Orleans casino. This was mainly out of curiosity and for analysis/interest, as I haven’t played any stud games in like 20 years; I mainly played them in college and a few times in casinos. So I had near-no hope of doing well, but it was a lot of fun and I met some cool people, and I (re)-learned a lot of basic stuff I’d forgotten about stud games.
This hand was from the Razz portion (for those who don’t know; that’s a low only game where the wheel is the best hand). Long story short, it was heads-up between I and a very capable player (in fact, he was the winner of the previous year’s event; he and the second-place winner were both at my table, so pretty bad table draw lol). I was the aggressor, completing 3rd street and betting the whole way, despite having paired up on sixth street and having 2-pair at that point. So I think my hand on sixth street was something like (rough guess): [6-3] A 3 9 6 and my opponent had like 2 7 Q 9 or something like that.
On the river my opponent looks at his card and checks to me immediately. I have a King. Despite having an initial instinct to bluff, I then had the thought that he’s probably snap-checking with all his obvious-call hands and thinking for a second with his super-strong (to consider whether bet or check-raise is better) and very weak hands (to at least consider a bet). So seems like it’d be better to bluff this in those moments when he waited a second or so (because even if it’s both very strong and weak hands, there’ll be more weak hands).
I checked back and he had a 9 high.
I talked with Jason Corlew, a pro stud player who lives in Vegas, about this hand, and he had a few things to say, including:
1) It is fundamentally bad for me to bluff the river, because most players are going to call there once they call 6th street.
2) Most players in my opponent’s spot are going to have an obvious check with almost all their range, including very bad hands, and would only consider betting with very good hands (6- or 5-high).
So in hindsight, it wasn’t as interesting a spot as I thought it was because the behavior wouldn’t yield any actionable information, but it got me thinking about the timing of river checks in general, and how there can be a lot of factors here (who the aggressor was on a previous street; immediate vs a second or two vs a pretty long time; board texture; limit vs no-limit; player skill level). So I wanted to think about this a bit more because I know in some spots, like in most no-limit spots, a quick check can/should make you more likely to bluff, because if a player improved, they’d usually want to think for a little bit (and this is mainly of practical use when a flush card or a likely straight card comes in and really changes the texture/dynamic).
So I want to think about all this a bit more later and write something up about it.
I did a Twitter poll asking what people believed about quick checks, and the results were pretty interesting, if only to see what the general interpretation/thought about it was. Note that if you subtract the ‘See results’, the ‘more likely to bluff’ vote got 48%, about twice either of the other two options. And reading the responses might be interesting, too.
What do you think about quick checks or check-timing in general? Write me at readingpokertells.com/contact or get on my email list at readingpokertells.com/course.
If someone snap checks to you on river in NLHE and you have nothing, does the quick check make you more or less likely to bluff?
— Zachary Elwood (@apokerplayer) June 10, 2019