Setting the stage
Invisible to me behind the dealer, in the #1 seat, is Carl. Carl doesn’t believe much in folding before he sees the three cards in the middle of the table. He doesn’t like folding after those three cards either, but he really feels that you can’t evaluate a poker hand until you’ve seen at least five cards.
Opposite me, in the #4 seat, is Steve. Steve is definitely a for-profit player. I don’t think that he’s a pro – he’s one of those Bay Area guys who’s probably making way more money working for The Man than he could make even crushing mid-stakes poker. Steve and I have tangled a couple of times already this session – I open, he 3-bets, I fold. I open, he 3-bets, I 4-bet, he snap-folds. Steve has no fear of piling chips into the pot.
I mostly avoid Steve, but sometimes the cards don’t give you a choice.
Like when you get AKs
We’re nine-handed, when Steve makes it $30 in the UTG+1 poker position. He gets a cold caller, because don’t you love California poker. I find A♠️K♠️ on the button and make it $150. Now I’m looking at Steve, but then I see that he’s looking over at Carl. I lean forward to look past the dealer and sure enough, Carl in the small blind is cutting out $150, because that’s the current cost of admission to the flop.
Ruh-roh. I have a feeling I know where this is going.
It gets back to Steve, who looks at our stacks. I started with $1800 (180 straddles), Carl started with $1200, and Steve covers us both.
Steve makes it $625 – the original cold caller realizes they’re in the wrong pot, and folds.
Things I’m thinking about
4-bets in my game tend to be of platinum quality. Many people in my player pool never 4-bet AK or QQ. There are 2-3 players at my table who don’t 4-bet anything less than KK (in fact, Carl is one of them).
Steve, on the other hand, is not one of those players. He has no fear of putting big bets in when he feels they’re warranted. He certainly can have hands weaker than KK here. But he’s no maniac – KK and AA now represent a decent portion of his poker range. He respects my game and knows that I’m not wildly out of line.
Things the solver thinks about
Part of our problem here is that most solvers don’t (yet) have an “Include Carl” mode – that is, they can’t model Carl cold-calling my 3-bet. If the pot were heads-up, that is, had Carl folded behind me, then the solver wants Steve to 4-bet an airtight range of AK and KK+, with whispers of QQ, AQs, KQs, A8s, and 65s. QQ calls when it doesn’t 4-bet, the rest fold, and probably better had I never mentioned them. A5s is the only non-premium that has a substantial mix of 4-betting, and that is about 50%.
Things Steve thinks about
However, Carl and the original cold-caller have generously donated 18 straddles to the pot. Steve is highly motivated to pounce on those dead 18 straddles. Sure, he runs into me having a premium sometimes, but that’s why they call it gambling.
Steve is smart enough to know all this, and has probably expanded his 4-bet range at least a bit.
Things I worry about
This is where various other precincts of my being were reporting in.
In my head, I knew Steve could be wider than the KK+ hands that would leave me in bad shape. But in my gut, I knew that the way he played the hand was totally consistent with having one of those monsters.
My gut also reminded me that I was in for a $1k buy-in, which I had grinded up to $1800 over the prior three hours. And should Steve and I get it in for 180 straddles and my AKs didn’t improve against his (e.g.) JJ, all my profits, not to mention my original $1k buy-in, would be wiped out.
GTO poker, and the best players, don’t think about that stuff. At our current stack depth, the solver mostly 5-bet jams AKs, 5-bet raises without jamming some (!), and actually calls 30% of the time.
That said, I think we can all agree that with Carl’s mostly dead money behind me, jamming would be the only correct way to continue.
What I did, what I wish I’d done
I would like to say that I shipped in my $1800 and Steve was left to sort out the mess (or snap call with his kings).
Unfortunately, my gut got the better of me, and I ended up folding. Carl reluctantly folded (it drove him nuts not to see those three other cards) and Steve dragged in a big ol’ pot, paying an entire $1 in rake for his efforts.
Let’s estimate Steve’s total range. JJ+ (three each AA and KK, six each JJ and QQ), A5s (three), AK (nine), and some random bluffs or weak value hands (six total?). The bluffs and weak value are easy folds. With AK, Steve has to call, though he can’t be thrilled about it. QQ and JJ are in a miserable situation, and because I’m over there in the #9 seat with that big red disc in front of me, Steve has zero fold equity. He might very well choose to fold JJ, which would be a fantastic outcome for me.
Let’s do the numbers
To help drive the point home to myself, I created a spreadsheet (thank you to Andrew Brokos for the original version) that shows the various outcomes, and my Expected Value (EV) for each of those outcomes.
I guessed that Steve would call JJ+ and AK, and fold his bluffs and weak value hands. Conveniently enough, this has him calling with exactly 27 of my proposed 36 hand combos, or 75% of the time. Against that range, I have 43% equity.
So I have +$220 in EV by jamming. Note that to the degree Steve folds JJ, QQ, or AK, I’m making more money, and (e.g.) Steve’s JJ certainly doesn’t have a fist-pump call.
Why I did what I did
On my best cash game strategy, I would have quickly gotten the all-in disc in front of me. It’s clear to me now in hindsight, and I even feel that my brain was lobbying for that decision all along. My brain was perfectly happy taking the risk of running into Steve having a premium.
My gut, however, won the argument, with some balderdash about not wanting to turn an $800 win into a $1000 loss.
The good news, which was later pointed out to me by a poker buddy, was that I realized that I wasn’t playing my A-game. I had let my gut make a decision that my brain knew wasn’t correct. It happens to all of us – the key is to recognize it and stop it, one way or another. A couple of orbits later, I picked up my chips, and left the club to go find dinner and think. This is what Tommy Angelo calls “A good quit,” and at least I got that part right.
Lesson learned
Of course, this exact situation will never come up again. But I reinforced an important lesson by rethinking the hand many times over a delicious Ethiopian vegetarian combo, discussing it with some trusted buddies, and writing it down here. That will help ensure that when I get into a similar spot, my brain will tell my gut that it’s only money, and sometimes you’re just destined to get broke.
And I won’t have to walk out of the club thinking, “Damn. He probably had A5s in full.”
