Strategy for Round One of the Best Damn Poker Show
Saturday, February 14, 2009 - C00LHandNuke
So by now you’ve probably seen the first two episodes of the Best Damn Poker Show 2 on Fox Sports. The competition was structured so that 24 players would be separated into four six-person tables. One person would be eliminated from each table based on how well Phil and Annie thought they played (dropping our number to 20). But if you were the chip leader at the end, you had elimination immunity. After that Phil and Annie would each select nine contestants to be on their team for round two. The draft would therefore eliminate another two players. After the draft we would play another round with three tables of six-handed action. Phil and Annie would then select their three best players to square off for the final table.
With this in mind, I went into round one with a very specific strategy – play tight and don’t make any stupid mistakes. I would show my “skills” off in round two, after the draft. In many ways, this is the exact same strategy I use when playing the early stages of an on-line sit-n-go. There is very little reason to get involved with a hand like A8 offsuit early on, because, barring some miracle flop like AA8 and an opponent w/ AK, you are just unlikely to get paid off. Yet even at the $500+ buy in levels, I see people defend their big blind with Ax all the time in the opening rounds – the aggressive players may even reraise if the suspect a steal! They flop an ace and lose 1/3 of their stack (or more) because the initial raiser had an ace with a better kicker. To put it another way, when you are nine-handed and the top three spots get paid, it’s almost impossible to amass enough chips to assure yourself a cash. Almost all you can do by getting out of line early is lose.
I was on the fourth table. This gave me the advantage of seeing how the first three tables went. None of the contestants were made privy to hole cards absent a show-down, but watching the first three tables reinforced my strategy. On a few occasions players got busted at the table, but weren’t selected for elimination because the bust was “righteous.” In other words, they played well but either got cold-decked, took a bad beat, or lost a coin flip as the aggressor. Also, from the comments made by Annie and Phil, it was pretty obvious that several players at the second table had some holes in their game. So I figured that I could pretty much count on one or hopefully two of these players to not be drafted. The only wrinkle came when the third table played so well that no player was eliminated. Hollywood Dave dramatically told us at the beginning of the fourth table that because of this, they might eliminate two players from our table. But taking everything into account, it didn’t change my strategy. Essentially I had to finish in the top four of my six-person table to “cash.”
The players on my table were lined up like this:
Niago (seat #1 – the grinder from LA) Niago is very attractive and she knows it. I’m not saying she is stuck up. Far from it. She is a really honest and down-to-earth person. Rather, she knows that men will do stupid things at a poker table whenever an attractive woman is in the hand. And from talking to her at dinner the night before, I could tell that she knew how to adjust her game for guys who would try to bully her. So if she raised my big blind from the button, I would be less likely to three bet without having a good hand.
Patrick (seat #2 – the on-line qualifier) Patrick beat over 8000 players in a series of on-line free rolls to win his seat on the show. As you would expect, he is your typical on-line whiz kid . . . just turned twenty-one, uber-aggressive and hopped up on Red-Bull and vodkas. NOT! Patrick was among the oldest competitors and has three kids older than the majority of the online poker-playing population. So he’s not your typical young-gun jammer. And you have to respect the time, skill and luck factor that guided Patrick through such massive fields in the series of tournys he won to get here. Bottom line, he was an enigma. He was hard to plan for and harder to read. But I expected him to be aggressive and play position – two keys to internet success in particular.
Shawn (seat #3 – the hero in this story, at least for now)
Tony (seat #4 – the body builder from New York) Tony sat in the seat behind me for the flight out to SoCal, but he didn’t know that. During the flight, I got to listen to him tell the guy next to him all of his “good” poker stories. From these stories I knew the following: Tony had experience in big buy-in live events and he liked to play loose early on when the blinds were small in hopes of flopping huge and getting someone to stack off light. With him on my left, I could fire into him on a lot of uncoordinated flops if he limped expecting him to fold most hands. If he called, I would know he had a hand.
Lynn “Sassytexan” (seat #5 – long-time UB grinder) Sassy is a student of Shawn Rice poker. Now I’ve had the pleasure of playing with Shawn for about twelve hours of day one of the WPT’s World Poker Challenge Championship, so I figured that at least in the early stages, Sassy’s game would be solid, maybe even to the point of being ABC-like. If she put lots of chips in the pot, she had the hand. I wouldn’t expect her to bluff or get too carried away with a draw.
Lenal (seat #6 – a pro from Miami, FLA . . . cue Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”) Lenal is covered in tattoos which may lead you to think he is a wild man, but he is a pro. He’s played lots of big events and his home game in Florida includes Chino Rheem (maybe you’ve heard of him from the final table of the 2008 WSOP Main Event) and most of the Mizrachi brothers (if you haven’t heard of them, you’re not reading this because you have no internet and likely have been living on a desert island for the last five years). Needless to say, he was the wild card and the player I would most likely try to avoid.
As play got underway, I stuck to my strategy of playing tight. This was made easier by the fact that I never held a hand better than J8 off suit for the first hour. I love it when the cards and your strategy align! On the first hand I had 72 off suit in the big blind. Tony and Niago limped. The flop came A35 rainbow. I checked. Tony bet and Niago folded. I hemmed and hawed a bit before folding, telling Tony I had misplayed a big pocket pair. In the coach’s booth, Phil commented on my theatrics. But my rationale was simple, I wanted to portray an image that would allow me to steal later and represent the ace when need be. It worked. Even with bad cards, I was able to build my stack by leading into ugly flops against Tony and Lynn, usually after getting a free peek from the big blind or raising the button.
The main hand that shaped the table was a battle of the blinds between Sassy and Lenal. With blinds at 100/200 Sassy had QQ and tried to make it 600 to go by throwing in a 500 chip on top of her 100 small blind. But she didn’t announce raise and thus the “one chip rule” meant she had just called. Lenal wisely decided to see a flop for free with the J9. So the first mistake was made by Sassy. I see a lot of internet players make mistakes like this when they try to move to the brick-and-mortar world. The flop came down J94 with two clubs. Gin for Lenal! Sassy bet 500 and Lenal just called. I believe his call was the second mistake in the hand. When Sassy tried to raise preflop it should have told Lenal she had some sort of hand. Her bet on the flop could have just been frustration with two big cards that missed like KQ, Ax or the like, or she could have a medium to big pair, or even a flush draw or straight draw. Bottom line, she could have anything. Lenal needed to define her hand and protect his hand on this draw heavy board. The turn brought the Q of spades (putting two spades on board and completing the KT straight and the less likely T8 straight). Now all hell breaks loose. Lenal finally puts pressure on the pot and Sassy tanks for a bit before going all in. Lenal makes the somewhat-crying call. When the hands were turned up, I breathed I small sigh of relief because it was the first hand I saw where I felt like a clear mistake had been made. Remember, my strategy was to basically wait for the other players to make a mistake, even if it wasn’t against me. So for the first time at the table, I felt relatively safe.
As it turned out, Phil and Annie actually faulted Lenal more for the hand he played just prior to this one. But because I couldn’t see the whole cards, I had no way of knowing that Lenal was in jeopardy. In that hand he raised under the gun with A4 off suit and defended against a near-min raise from Patrick (holding KK). Even though he was getting great odds due to the smallish reraise, he had a dog hand that was likely a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 dog. And that’s assuming he gets to see all five cards. In reality, he is a bigger dog because unless he flops two pair or better, he will have to fold on most flops. Even assuming all three aces are live, he will flop the ace less than 20% of the time. The same goes if the 4 is the live card and he is up against a bigger ace. One thing worse than only having three outs, is having three outs, but not knowing what they are. That’s the situation you’re in with a rag ace when there is a lot of action preflop. When someone offers me 3 to 1 to call their three-bet it used to make me sick to my stomach to fold because it looks so weak. But in my case, this is ego talking. In order to win, you have to put ego aside and do what’s right.
My cards continued below the Mendoza line for the rest of the table. Near the end I had two hands that didn’t make the television airing, but were mildly interesting. The first, I picked up KK in the small blind and everyone folded to me. I raised it 2.5 times the big blind and had to use all my Jedi mind tricks just to get Tony to call. We took a flop and my read was he completely whiffed. I went ahead with a smallish cbet hoping he would interpret weakness and make a play. He almost bit, but then seemed to remember that Phil and Annie were watching and that he had air. He folded.
The other hand also involved Tony. This time he raised 4.5X from under the gun. I looked down at AJ off suit in the blind. We both had slightly more than 15 big blinds, so I had some fold equity to shove. My read on Tony was that he had a pocket pair that he knew figured to be the best hand five-handed, but that he didn’t want to play a difficult flop with over cards out of position. A lot of this read comes strictly from Tony’s bet size (so you can use it on-line pretty accurately), but it is also supported by my take on his personality. No way he makes that bet with AA, KK, or QQ. It’s not in his trappin’ nature. The only real threat here is that he has AQ. Some players feel the same way about AQ as 55. If they get called and have to play a flop, they hope to hit it hard and turn green when they miss. On the whole, I decided to fold because I didn’t want to run into AQ here (a disaster that would occur probably 1 in 4 times based on my read) and didn’t feel the need to show “strong play” and try to make Tony lay down a hand like 88. If I hadn’t already sensed a mistake from Lenal or if I felt like I needed the chip lead for immunity, I probably would have shoved here. Calling for me wasn’t an option. I talked to him later and he said he had 99.
Well, that pretty much sums up my opening round on the show.
Cheers
Shawn
Tags: Annie Duke, Best Damn Poker Show, C00LHandNuke, Phil Hellmuth, Player's Voice, Poker Strategy
