As to hands, I played an extremely frustrating session today and I'll share a few hands, cause they are pretty difficult spots, and because I feel the sting still (-190k) and I want to exorcise it! Today WSOP ME champion Peter Eastgate made his entrance on to the Stars nosebleed tables, playing anyone and everyone on 100/200 and 200/400 nlh. Up early and coffee in hand I sat down scanning my usual FTP haunts, but seeing his sn Lsser sitting this high made me decide to run up my 49k stars roll via 200/400 nlh. A quick aside, before his WSOP victory his screen name had been seen on stars playing 25/50 for about a week, where he had been forming games around him and playing crazy. So this was the same idea, but for 8x the stakes and he was insisting on HU NLH, my best game. My friend was playing him at 100/200 at the time, and after winning a few stacks from lsser, lsser demanded 200/400. He has been running awful lately and so passed the option on to me. And so here I went spamming my aim list for people to send me money. One friend acquiesced and shipped me 120k + another 20k from a friend and so off to the races I went playing one or two tables of 200/400.

I'd like to say that this is the best game I've had in the last 4 months. Not because I had the biggest edge, but because I had a very clear fundamental edge that I could hold on to, and I knew he had just won the friggin WSOP ME, and I knew that meant he was young and rich and European, a deadly combination in high stakes poker. He wasn't gonna quit, and I thought this my chance to make 300k+ in my best game.

I don't know that I think about hands in quite the same sense as some people. I mean they aren't isolated at all. So this is my sort of profile on Eastgate psychologically, and then over the course of today I learned exactly how he plays NLH. I sort of wrote down all these reads stream of consciousness style, I usually build a player profiles rather than just analyze hands in a vacuum.

I'll start with three, though there were many more interesting spots on the day (as their usually are when you lose a lot, interesting=close), but I'll use these three as they are probably the most fun.

I'm going to start with the good and move to the bad. The first hand against him was relatively early in the match, I had been minraising because he was 3betting maybe 38% of hands, and my goal was to play a bit more postflop and try to reduce my variance a bit when my options were close in value (so less 4bet bluffing and more flatting in pos). I min raised to 800 with Qh 9c and he predictably 3bet to 2800 with effective stacks of 29k. Now, this isn't one of my best preflop calls, and unfortunately not even close to one of my worst and I called. The flop came 9c 3s 6s and he led out 3100 into 4800. My read on him at this point was that he can have almost any bway combination, some small and med pairs, and some suited connector hands which have hit the flop in some way. I just stoved my hand against what I think his range is preflop and I'm a 68% favorite which is actually pretty substantial when you consider how wide ranges are here preflop. I don't think him betting out changes that in any meaningful way as he is apt to check and call with some of his weaker pairs and bways, but let's say against his betting range I only have maybe 65% equity as an estimate (I stoved this too, but against a player as arbitrary in his decision making as Peter it's not as strong an assumption). So, I made a small raise on the flop to 7200, which should leave him some fold equity on a jam and may allow him to pull some kind of silly stop n go with a 55 or AK type hand if he decides I'm on a draw. Again, with a med-strong made hand I want to allow him to get the last bet in. To my surprise, he flat called the flop with 19k behind in a 19k ish pot. The turn came Ad and he checked. I thought on the flop that flat-calling was the least likely action he would take with any of his range, and so I had to reevaluate. I still don't think he has Abway, because it's a huge disaster to allow me the last bet with a bluff or draw when he has overs which beat a draw and one pot sized bet left, and I don't think he plans on check/calling down AQo on this board. I also think with any small trace of fold equity he would jam a draw on the flop, so I discounted OESDs slightly and more strongly flushdraws from his range. That left weak made hands, weak gutshot type and 87 type str8 draw floats, and slowplays. Against this new range, betting only is valuable for protection, and risking a PSB on the turn when I'm likely to only be called by better and I estimate his non-slowplay range has 20% equity or less is a weak play. He also can have A6 or A3 occasionally which improved. I made a med-long timing tell which I think can indicate anything from a FD to a bluff which gives up on an overcard, to a slowplay. I'd also like ot add I don't think he was thinking nearly this deeply about the hand, I get the feeling his postflop play consisted mostly of mashing buttons and trusting his "gut", it was my job to make sense of his gut. The river came down a Js and in less than a second he jammed for 19k. Other than the big bet he had just made this didn't change my assesment of his handrange in any meaningful way from the turn. And the more I thought about the hand, the more it actually narrowed it, and pushed me towards calling. Peter rarely acted instantly on later streets, especially when the board changed, and the flushdraw coming in on the river given my line is just very important even if he doesn't think I have it particularly often, I certainly should have it more than he does. So when he insta-jammed I figured his slowplays had to be discounted as none of his slowplays beats a flush, and he's not tricky or stupid enough to snap jam an Ace or med 2pair on the flush card without thinking about it for a second. What that left me with was him turning a pair into a bluff because an A + flush fell, or him bluffing with one of the random str8 draws which all missed. I called, he showed T7cc. Ship.


The second hand I think I misplayed slightly. Lsser opened the button for 1200, I made it 4000 with TT, with 55k effective stacks. I had been 3betting more frequently as stacks got deeper but it probably wasn't too noticeable to him. At this point he made it 11000, with 45k behind, giving me 3:1 ish preflop and 8:1 ish on his stack. This was his first 4bet in 580 hands total so his range has to be something like JJ+, AK, and the occasional bluff. First of all, getting it in sucks. I ship in 55k to win 11k and when called I have 36% equity or so. Before I call I need to run some postflop situation through my head in order to play profitably. Any non AK board I'm considering a blank and so peeling or CRing has to be an option. The big sticking point here is that in only one specific scenario can I peel preflop profitably and that scenario is if he does not bet AK on the flop so that I can play perfectly on the turn/river and maybe get a bet from AK unimproved (which is 50% of his combos btw so this isn't trivial). I expect him to always bet overpairs on the flop so in this scenario of checking AK unimproved and betting overpairs I can win with TT, but then I can win any pair as well. Since I had no 4bet pot play with him, my only info was that he always bet his aces in 3bet pots unimproved. Will he in a 4bet pot? I don't know they are very different situations. So I should have folded preflop. Instead I called, and the flop came 8h 7h 4c and I checked he bet 13.6k. What's changed here? Nothing, except a scary board like this I expect him to bet AK even less than usual, so I made a "big" fold, which is actually pretty easy once I go through it. So that was a small mistake.


This third hand may or may not be a mistake, but probably is, but it's hilarious. With 29k stacks I call a minraise from the BB with Jd 2d. Whatever. Flop came down 4d 3c As and I checked to him as he was cbetting this board almost 100% of the time. He cbet 1200 and I made it 3600, although I expected him to peel with any piece of the board I still expected him to fold 50-60% of the time, which with my gutter and back door flush draw makes this profitable. I expected him to 3bet with any 2pair+ or flopped str8, so this also gained me a bit of information about his handrange. He would fold any overcards unimproved KQo type of stuff, but call wiht any gutter or pair, which is quite a few combinations when you are opeing 86% of buttons like he was. He called. Turn was the Td and I decided to check. In hindsight I think this was worse than betting as I think he folds any gutter, any 4 or 3, and maybe even a hand as strong as 54. I'm also not sure that he jams an ace, and I'm still not really sure. He probably jams his ace+gutter combos or pair+FD combos, but rarely bare draws. So in hindsight this really hinges on how often he jams bare aces, as around a third of his range going into the turn contains an ace. I still think I should have bet, but I checked. He instantly checked behind. This threw up a sort of red flag as he had been betting a ton of turns in raised pots when I took a CR/check line. In fact, after I have looked at this hand closely my best turn play is really close between bet/fold and c/r turn, with C/C being slightly worse than either. But only slightly. River came down a relatively blank 4o and I checked, as a bluff in this spot represents a weak ace, but does so pretty poorly, so I should really have the ace against a basic player like Lsser. He bet 6800 into 8400 pretty quickly. Now I had three legitimate options, call/fold/raise. Fold is of course the standard play because I have jack high and he still has a range containing aces, fours, and bluffs, maybe the occasional slowplay from the flop. I had already decided his range was around 1/3 Ax going into the turn, adding the 4x combos which are very likely to check quickly on the turn that means he probably has an ace or better half the time in terms of combinatorics. If I c/r he should fold the Ax combos sometimes and always call with 4x, but I don't think he will, because my line is really quirky and he doesn't seem to be mcuh of a thinker, so c/r is out. That leaves calling, where if I'm getting 2 to 1 I can call here with J high since I should be ahead of all of his str8 draws and behind all of his combos of Ax and 4x. But two other questions need to be sorted out before I can do this, I need to make sense of what his turn insta-check and river bet means, and if he bluffs with Khigh/Q/J high missed gutters or 3x. At the time I didn't really know, but since I was losing I decided the turn check meant a hand which didn't want to get blown off its draw like 56/87/28/T6 etc and not a hand with showdown value which didn't like A8. I also decided he would check down K2 type hands for the same reason. The main merit to my call here is that if my assumptions are right it can be good, and if it works it can be a real momentum changer against most players. But my assumptions on the river were way too shaky, mostly my interpretation of the insta turn bet, so I think it was a med-poor call and he showed meA7o.