Hand from Borgata WPT

[ActionJeff]

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Your comment about "The best bridge player of all time" was an outright exageration or lie. This comment would make any post you make suspect in my eyes.
What you said was the equivalent of saying some misc. top starter in the nba was the best player of all time.

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pls explain about bridge, great players, etc? I am curious. I thought thor was the big winner in bridge cash and had won the main event tons of times more than other people and stuff

[yaaam1484]

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so whats the key?

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Wtf. I just explained it.

It's obvious that the angle shot makes sense.

The key is that the intention to call does not make sense with his line so far in the hand.

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I think the reason why nobody came up with the key is that you confused everyone.


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He was implying that he meant to throw out a 1k and a 500 chip rather than a 1k and 5k chip. That is not the key to this hand.

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I'm surprised no one is confused by the fact that he wasn't upset. If he did have a monster, wouldn't he pretend to be upset?

Don't focus on this too much though, because it's not the key. Just a little something I found interesting.

I'm curious who the first person to find the key will be. I bet it's going to be a very well respected poster. Maybe LearnedFromTV!

Edit: I'm going to sleep relatively soon. I'll respond more in the morning.

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Thus ruling out and not focusing on:

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UTG and I are silent. The other players at the table debate it, and one calls over the floor. Obviously after hearing the situation, the floor says it's a raise. While the explanation process is going on, the BB says several times that he meant to call. He is very adamant about it too. He doesn't seem upset at the ruling or anything, but I guess he just wants to make it clear that he wanted to call.

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Which made me look at the other things you wrote, but nothing made any sense at all. If you wrote this in another way and didn't confuse us even more I think you'd get the key really quick. As pointed out you only beat a bluff or AK whereas AK is not likely compared to AA/KK/TT. Q high has almost the same strength as your hand.

Another point is that if you got him beat there's not much to gain. If he got AK he's checking the river, if he fires another bullet you are forced to fold unless the river is Q/J.

[operaman]

Bridge doesn't have a main event. It would be more akin to tennis in that it has several respected events. Bridge is a game of the rich. Becuase of this, money is frowned upon in bridge circles and is not the metric of success in bridge. One problem with bridge is the insane amount of titles everyone gets. Being a life master in bridge means you have spent thousands of dollars to participate and nothing else. If you don't have 10 or 15 items on your resume in bridge you haven't been playing enough. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] This combined with the fact that the most fair (least luck) form of bridge involves two 4 player teams makes in even harder to figure out who is a good player and who has the money to hire the best players to play with them. The italian blue team is the closest thing to a consensus pick for all time best team ( 10 consecutive titles in the most respected event of its time). The majority opinion for best player on that team is benito garozzo(sp??). He is "Papi" on okbridge and you can watch and chat with him online which is a real treat if you like bridge. (if he hasn't kicked the buckett since i last watched him. )

thors record would be the equivalent of a tennis player winning 4 doubles events at wimbleton. ( This may well be a underevaluation of his performance and sorry if that is the case mr. thor)

[Ship Ship McGipp]

fwiw i am a poker genius and amazing deep obviously, and i agree that raising preflop is not good against describe opponents.

i would ALWAYS raise two tens, usually two nines, but flatting two eights would be my standard, although raising is not bad and gets better as your postflop skills improve

deepstack jiggas postiion

checkraising the flop is LOL bad, check calling the flop and leading the turn is by far the best line, and check calling and checking again is by far the second best line, and betting checkraising are so far behind that doing them would make me berate you and laugh at your play

[NoahSD]

I agree with Mr. Jones.

[SanchoHH]

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pls explain about bridge, great players, etc? I am curious. I thought thor was the big winner in bridge cash and had won the main event tons of times more than other people and stuff

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The event he has won several times is the "Cavendish", a tournament (participation by invitation only) held anually in Vegas. This is quite an achievement, but the event is far too short (too few hands played) to consider it "the main event", although it certainly has the highest cash prizes.

The most prestigious tournament is the "Bermuda Bowl", the world championship for teams-of four (actually, most participating countries send 6 players, but only 4 are playing at a time). This (and the Women's and Senior's equuivalent) are going on right now in Shanghai. There are two USA teams, both of which are contenders for the title, together with (IMO) the big favourite (and defending champ), Italy.

The USA have a top player pool of maybe 20-30 players, all of which could well be on one of the US teams and have chances to win the world championship. Thor is one of them, although there are a few even in the US who I would consider somewhat clearly better than him when it comes to individual performance (this is always a bit difficult to assess in Bridge as it is a partnership game).

Besides the Bermuda Bowl, there are a few more tournaments (worldwide, and also the so-called "US Nationals", which draw a good international crowd) that are certainly more prestigious when it comes to the recognition you earn by winning them, mainly because they are played over a much longer distance than the Cavendish (which, of course, reduces variance). But the big prize money make the Cavendish more glamorous than e.g. the world championships (where nothing but the title is to be won).

[ebarnet]

first of all, this thread was a huge letdown

secondly, isn't this line with QQ or JJ right also if we're assuming this guy is kinda fishy. He's got QQ, flop is the nut worst flop so he checks. Turn gives him a gutterball, he has a pocket pair and for the love of god it's POCKET QUEENS this adds up to call with QQ or JJ a possibility. Add in the fact that he's drunk- bad decision making, when i'm drinking/pokering i love to make ridiculously stupid aggro plays to blow people off their hands. I just don't think you can throw QQ or JJ out of the range quite yet.

And now to take away all credit from my preceeding writings: I think he was indeed angling with AA or TT exactly because KK bets that flop. Also the fact that he showed the bluff in a small pot and it wasn't too crazy leads me to believe he's really got the goods now.


edit: the more i think about this, the more i lean to QQ, JJ and TT. TT most likely if we agree that when this guy bluffs it's only small pots and it's nothing crazy.

[Mr. S-inator]

This is easy. He was adamant about meaning to just flat call which telegraphs a weak hand. The player, unless retarded, must know that his protestation exposes his hand as weak.

In this hand, only the nuts or close to the nuts would want to seem weak. Any other weak hand and the guy would be quiet.

He does not want to be put under pressure when he has mediocre holdings or a tough spot. This is a very important game for him. Ten thousand dollars means a lot. No way in hell would he A) make such a big mistake by throwing in 5k B)after making such a mistake, let everyone know the strength of his hand. He wants to induce a stupid bluff from the Armenian and thinks that your holding is too weak to play.

Furthermore, His range is what? AA KK AK? That alone makes it a fold but when you analyze his speech, the decision is simpler. I'm a bad player so I call and c/f river but this is potentially a fold.

[FoldEqu1ty]

I agree with ActionJeff et al - the way this thread was phrased/conducted is really condescending and annoying. This hand is just a range exercise like any other, and it is very simple and clear cut imo:

All the turn stuff is irrelavent imo. It's just "He thinks that I thinks that he thinks that I thinks......" and could mean anything. Based on your preflop read, there is "a pretty decent chance BB has a huge hand here". I would say that his range leans heavily towards big pairs here - a straightforward, tight player, is imo highly unlikely to consider AK a monster at this stage of the tournament, and would not have been so sheepish about it preflop - in his mind it is a drawing hand. QQ and JJ fold that turn, leaving his range heavily weighted towards TT, KK and AA here. Even if we add AK to his range, because of positional disadvantage a call here is still -EV.

[Luisgallo]

if he meant to call and he threw what he thought was one 1k chips and one 500 chips why did he have to say CALL?

Also I expect him to have only few 5k chips...he cannot get confused.

We have to assume your preflop reads are correct because this exclude any hand like QJ.

checking the flop with top set or mid set is plausible for a straght forward player.

Also he had few beers, this might make it playing a bit looser and this will put the QJ hand back in action.

I don't think he would act anyway tricky with the floorman ruling, if he is not experienced I think he meant to raise then he realized that calling was better to trap u.

bottom line u are beat here and the key is that guy changed his mind while betting from raise to call.