Child's QQ -v- Yang's JJ

[pendragon]

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It seemed to me that Childs felt in his gut that he had the best hand, but he was just scared of potentially being knocked out early given the small chance he was wrong.

When you play for 4-5 long days, and make it to the WSOP main event final table, and fly out your friends and your family to come and watch you.... and then you are put in a semi-marginal situation where you could be gone in the first 20 minutes -- its easier to take the cautious route and wait for a better spot.

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I think you're probably onto something here. The guy was just afraid of getting knocked out so fast, in front of all his friends who spent a lot of effort to come and support him. He probably wouldn't have called even if he thought it was a coin flip.

Also I think he may have re-leveled himself out of it. He probably thought the others had him pegged as a tight player, so when he raised out of position, he must have figured Yang would not reraise him unless Yang had something (which Yang did - but it was a lesser something). Basically "Crazy aggro has to realize his table image is crazy aggro, so why would he reraise me, with tight image betting out of position, unless he had a monster?"

I think a lot of times players hurt themselves when making multi-level leaps of logic regarding table image and position.
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But man if there's one place you can make a lot of money by just surviving, it's the WSOPME final table. Look at Tuan Lam. Norm and Lon were bagging on his fold to the money strategy. I'll fold into an extra $3M any day. And he was ugly miracle river away from a real good shot at winning.

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Quite true.

Childs may have been close to getting 3:1 on his chips - but that doesn't mean he was getting 3:1 in "real money" terms. It probably wasn't close to that in terms of actual cash. Just being able to hand around the table counts for a lot.
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You need to calculate chip stacks and cash equity if you really want to analyze the situation.

Pure chip EV is not equal to $EV at a final table with steeply ascending pay ladder.

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Well this is pretty much what I wrote before I clicked the next page [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Very true.

I do think this was a bad play. And I hate it too. But, it isn't totally indefensible.
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uh the steepness of a tournament pay ladder is what makes it even MORE of an obvious call IMO

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Not at all. As you know the value of chips in tournament poker is marginally decreasing. The value of $20K in chips in this tourney is $10K, but the value of about $120 million (or was it $160?) is only $8 million, not $60 million. Obviously I'm not enlightening anyone here, but people seem to ignore this sometimes.

At the final table this is also much clearer than it is early in the tourney. The value of a having a couple million in chips is very high if you have a plan to play tight, and stick with it.
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That's right. With Childs' remaining stack, the small increments for 8th-5th and the huge additional EV of winning, chip EV and cash EV are close enough at this point not to come into the decision.

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No, because those extra chips don't guarantee him anything. They still have marginally decreasing value, not linear or increasing.
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In regard to another point, if I really thought that having my family there would inhibit my play, I'd ask them not to come. Seriously. In practice of course, I would want them to be there but if I have to bust on the first hand doing the right thing, so be it.

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Now I have to say, this is just rhetoric. And rhetoric that is highly unlikely to be true in practice.
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if someone has raised the past FOUR OUT OF EIGHT HANDS

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To be accurate, three out of eight hands. The fourth hand he won, he had called Khan's raise pre-flop, checked the flop, and won with a bet on the turn when an Ace fell. Plus, one of the three raises was a reraise from the BB to Kravchenko's attempt at a blind steal. That leaves two pre-flop raises plus continuation bets.

This was the first time Yang had re-raised pre-flop besides the Kravchenko steal attempt.

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Interesting.
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actually the only reason for folding QQ there is that childs thought he could outplay yang in the long run and take a huge pot of him when he hits a monster

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With that flop, QQ pretty much was a monster.

Again, I do hate this play, because 1) it was the pretty much the best possible flop for QQ and 2) Yang's aggressive record so far (though apparently that may have been exaggerated a bit). Child may have multi-level logic'd himself to discount issue 2, but with issue 1, calling is the obvious play. However, while a bad play, it isn't super horrible. Just fairly semi-horrible [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]