The Final Hand
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The final hand always gets the most attention. It could be the last hand of a grueling heads-up battle to determine a million dollar tournament winner. Or it could just be the hand you busted out on in your local Wednesday night tournament. Either way, chances are that you (and maybe a lot of other people) will be thinking about that final hand for a while.
In this column, I analyze a final hand from one of my readers. It was the final hand he played in the 2009 World Series of Poker main event, and he has naturally spent hours analyzing and reanalyzing it. I think it’s an instructive hand, and I wanted to share my thoughts about it. I’ll let my reader tell the story.
This hand occurred on day 3 of the main event. It was level 11 with the blinds at 800-1600 with a 200 ante from each player. The table had been playing mostly tight with a few active players and no big name pros. I had just doubled up to around 50,000 chips. The chip average at this point was around 90,000. The best hand I had seen in 3 hours was A-5, and I had not played a hand this level. It was folded around to me on the button, and I looked down at A-J of hearts. I raised to 4,000. The small blind folded, and the big blind (an aggressive European player) reraised to12,000. He had me covered with about 80,000 in chips. I put him on a range of suited connectors (A-K to 7-6), pocket pairs (A-A to 5-5), and some other hands like K-Q and K-J. I decided to call.
Getting reraised when holding A-J often puts a player into a difficult situation. Because A-J is so far behind many of the hands people reraise with, it can be tempting to lay it down. Often folding is the right play, but I like my reader’s call in this instance. Here’s why.
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Tags: andrew-prock, commitment, equity, no-limit-holdem, poker, poker-tournaments, pokerstove, pot-odds, spr, stack-to-pot ratio, world series of poker main event, wsop
It looks like a result-oriented analysis. If the flop had come without an A or a J, our Hero would have lost 1/4 of his stack for nothing. If the Villain had shown AK or AQ (perfectly coherent with his preflop play), Hero would have been condemned for having committed with a hand likely dominated. If I’m reraised with AJ with a 30 BB stack and only 3 BB invested in the pot, I’ll almost always lay it down.