Recently I had the pleasure of playing in the 2006 WSOP Main Event. The tournament was a bumpy road for sure, and after some ups and downs I found myself with about 24k and coming to table with a very big stack. Behind the stack Kido Pham poked his head out. He recently won a circuit event that you can watch on ESPN, and is obviously a skilled player. He was sitting on about 80k and luckily sitting in the 10 seat, while I was in the 1 seat (to his left).

The first hand I looked down at was AA in the CO. I hadn’t had AA all day (this was day 2) so I was pretty excited. A guy utg lead out for 4k. I made it 12 and we saw a flop. An all ragged flop came out and I won the hand. Kido then used his big stack to push around for the whole round.

An interesting side point to make is that in live tournaments, you can tell how aggressive a player is preflop by not only the size of his stack, but its composition. Kido’s stack was almost entirely 25 and 100 chips. This meant he was constantly pounding the blinds and probably picking up a lot of uncontested pots.

It came to me in the BB. It folded to him and I looked down at A9 off. He raised and I reraised having position on him with a decent heads up hand. He mucked. The next hand came down and I looked down at J9. He button raised when folded to him. I reraised and he folded. He was getting rather unhappy with this turn of events, as he was used to running this table. I was setting him up. No one at the table had seen my cards yet. I had increased my stack from 24 to 36k and never shown my cards while bullying the bully. All I needed now was a real hand.

Kido Pham raised from the CO. I looked down at AK and make the call this time. The blinds folded. The flop came the best flop you will ever see for AK. Kc 4d 7h. He bets out 4k for about the size of the pot. I push 14k almost immediately in, with about 22k behind. He has me well covered. He goes in to the tank for at least 5 minutes. I start hoping he does something crazy. There are no real draws. He’d have to have K4, 47, K7 44, 77, or KK to have me beat. None of these seemed consistent with how he was acting and playing the hand. A few more minutes later, he shoves all in. I think I beat him into the pot and he cringed. He flips A5 hearts. He’s basically drawing dead and I win a 73k pot.

On the surface, this may seem like an awful play by Kido, and I don’t actually like it because of how short a stack I am. (I like the play much better if I have 50k at start of hand.) But from Kido’s view, I had pushed all in to win a hand, and reraised him 3 times now in 9 hands. I never had to show my hand. So even though I knew when I was making a move or really had a hand, he had no way of knowing. If he folds then, I might run him over for the next hour. I think there are better times for him to make the move (when he has position, when he has more folding equity, and when he has a draw as an escape). He probably does not make the move if I hadn’t shown such aggression since coming to the table. The one mistake he made was taking so long to decide. He gave off a lot of tells that he was thinking of making a move and I would have called him with much less than AK. This situation also reinforces Dan Harrington’s point that at a table, your image is not dependant on how you are playing, but on how it looks to your opponents how you are playing. I looked super-aggro, even though I had been pretty tight all tournament. If you play a very aggressive pre-flop player, play back at him a few times to put doubt in his head, then wait for a hand and trap him; it can really handcuff even the best tournament players.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 10:45 am and is filed under Hand Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.