Even the best players in the world make mistakes. Join Sam Greenwood as he breaks down and analyzes hands played from the high roller circuit on his Punt Of The Day Substack.
The more you do something, the more you grow accustomed to it. I try to not take things in my life for granted, up to and including that people are interested in reading the more than 200 essays, blog posts, and newsletters that I’ve written for Punt of the Day.
I was in awe when people told me stories about playing poker with Phil Ivey. I remember being 17 years old and getting kicked out of the Rio Convention Center for trying to spectate the WSOP. The security guard said I needed to be 21, and he was not fooled by my very bad fake ID.
If you told that devastated 17-year-old that he would eventually play poker with Phil Ivey so often that Phil would know who he is, he would be floored.
I want to thank everyone for reading and supporting POTD, and given the theme of the blog is self-criticism, I’d like to take this brief moment to remind myself— hey, you’ve made it, Phil Ivey knows your name!
In 2023, I tweeted, “20 years after Moneymaker and 8 years after PioSOLVER, the most reliable way to have a poker hand go viral is still aces getting cracked.”
Generally, people like watching poker hands where someone has pocket aces. It’s better if they lose, but hands where they win still seem to attract more eyeballs than usual. Another way for a poker hand to go viral is for the hand to feature at least one of Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, or Phil Hellmuth. Yet another way for a poker hand to go viral is for a Casino Royale-type setup where someone has quads or better and coolers someone else.
Given what I just outlined, it will not surprise you to learn that a hand where I had the second nuts and Phil Ivey had the nuts, quad aces, is probably the most-viewed hand I’ve ever played. (The YouTube clip has 1.7 million views alone and the hand was picked up by outlets such as USA Today.)
There are some other things that led to this hand’s popularity. The tournament took place in March of 2020, making it one of the last live tournament series before COVID lockdowns began. So in the following months, when PartyPoker streamed online tournaments and those tournaments went on break, they would show PartyPoker live event highlights.
Of course, a frequent hand they chose to showcase was Phil Ivey busting this poor shmuck who thought his flush was good.
Imagine this scenario: You’ve been playing online poker for 20 straight days, you have a deep run in a tournament, so you load up YouTube to see your opponent’s hole cards from hands played 30 minutes ago. You see someone, let’s just say Michael Addamo, bluffed you, or someone else, let’s say Mikita Badziakouski, correctly hero-folded to you.
You’re still playing the tournament, but the stream goes on break. Then you see a replay of Phil Ivey coolering you yet again. Every reply in the chat is, “Why is this such a big cooler? Doesn’t this Greenwood idiot realize he can lose to a full house?”
You feel like responding to the trolls, “Actually, it’s Short Deck, and in Short Deck a flush beats a full house, so I only lose to quads, that’s why the announcers are so shocked as well,” but you don’t.
If that happened to me once, it would have been unpleasant, but it happened to me several times. It happened so many times that when I gave a fireside chat at VClub in Toronto this summer, I got this question.
“How do you feel about this hand being so popular when most of the people who watched it didn’t even know a full house loses to a flush?”
That doesn’t bother me too much — if people in a YouTube chatbox hate your play in a poker hand, you probably played it well — but there was one thing that irked me about this hand. I actually think I could have found the hero fold, despite having the second nuts.
Event: 2020 PartyPoker Millions $50,000 Short Deck
The Hand
There are three players remaining and we are in the money, sitting on a stack of 4,375,000. There is a 60,000 button ante.
Phil Ivey (7,205,000) completes, Wai Kin Yong (3,360,000) folds, and I check K♣8♣ on the button.
Flop: A♣Q♣8♠ (pot: 300,000)
Phil bets 200,000, and I call.
Turn: A♠ (pot: 700,000)
Phil checks, and I check behind.
River: J♣ (pot: 700,000)
Phil bets 400,000. I raise to 1,950,000, and Phil shoves. I call the other half of my stack, and get shown A♥A♦ to bust in third place.
(Editor’s Note: Ivey finished runner-up in this tournament, but would win another $50,000 short deck event the next day, and then take fifth in the $100,000 short deck finale two days later.)
What Was I Thinking?
Phil had been shoving a lot as the chip leader. Short deck is a game where chip leaders can play very aggressively, and Wai Kin and I only had 70 antes. That being said, it is three-handed, so there is less dead money in the pot than six- or seven-handed. From a stack-to-pot ratio perspective, we are about as deep as having 40 big blinds in no-limit hold’em.
‘He Has What?’
But equities run a lot closer in short deck than even a game like pot-limit Omaha, which makes shoving much more attractive. Phil’s limp was slightly concerning to me. If you’re shoving a ton and suddenly limp, it raises alarm bells. However, it didn’t affect my preflop decision-making, as in short deck you almost never bluff-raise suited hands from the button, so I checked.
I flopped a hand with a lot of equity, but one that runs hot and cold. I am not an equity favorite against hands that would stack off, and I don’t want to play a massive pot against the chip leader three-handed. I’d rather play in position and see if I can make my hand.
On the turn, I wasn’t sure if I could get Phil to fold a better hand than mine, so I checked back with my pair and the nut flush draw. I may have chosen to bluff with weaker flush draws that had less showdown value like 10♣6♣.
On the river, Phil can value bet as thin as a straight for this size, so raising any flush is mandatory for me. I figured a roughly pot-sized raise that risked slightly less than half my stack was an appropriate amount.
When I got shoved on, I was very concerned that I was beat. But I was getting such a good price and thought I might beat some value bets, so I called.
What Did I Get Wrong?
If you had a short deck ICM calculator, I suspect Ivey would never open limp first in. He would shove a bunch, and he would raise first in with A-K suited and A-A (and bluffs) and call a shove. An ICM calculator says I need to call the river if I have ~36% equity, so let’s go through the exercise of figuring out if Phil is value shoving worse or possibly even bluffing?
I think it’s unlikely Phil is bluffing. It’s a very hard spot to bluff. He almost always takes an aggressive action preflop or on the turn with an ace, so it’s unlikely he’s value-betting trips and then bluffing with it over a raise. A jack should have enough showdown on the river that he doesn’t really want to bluff with it. 10-10 and 9-9 would often be all-in preflop, and he can’t have the Kc blocker when I have it in my hand.
Let me be clear. Phil Ivey is one of, if not the greatest poker player of all time, but even he would have trouble finding an appropriate hand to bluff here.
So that leads to the follow up question, can I beat worse for value?
This is short deck, so there are only six possible flushes he could have — 10-9, 10-7, 10-6, 9-7, 9-6, and 7-6. 10-9 suited is a short deck powerhouse; it has 39% equity AIPF vs AA, so he’d shove it for sure. 9-7, 9-6, and 7-6 all have gutshots on the flop (A-6-7-8-9 is a straight in short deck), and he’d likely continue playing aggressively with them on the turn.
That leaves exactly 10-7 or 10-6, which might just call the river or bet the turn, but could plausibly play this way. I think Ivey would almost always play A-A like this if he wasn’t playing raise first in preflop, which means I need Phil to shove around 0.55 combos of worse hands to give me the 36% that would make my call breakeven.
However, being a short stack in a short deck tournament sucks, and being a big stack is very good. So ICM is undervaluing the expected value of gambling for a big stack, which means I can make calls which ICM would declare negative EV.
I definitely think I could have folded a worse flush on the river, but ultimately I think my hand was just too good and the odds I was getting were just too enticing. If I could bet at even money than Phil Ivey had quads, I might have done it, but that extra 15% chance he didn’t was too enticing to pass up.
Grade
I still don’t know how I feel about this hand. It really does feel like Phil should have quads much of the time, and it’s his most likely individual combo by a lot. However, there is a very large difference between it being his most likely individual combo and him having it two-thirds of the time.
Short deck, especially in the money, can be tricky. I got the preflop, flop, and turn decisions right. I should have thought a little longer on the river, but I think my instinct when playing a game I’m less skilled at is to avoid making heroic plays that could spectacularly blow up.
I also didn’t want to risk doing something like accidentally slowrolling a legend of the game, which is a silly thought to have when playing for such high stakes. (I’ve been nit-rolled and slowrolled dozens of times in my life and usually handle it adequately, so I am sure Phil Ivey could do the same.)
My technical analysis was sound and the hand was well played, but I think I got some of the soft things wrong that could have allowed me to make one of the greatest folds of all time to the GOAT.
I’m going to give myself a B.
Sam Greenwood is one of the winningest tournament poker players ever and is third on Canada’s all-time money list, having cashed for $42 million and counting in high roller events all over the world. The former stock trader-turned-champion has played millions of poker hands and is breaking them down street by street on his Punt Of The Day Substack. You can reach out to the Run It Once coach on Twitter/X for private coaching @SamGreenwoodRIO.
- Photo by PartyPoker / Oleg ParaMon