Recently, on the poker podcast The Chip Race, with hosts Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin, poker player Charlie Carrel talked about a hand he played in the 2017 WSOP Europe One Drop $111K buy-in event. This hand involved some exploitative live reads Charlie made. The full audio of that podcast episode can be found on Youtube (also here’s an iTunes link to the podcast episodes). You can follow The Chip Race on Twitter, too.
Below is a transcription of the most relevant parts of Charlie’s interview. Charlie talks about three behaviors/tells in this:
- A tank-call on the flop
- Silence from a bettor in response to questioning/interaction
- An uncomfortable smile from a bettor in response to a joke/interaction
Also, here’s a link to a PokerNews article about this hand, with some more context and opinion.
This hand occurred on the third or fourth level of the tournament, with blinds in the 15K-30K range. (Charlie did this interview pretty long after he’d played it, so there are some approximations. Also, this is just a rough transcript; it’s pretty accurate but not word-for-word.)
Transcript:
Paul Newey, a regular; I want to call him a recreational player because he makes billions doing finance or whtaever he does. But he’s quite good. He opens the low-jack to 65K. He’s quite a tight player.
This super-super, I assume super-rich billionaire guy who’d been joking around loads, and who’d been joking around with me quite a lot, and who had been speaking about being so infuriated that someone else, one of his friends, could have been picked up at the airport sooner. He said “I don’t care about losing 100K but this is annoying.” He was a character. He 3-bets the button to 165K. He had been extremely loose, probably playing like 60-70% VPIP. He hadn’t been 3-betting much but I hadn’t been on table long enough to really get a good sample size on that.
We look down at AKo in the small blind. Playing 3.2M, maybe a bit less. We have a decision on what size we want to go to. Whether we want to call or 4-bet. Usually in this kind of situation I would probably lean towards calling because I don’t want to make take such a high-variance situation in what was the best or second-best table in the room. If it was a table with all super sickos that I didn’t have good live reads on, I might 4-bet this hand, either to take a slightly higher chip EV line and also increase variance so if I do bust, I can take a third bullet and try to get back in on a better table.
That being said, with this specific scenario with how loose this guy was, I thought calling would prob be letting his shitty hands, like J9 suited, or Q7 suited or whatever he might be going crazy with, might be letting him realize too much of his equity. So I thought it’d be better to isolate him, esp cause I had quite a good read on him, or at least I felt like I did.
So I chose to 4-bet. I chose a pretty small size, 425K from 165K. Standard would usually be maybe 470 to 500K depending on how deep you are and other factors that have to do with your assumptions of his range. I chose this size because I didn’t want him to fold that much at all, because I felt like my hand dominated his range so strongly, and I had such good reads post-flop that I felt like it was bad for him to fold to the 4-bet.
And def the hands that I dominate, so if he had like AT suited, hand like that, I really don’t want him to fold. That isn’t always the case, but I think if you have live reads, that can be the case.
Some talking with the hosts, then Charlie continues talking about the flop…
It’s pretty huge considering stage of tournament already and against a highly volatile player. It was an exciting flop. Actually an unexciting actual flop: 6 2 2, two clubs. We do not have a club in our hands. We are faced with decision to check or bet, and if betting, what size.
I really like in these situations going heavily exploitative. Not just against recreational players; this is actually a situation I’ll go quite exploitative against very good players. I’m not going to say how.
But against this specific player, I felt like, because he was so sticky, and very confident and chatty person, but also didn’t like to be pushed around. He had reacted quite, not annoyingly, because he was a good sport, but definitely there was a bit of ego there when I’d been 3-betting and iso’ing quite wide. So I felt like if I put out a hilariously small bet, there was a very low chance he would hold many of the hands which I have beat. Which actually is quite a large % of hands, sticking with our pre-flop assumptions that he’s quite wide and not folding much to the 4-bet either. So pretty much, our hand is still a value hand. Even though obviously we have Ace high. So I bet small for value.
He goes into tank for at least a minute and a half. Which was really really strange for that, and as he called, when he called, the only thought I had was, “I have the best hand right now.” Because I thought any pair definitely makes that decision to call or shove a lot quicker. I felt like if he had tens he’d just call quick. And if he were gonna tank there might be a small chance he’d raise, but I really didn’t think any pair would tank call. Even if he were trapping, I think it’d be almost kind of douchey, and he didn’t seem like the type to tank for a minute and a half with aces or anything like that.
The turn is offsuit 5 and we check. The reason for checking here is, I felt like if we have the best hand, there’s two types of hands I thought he could have in this situation. Lot easier to say this confidently in hindsight, but these are the kind of thoughts I was having with [unclear] at the time. I thought he could either have some kind of float, like some kind of random J9 suited with or without a backdoor. I didn’t think flush draws would play it that way; I thought they’d raise or call quicker. Or he could have some type of Ace- or King-high hand he thinks might be the best hand.
The Ace and King high hands obviously we dominate. So I didn’t think it was too bad for it to go check-check because he only has 3 outs. And with the float hands, we want to give them a chance to float and do their thing. For those reasons, I think checking is a better option against all parts of his perceived range.
So we check and he bets 800K out of a stack of 1.4M. Which was very surprising and he didn’t take that long about it. It really didn’t feel that good. I felt like if someone were floating, they’d probably go more for like 550 because people tend to be more conservative with their stacks. All the assumptions I’d been making up to that point is that I had the best hand. But when he bet that size, I was like “Oh crap, I’m gonna have to really question these assumptions.” Especially when it’s for an 111K tournament.
So I spoke to him. I spoke to him quite a lot. It was a very handy situation. Was something I talked about on the podcast previously.
I had been speaking to him previously, and that wasn’t because I wanted to get reads. It was just because I was fucking around with him. We had this situation where, on the last hand before the break, we both wanted to see the flop really badly. I was like “Dealer, can we?” And I was like, “Ok.” And he just reaches in and deals the flop and turn and river. Dealer’s like, “What?” We were cracking up laughing for like 5 minutes between us, and fist bumping. It was just like, we’d definitely built some level of rapport, which became useful in this situation.
And the reason it was useful; he did not reply to me for at least a minute. It is so difficult when someone you have rapport with is speaking to you in a friendly way, it’s so difficult to just ignore them and pretend their not there, and to keep that gruff face. I really felt if he had value hands, I gave it a high likelihood, at the time I gave it like 75 to 80% likelihood that he would end up speaking in a jocular, jest-y fashion. So that made me feel pretty good.
I ended up calling the clock on myself, to try to get a reaction and smile from him. I ended up getting the smile. Which was the final nail in the coffin. It was not a very comfortable smile at all. For someone who has a lot of money and doesn’t care about losing 100K, it wasn’t like he was about to scoop in a pot.
So I ended up check-shoving. I ended up going against the sizing tells that he was strong, adn went with the live reads, and he snap-folded. Which was very surprising. I showed to the table. I wouldn’t have done generally. If I was playing the guy heads-up, I wouldn’t have done it. I just wanted to get that kind of image for the table, because I felt like it was a table I could just plow over.