Facing a River Overbet for My Tournament Life: Call or Fold?
Today I want to complete our ongoing review of hands I played in the $3,500 buy-in World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open a few months back, a tournament in which I managed to make a relatively good run before falling in 36th place.
It was Day 3, and after losing several all-ins versus shorter stacks, I had fallen below average to about 425,000 or 28 big blinds when I was dealt J?J? in the hijack seat. The blinds were 10,000/15,000 with a 15,000 big blind ante, and I opened to 35,000.
It folded a loose-aggressive (and perhaps slightly tilty) player in the small blind who called from his stack of 790,000, and the big blind folded. The flop came 7?6?3? and my opponent checked.
As I explain below, this is a spot where I'm betting almost always, and in this case with my stack size I'm thinking about finding a good bet size that could allow my opponent to check-raise all in. There was 100,000 in the pot and I bet 50,000.
The small blind called, the turn brought the 10?, and he checked again. As I run through my options here I could check or bet relatively big. Here I thought my opponent was primed to make a mistake on the river if I checked, and so that's what I did.
The 3? river completed the board, and as it happened my opponent put me to a decision by jamming all in �� a big overbet compared to the 200,000 in the middle. I had 340,000 behind.
I could easily be crushed here, but I also beat lots of hands that my opponent could certainly have. What would you do? Do you usually call or fold when everything is at risk?
Take a look and listen to my analysis of the hand from start to finish, and see what I decided on the river and how things turned out.
Photo: "Jonathan Little," World Poker Tour, CC BY-ND 2.0.
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $7,000,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. Sign up to learn poker from Jonathan for free at PokerCoaching.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.
