The Crazy PSPC Fold with AQ on K9QQA: A shitreg’s take

Disclaimer: I’m a midstakes cash shitreg; I don’t play tournaments frequently, Trying to get better and think more about poker hands, and I put this together to kill some time at work as it’s a slow week.

Edit1: Per u/spreek, I didn't really take into account that AK is a pretty natural bluff and this becomes a pretty bad fold if villain decides to bluff with AK

TL;DR – it’s a very reasonable fold based on a few range assumptions. This is not a case of scared money making a bad fold and happening to have the worst hand.

Most information is taken from this PokerNews article: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2019/01/nguyen-polychronopoulos-full-house-fold-33051.htm

Villain is a two-time bracelet winner with $2.4M in live cashes. It’s unclear whether Hero knows this at the time, but we can assume he’s playing relatively solid and there’s no reason to think he’s a recreational player. This hand occurred an hour or two from the bubble if I recall correctly.

"So, oddly enough, the last two orbits I had shown down two relatively loose hands that I don’t normally play. But I happened to play those bad hands, and they got shown down. I won the pots, but I think I had a loose image," Polychronopoulos started.

Here is the hand history (via PokerNews):

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Hero opens the button with AdQc to 10,000 (?), and Villain 3 bets to 37,000 from the BB. Hero calls.

Flop: Ks9sQd

Villain checks, Hero checks

Turn: Ks9sQdQh

Villain checks, hero bets 17,000 into ~75,000 (~25%), villain calls

River: Ks9sQdQhAs

Villain checks, hero bets 50,000 into ~110,000, and villain jams for 203,000 total.

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• In order for this to be a good fold, Villain’s range must be overwhelming value hands, mostly including only AA and KK. This means villain must be bluffing very infrequently and rarely have worse value hands (KQ/AK/XXss/etc).
• I think it’s pretty safe to assume that AA will take this line to the river near-100% of the time. Checking AA on the flop makes a lot of sense given how frequently the button can have 2 pair or better; if she decides to raise a flop cbet with strong value hands (KQ/K9s/QQ/99/JTs/Q9s) and some high-equity semi-bluffs (QJss/ATss/T8ss/T9s/Axss/etc), we’re going to frequently be put in tough spots on future streets and potentially make equity mistakes by folding or calling incorrectly. Even though the preflop 3bettor will have KK and QQ more often the preflop caller, the preflop caller could conceivably have every other strong value hand more often than the 3bettor. For this reason, it makes sense for the 3bettor to check this flop a lot (potentially with his whole range, I’m not a PIO nerd though idk for sure).
• As far as KK, his frequency in taking this line with KK likely depends on his flop strategy. If he plays KK as a check 100% of the time on the flop, then he will likely have all the combos of KK when he check/raises river. If he is cbetting KK 100%, which makes sense as well under certain assumptions, then he’ll never have KK on the river when he check/raises.
• Just to be conservative, let’s assume he always has the 1 AA combo and 2 out of the 3 KK combos of KK. This is 3 combos of value hands we lose to. We can’t approach this purely like a cash game (and reconcile the river odds with the combos we beat or lose to), because this hand occurred close-ish to a $25k bubble. So theoretically speaking, there’s a decent chunk of pressure, but keep in mind that the min-cash is only 1 buy-in. I’m going to approach this theoretically, as opposed to speculating about the artificial ICM pressure based how much this $25k means to hero. By this I just mean that if hero was a $15 average buy-in platinum pass winner, the ICM pressure will feel MASSIVE, despite it only being a single buy-in. So basically, hero is getting 2.4:1 odds on the river (risking 150,000 to win 358,000), which means from a pure cEV perspective we’d need ~30% equity. I’m going to make a mostly arbitrary assumption and assume that with the added ICM pressure we’ll need 50% equity. So basically villain must have fewer than 5 bluffs or worse value hands.
• There are very few natural bluffs that would check flop, check/call turn, and check/jam river. I’m sure Doug Polk will identify some fifth-dimension, galaxy brain GTO bluffs for this river like AJo or KxTs, but if we’re going to be realistic, there are very few natural bluffs. Even AJo, which seems conceivable given it blocks AQ and could be used to get hero to fold some flushes, might not 3bet pre 100% of the time or call turn 100% of the time. I’ve been looking at the board for a while and I’m really struggling to think of his bluffs we might expect villain to show up with. That’s not to say he’s never bluffing, as many good players will find bluffs here, but it’s hard to think of many hands. Furthermore, I don’t know that villain will have an incentive to find many bluffs here, and I could see some villains thinking that hero will just have too many KQ/AQ/99 combos and not enough thinner value bets to make bluffing an attraction proposition. Conversely, maybe villain thinks he can put max pressure on hero if he thinks she’s not a high stakes tournament reg and cares more than she "should" about the $25k bubble. I think a conservative estimate would be to think that maybe villain shows up with 1.5 combos of bluffs (heavily, heavily discounted AJ/KT/whatever).
• It's generally hard for villain to have many worse value hands, but this depends on his 3betting range and postflop strategy. I think this basically comes down to how heavily you discount KQ, AQ, and 99. Check/jamming a flush seems pretty suicidal here, so I’ll ignore those hands. I don’t think it’s likely all villains are always 3betting these value hands from the BB, so you can apply some discounting preflop right away. If villain checks flop 100%, then he could potentially have all of these KQ/AQ/99 combos if he plays his range as a check/call on the turn given the turn is range advantageous for the preflop caller who will have more Qx. I think that’s a pretty big assumption here though, given that it may be tempting for villain to bet flop with KQ and 99 depending on how often he expects hero to attack this board. It might also be tempting for villain to check/raise KQ or 99 on the turn if we think villain’s range is mostly Qx/JT with very few bluffs (even if villain can’t rep many bluffs on the turn when he checks flop and check/raises turn). Based on all of this speculation, I think it’s reasonable to arbitrarily assume villain has 20% of KQ combos, 50% of AQ combos, and 10% of 99 combos (99 is heavily reduced because I’m not actually sure if 99 is strong enough to check/jam for value on the river). That leaves you with 0.6 combos of KQ, 1 combo of AQ, and 0.3 combos of 99. We’ll round the total of 1.9 combos to 2 combos of worse value hands.
• In summary, our speculation leaves us with 3 combos we lose to, 3.5 combos we beat, and 1 combo we chop with. If we assume this, then that means we have just over ~55% equity, making this a +cEV call but possibly a -$EV call given he breakeven threshold of 29% equity and the impending $25k bubble

To manage the scope of this post, I’ve ignored any potential live tells, which Hero claims she had in the PokerNews article. Based purely on the action, I think the fold is pretty genius, unless specifically:

1. Hero suspects that villain is capable of bluffing in spots where there are no natural bluffs
2. Hero thinks that villain will 3bet pre very wide, play all of his range as a flop check and turn check on this board, thereby giving him way more combos of KQ and AQ

What do you guys think? Anything I’m missing or misstating? I saw a few people in other threads calling this an “atrocious fold”, but I honestly can’t see how that could be the case. I think it's one of those cases where AA/KK could have a more profitable river check than bet, but theoretically should get paid off very little.

As a final note, you have to give props to Polychronopoulos for being a good sport and not being too embarrassed to show his hand. In the PokerNews interview he says, "I gotta show her, ya know? I mean, poor girl’s gonna be eaten alive forever. Not forever but, it’s gonna hurt her. And the cameras are on; it’s good for the game. I decided to show her she made the correct laydown because she earned it."