NBC Heads-Up

April 27, 2009 at 12:02 am · Filed under Poker Strategy, Life

Having beaten Phil and Doyle, the field was now down to 16 and I was ‘in the money’ (meaning I was guaranteed to turn a profit on my investment in the tournament). I was set to face Paul Wasicka. While he may not be as well known as Phil Ivey or Doyle Brunson, that certainly doesn’t diminish the challenge he would present as an opponent.An accomplished heads-up player, Paul was the 2007 NBC Heads-Up Champion (and he has over $4 million in tournament earnings!). Interestingly, he beat my fiancé (Chad Brown) in the finals that year 2-0, so I guess this was an opportunity for revenge. Since Paul had won in ‘07, there was a ton of YouTube footage. His style seemed very versatile, he could make a big lay down, a great call in tough situations, and even bluff in the right spots – this match was going to have to be more about feeling it out in the moment than about having a plan.As I did in both of my earlier matches, I again let my opponent take control early on when the stakes were relatively small. I lost a little bit of ground at the start, letting Paul take a slight lead. However, I built up a good image by remaining conservative in the early stages. In one key hand, I knew Paul would be thinking I would try and pull off a big bluff to exploit my tight image – so when I made a very strong hand, I overbet it and got him to call a pretty big overbet (a fake bluff) on the river.In the end, Paul seemed willing to gamble, pushing all-in rather often – forcing me to decide what sort of hand I would be willing to call an all-in with. When I was getting pretty short after a tough run of cards, he pushed me in and I had Ace-Five (a pretty low kicker). At that point, I just felt he was on a steal (pushing me around since I was short on chips), so I decided to call. He held a weak king – giving me the 60% chance to double up and take the lead, and the odds prevailed.

After I survived that all-in, I found myself facing a board of k 7 9 6 on the turn after a flop where I had decided to slow play top pair kings with k 6 in my hand (and to my delight, I hit a 6 for two pair on the turn!). When Paul bet 7,000 into me, I decided there were too many potential straight draws he could have to justify slow-playing the hand any further. I raised it up to 20,000. Paul thought for a while and then moved all-in. Two pair is a pretty good hand heads up, and I thought it was better than 3:1 that I held the best hand, so I called. I was happy to see I was in the lead when Paul flipped over top pair kings with a ten kicker – but I wasn’t out of the woods yet. He had what seemed like a ton of outs! He was looking for a ten to make a better two pair, an eight to make a ten-high straight, or a seven or nine to make two pairs kings and sevens (or nines) with a ten kicker (which would counterfeit my two pair). That means he had 13 cards in the deck to hit on the river – and if he didn’t do so then I would be moving on to the quarter finals. With 13 ‘outs’ as we say in poker, that puts him at roughly 26% chance to win. So, I was a 3:1 favorite to hold up…

A jack on the river sealed the deal and I was ecstatic to be moving one step closer to the finals!

Paul was a class act after the match. He gave me a heartfelt congratulations – something that a lot of poker players can’t do when they lose. Learning to be a gracious loser has been one of the most important lessons of my professional career – and I really respect it when one of my opponents acts in such a classy way. To his credit, the round was a definite chess match and it could have gone either way – I am just proud that I never got it in as a statistical underdog (which against an opponent of Paul’s caliber is hard to do!).

Until next time,

V

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My NBC Heads Up Experience Cont’d

April 17, 2009 at 2:51 am · Filed under Poker Strategy, Life

If any of you tuned in to NBC at noon this past Sunday you might have caught the tail end of my first round match where I eliminated the grand daddy of poker, Doyle Brunson. Well, if you thought that karma would ensure a more desirable second round match-up for me (considering the bad luck of drawing Doyle in round one)…think again. Things only got worse. After the first match, I soon found out that I was going to have to play Phil Ivey (pretty much the odds on favorite to win this, or any, event) in round two the following day. But hey, I put my $20,000 into this pool because I believed I had a shot at winning this thing, so I certainly wasn’t going to lay down and accept defeat. However, I knew I couldn’t expect to just head into the round and wing it…to beat Ivey, I was going to need to prepare. So, I quickly headed up to my hotel room to come up with a plan.

Normally, when you sit down at a 9-handed poker table, you can expect to play three or four hands per hour (at most) against each of the opponents at your table. To the contrary, in heads up play, things get a lot more personal. You can expect to play hundreds of hands against the same opponent over the course of the match. This creates the opportunity for building an image in your opponent’s mind for how they expect you to play in a given situation–and then, of course, to capitalize upon and exploit that image through the implementation of a more creative play later on. With Phil, I wasn’t expecting him to make any mistakes that I could capitalize upon. Instead, in order to beat him, I would have to tell a very believable story through my play (about my style) and then use it to my advantage later on. In the end, I opted to play very very conservatively in the early rounds– letting Phil win 70% of the hands when the blinds were small before the flop. I wasn’t raising without good cards, I folded to any demonstrated strength by Phil, and sometimes I even folded the button without even calling (in heads up play this is a very uncommon strategy as position, or having the button, is a huge advantage). I waited patiently until the middle rounds before making a move. I let Phil build a slight chip-lead…but even more importantly, I let him believe that I was playing a very conservative style. At about the end of the first hour, the blinds were getting higher, and I decided to switch gears. So, I started raising and re-raising a whole bunch. And Phil would give me credit for good hands–he thought that based upon how conservatively I had been playing that I was all of a sudden simply getting a rush of cards. I was not. And so, eventually I won the chip lead and took the advantage in the match. Eventually, through a few aggressive plays with draws on the flop, and one lucky river that I recall, I took quite a significant lead over Phil.

If you want to see how some of the hands in this match played out. Or, if you want to see how it turns out…tune into NBC at noon on Sunday for round 2 of the NBC Heads Up Championships.

With that, I’m off to the WPT $25000 world championships at the Bellagio in Vegas. I’ll keep you posted on this and more of my NBC Heads Up adventures in my next blog which should be up next week. Wish me luck!

-V

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