My name is Shane O'Brien. I am a young aspiring poker player who hopes to make a decent bit of money playing this game that I love. I play in small home games or small city games. To help improve my game I watch poker vlogs or games that are on television like the World Series of Poker. Over my time watching poker I have seen a fair amount of crazy poker hands with bad beats, coolers, and insane bluffs. I have also been a part of a few hands that made my jaw drop. Today we will be talking about a hand that I saw in the P.C.A. 2019 tournament. It involves a woman named Thi Nguyen and a man named Athanasios Polychronopoulos. The FlopBefore the flop came, Thi looked down at AQ off suit and opened it up with a raise. Athanasios has pocket aces. For those who do not know poker this is the best starting hand you can possibly get. He re-raises Thi and she calls. Now we go to the flop. The flop is the first three community cards to come onto the board after the dealer burns one card. The flop comes king, queen, nine. thi flops middle pair and has top kicker. Athanasios is the first to act and he checks with his over pair and Thi checks behind him. The TurnThe turn is the next card to come after the dealer burns a second card. The turn comes and it is another queen, giving Thi the best hand with three of a kind. At first it seems that Athanasios is in deep trouble here. However he believed he was ahead with his aces, so he decides to try to set a trap and checks. Thi with the three queens has no other choice but to bet. She fires a small bet of about 17,000 into a 70,000 dollar pot. This is a very small bet size. It comes out to about 24% of the pot. Anthanasios is getting some pretty good pot odds to call so he does. Now we go the the crazy river card. The River The river is the final community card to come onto the board. At this moment Thi is ahead with her three queens and Athanasios is a huge underdog to win this hand. Given that Thi has one ace and Athanasios has the other, that means there is only one card in the deck that can save him.
Of course the one card that can save him just so happens to be the river card. The ace of spades. This card gives Thi a full house, queens full of aces. But, this also gives Athanasios a higher full house, aces full of queens. The chance of him hitting that card was somewhere around 2%. Again like a crazy perso Athanasios checks for the third time. Thi makes a good size bet of 50,000. Athanasios raises her all in. I have not played poker for as long as she has but to fold a full house is insane. It is one of the best hands you could possibly make in this scenario. Being the sick human that she is, Thi somehow makes an amazing fold. I have not met a single poker player that would have made that fold. I believe many people would go broke on this hand but she had the courage to lay this hand down. That is all for this hand. Check out next weeks post for another crazy hand.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2019
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