Strategy: Analyzing Steve Gee's River Bluff at the 2013 WSOP Main Event
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One of the most interesting hands during last week��s World Series of Poker broadcast on ESPN occurred when hyper-aggressive Steve Gee found himself chasing a second-best draw.
A recap of the action:
Blinds were 30k/60k with a 10k ante. Jaime Kaplan (3.225m in chips) raised to 130k from middle position with A?10?. Gee (3.045m) called on the button with K?Q?.
Flop: 3?3?7?
Kaplan bet 170k, and Gee called.
Turn: 9?
Kaplan bet 240k, and Gee called.
River: 6?
Kaplan bet 400k, Gee raised to 1.1m, and Kaplan folded.
We conducted an analysis to dive into two of the central questions for this hand:
On the flop, should Steve Gee have chased a non-nut draw on a paired board?
Thanks to the hole card cams, we know that Gee was chasing a draw that would have left him crippled. But Gee couldn��t have known that, and it��s unfair to judge his call based on his 20% equity against Kaplan��s actual hand. The real question is how Gee��s hand looked against the range of hands Kaplan might reasonably have.
To get a sense for how Gee looked against Kaplan��s range, we searched our database for all the players that had been in Gee��s flop situation. Every time we found one, we added his/her opponent��s actual hand to ��Kaplan��s range,�� keeping track of how many times each hand showed up. Then we calculated Gee��s equity against that range.
It turns out that Gee was a 52% favorite! And if Gee had a read on Kaplan, that��s probably a lowball estimate. All in all, very easy to see that Gee��s flop call makes a lot of sense.
Was Gee lucky to win that pot with a bluff on the river?
Again, thanks to the hole card cams, it looked like Gee had a soul-read on Kaplan. But that��s not necessarily the case. Kaplan will often be betting for value hands that are stronger than his busted flush draw.
Our analyses show that Gee��s betting line usually indicates enormous strength. Across all players with a call-call-raise line on a board like this, the river raise was a bluff less than 20% of the time. And if we drop the ��board like this�� qualification, a call-call-raise line is a bluff only 10% of the time!
Overall, Gee��s river raise is extremely credible. It��s a bluff so infrequently that he probably expected to induce a fold from many legitimate hands Kaplan would be betting.
Just how skillful was Steve Gee in this hand?
Gee��s successful river bluff earned him about 23 big blinds relative to the typical player in his shoes.
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