sam h
01-25-2004, 11:30 PM
I've never watched a whole final table of this magnitude before, so I decided to check out the rebroadcast on Stars. There were several things I found somewhat surprising, especially once it got down to three players (total chips in play roughly 1650000, blinds starting at 3-6K with 1k antes).
The three short stacks busted in the first ten hands, but after that it became a very cautious trapfest. Hansen and Corkins did a fair amount of preflop raising, but Negreanu rarely raised on the button. But the more suprising thing for me was the postflop play. A farily typical sequence was: somebody raises to 30K preflop and one player calls. Flop comes xxx, check, bet 30K, call. Turn comes x. Check, check. River comes x, check, bet 30K, fold. Rarely did I see anybody bet more than half the pot after the flop and often the bets on the later streets were less than one fifth of the pot. Despite this, very few hands went to showdown. And very, very rarely did anybody come over the top of any of these small bets, even with a lot of weakness shown. I don't know what their cards or reads were, and they certainly know each others games in ways that I can't understand, so I'm not passing judgement. I just found it very surprising that nobody was more aggressive. While I understand that the large stack/blind ratio makes trapping attractive, I would think it would also make the players more willing to try a few bluffs or at least call down more when an opponent has shown a lot of weakness and its only 30K to you on the river to win a 150K pot and you have 500K in front. It's quite possible nobody really had anything to show down in these situations, because the sample size here is pretty small. But still something to wonder about.
Corkins was relentlessly wearing Gus down until he took a bad beat, raising from the SB/button and then calling Gus's 300K all in reraise with A9s only to lose to T9s. After that he still had a decent chip lead but never won a pot, except once taking the blinds when Gus folded the SB. He kept folding to Gus's raises, lost the chip lead, and then picked a really weird time to make a stand.
Corkins calls from the 12K SB with 94d and Gus checks with 73o. Flop comes K75 with one diamond and Gus bets 30K. Corkins calls? Turn is 3d and Gus checks. Corkins bets 100K, leaving him 471, and Gus goes all in. Corkins quickly calls 471 into a 779K pot, even though he's a 3:2 dog against even a complete, unpaired bluff with a card higher than a 9. Maybe he put Gus on 82o.
I was glad to see that Costa Rica won the World Cup event. The poker players I met when I was living down there were almost all nice affable people, and the general camaraderie in the poker rooms was a real departure from the surly bitch-fest that too often characterizes live poker up here in the states. Alex Brenes, who won the deciding match, is the only one of the four members of the team I played with. He's a lot of fun at the table - a one man barrage of animated drinking, raising, and laughing.
The three short stacks busted in the first ten hands, but after that it became a very cautious trapfest. Hansen and Corkins did a fair amount of preflop raising, but Negreanu rarely raised on the button. But the more suprising thing for me was the postflop play. A farily typical sequence was: somebody raises to 30K preflop and one player calls. Flop comes xxx, check, bet 30K, call. Turn comes x. Check, check. River comes x, check, bet 30K, fold. Rarely did I see anybody bet more than half the pot after the flop and often the bets on the later streets were less than one fifth of the pot. Despite this, very few hands went to showdown. And very, very rarely did anybody come over the top of any of these small bets, even with a lot of weakness shown. I don't know what their cards or reads were, and they certainly know each others games in ways that I can't understand, so I'm not passing judgement. I just found it very surprising that nobody was more aggressive. While I understand that the large stack/blind ratio makes trapping attractive, I would think it would also make the players more willing to try a few bluffs or at least call down more when an opponent has shown a lot of weakness and its only 30K to you on the river to win a 150K pot and you have 500K in front. It's quite possible nobody really had anything to show down in these situations, because the sample size here is pretty small. But still something to wonder about.
Corkins was relentlessly wearing Gus down until he took a bad beat, raising from the SB/button and then calling Gus's 300K all in reraise with A9s only to lose to T9s. After that he still had a decent chip lead but never won a pot, except once taking the blinds when Gus folded the SB. He kept folding to Gus's raises, lost the chip lead, and then picked a really weird time to make a stand.
Corkins calls from the 12K SB with 94d and Gus checks with 73o. Flop comes K75 with one diamond and Gus bets 30K. Corkins calls? Turn is 3d and Gus checks. Corkins bets 100K, leaving him 471, and Gus goes all in. Corkins quickly calls 471 into a 779K pot, even though he's a 3:2 dog against even a complete, unpaired bluff with a card higher than a 9. Maybe he put Gus on 82o.
I was glad to see that Costa Rica won the World Cup event. The poker players I met when I was living down there were almost all nice affable people, and the general camaraderie in the poker rooms was a real departure from the surly bitch-fest that too often characterizes live poker up here in the states. Alex Brenes, who won the deciding match, is the only one of the four members of the team I played with. He's a lot of fun at the table - a one man barrage of animated drinking, raising, and laughing.