Erick Lindgren's final hand - does anyone disagree with me?

[curtains]

Anyone else agree that the hand Erick Lindgren went out on was a terrible play. To go allin UTG with 86o to only increase your stack by a little over 10% is not a good touranment poker strategy IMO. I'd want to have about 30-35k before I got this desperate with 2-4k blinds.
If blinds were 5000-10000 then ok, its not so bad at all...but 2000-4000 and you have 55k in chips? (I think this was the situation)

Anyway despite this, I am sure Lindgren is a really great player...his results have been simply too good, and he just seems like a very quick guy.
I just think that it's important to know when to steal and when the risk/reward just isn't there, and its not that hes trying some crazy bluff but that hes simply making a technical mistake.

ps - sometimes its hard to follow what the exact blinds are, but i was pretty sure it was at 2k-4k...if they were higher than it was either an OK play, or at least not as bad of a play.

[AndysDaddy]

There was also a (E)1,000 ante. I doubt this changes the equation a lot with only three left, but its worth considering. (btw - is there a way to insert the Euro 'E' symbol into a post?)

I agree. This struck me as a strange play. With the stack sizes, any ace - and probably a lot of kings are going to call the short stack here. Maybe he was more interested in getting back out amoung the hot Paris babes. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[J.R.]

I agree, I think Eric felt like he was a better player than everyone else at the table (which for my money is pretty clear) and it seemed like people were happy to fold so he amped the aggression. Eric's extremely-confident attitude was apparent to me in his coffeehousing. Anyway, he had the skill to wait but not the patience and I think he really thought he could just run over his "weak-tight" opponents.

[jayadd]

he bluffed and he got caught thats it duh.
Why even take time to think, of course it was a bad play. Just like everyone else calling with 9 10s utg for 3 bets. Move on.........

[Rushmore]

[ QUOTE ]
he bluffed and he got caught thats it duh.
Why even take time to think, of course it was a bad play. Just like everyone else calling with 9 10s utg for 3 bets. Move on.........

[/ QUOTE ]

Jay,
I don't recall your posts ever being quite so, uh, pointless.

The question is not whether he bluffed and got caught. The question is whether one should ever bluff in such a situation. I believe the point of the post was that an argument can be made that Lindgren's play should never have been made, and that the implied question is whether or not anyone else was surprised by the fact that a well-established professional player would make such a play.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Anyway, I SURE don't know what "calling with 9Ts utg for 3 bets is."

[drewjustdrew]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyway, I SURE don't know what "calling with 9Ts utg for 3 bets is."

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe it's a super straddle.

[jwvdcw]

I agree totally...why bluff from UTG??

[ohkanada]

Not saying it was the correct play, but it was 5 handed. So UTG 5 handed is like cutoff-1 in a 10 handed game.

He tried and failed. Maybe the blinds were increasing very soon.

Ken Poklitar

[curtains]

There are some situations when its almost never wrong to bluff,no matter what your cards are. Im just saying that I think that this is a situation where its almost always wrong to bluff allin, no matter what your cards are(something like AJo would not be considered a bluff).
Whats interesting about it is that if the blinds were doubled or a little bit more than doubled, one could argue that bluffing allin is the correct play UTG.

[Nottom]

[ QUOTE ]
There are some situations when its almost never wrong to bluff,no matter what your cards are. Im just saying that I think that this is a situation where its almost always wrong to bluff allin, no matter what your cards are(something like AJo would not be considered a bluff).
Whats interesting about it is that if the blinds were doubled or a little bit more than doubled, one could argue that bluffing allin is the correct play UTG.

[/ QUOTE ]

We have no clue how the table was playing since we only got to see a small portion of the hands played. Maybe he had bet legitimate hands and had people all folding so figured a bluff would be +EV, who knows? We don't see all the times when somebody does this and pulls it off, we just see Erick getting knocked out after going all-in with 68o just like we saw Howard Lederer get knocked out of tourney of champs with 63o in an even more questionable situation.

We can chat it up on here all we want, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say these guys likely know more about high stakes tourney poker than 99% of the players here and had a good reason for doing what they did. Without knowing the whole story its hard to really fault them for making a play that just doesn't work out.