An analysis by Jonathan Little examines a hand in which an elaborate threesome takes place with a female protagonist couple, whose owner is called upon to make a difficult decision, in light of the stacks at stake.
The couple of Women, joys and sorrows
Crowd a couple of women at the Final Table
Playing a couple of women is an easy choice – right? Let’s talk for a moment.
This rather out-of-the-ordinary hand was played at a final table of the WSOP Super Circuit Online Series for a $ 10,000 Buy In where the 10, the jack and the women clashed. You probably never expected queens to make the toughest decision of the lot! Can they be folded, in your opinion?
It was Erik Seidel’s poker Hall of Famer tournament for his ninth bracelet, but fortunately he was not involved in this.
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At that time there were 8 players left and the blinds were at 100,000 / 200,000 / 25,000, after the first three players to act passed and Joachim Haraldstad (11,634,645) raised to 400,000 from hijack after tapping a pair of women, qq. Francisco Benitez (4,599,943) was the next to act, after seeing 10 10.
Joachim is expected to relaunch a wide range, as the average stakes did not want to unravel until he saw Isaac Baron come out, who was the shortest stack at the table. It was an easy all-in, which will often force the attacker to fold with this dynamic of the final table.
Francisco has gone all in, but Claas Segebrecht (8,946,380) plays small blind and is seen delivering jj. Claas has a difficult decision to make here, as he could potentially get a double paycheck if he folds and Joachim eliminates Francisco, with Baron still very short. That said, I think Claas should shove, too, since his jacks are still ahead of both Joachim’s and Francisco’s range. Claas also has excellent fold equity against Joachim’s range and stack size.
What the ICM says
I uploaded the script to ICMIZER which revealed that Claas should go all in with 9-9+ or ace-woman / +. That’s all. The program also says that in this scenario Joachim should call with only three hands: a pair of aces, kings and queens. Obviously, queens are the weakest hand in making a profitable call, so it could be an action to consider in depth. If he had an ace, he should fold. Pocket jacks are a pretty easy fold, but the queens are close…
So when should you fold the queens? Well, if you remove a small number of combinations from Claas’ shoving range, the pair of queens actually becomes a fold. The decision to call a queen couple depends on how tight Joachim thinks Claas is.
Joachim thought about it for a while and finally decided to get out of hand. From this point of view, folding with a pair of queens is reasonable as there was a four-bet jam from an opponent who is encouraged to play tighter due to a player with a very short stack at the table.
Claas was in a good position to win a nice pot and eliminate an opponent, but Francisco was lucky after the board showed 9 8 to 7 6 that gave him a ten-point lead.
Here’s how the players closed the tournament:
The article was written by Jonathan Little, a professional poker player and author with over $ 7,000,000 in live tournament winnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast on JonathanLittlePoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.
