What Michael Addamo does differently
Dara O'Kearney puts the hands of Michael Addamo through a solver to see why he is able to crush elite fields so comprehensively.
Students send me interesting hands they see on live streams to ask my opinion all the time. For the last year I'd say almost all of the hands I get sent are ones played by Michael Addamo.
Clearly Addamo is crushing everything right now in poker with a hyper aggressive style that includes lots of overbets and lots of bluffs. Most players think he is an uber exploitative player that leaves himself open to counter-exploitation.
I have studied a lot of his hands now and you may be surprised to discover that he is actually playing closer to GTO than most would think and certainly more than some of his elite tablemates. He does deviate, but when he does he deviates for good reason and still based on a solid GTO methodology.
Let's look at this classic hand from PokerGO to see what I mean:
In the hand Jake Schindler opens UTG with QQ and Addamo 3-bets from the Big Blind with 78, Schindler calls. The flop is 75K and Addamo bets 19,000 into a 57,500 pot, Schindler calls. The turn is 6 and it goes check/check. The river is K, Addamo checks. Schindler bets and Addamo check/raises.
While this hand might seem wild on every street, believe it or not it was only the very final action where Addamo deviates from GTO. The 3-bet preflop with 78 was approved as it gave Addamo board coverage. The continuation bet too because Addamo has range advantage. The check/check on the turn is approved because Schindler has more hands helped by 6 and range advantage shifts in Schindler's favour, even though the specific card helps Addamo.
On the river, Addamo is supposed to check/call as a bluff catcher. It's only now that he starts to think of his hand exploitatively, correctly reasoning that Schindler likely has a hand like TT-QQ that doesn't want to call an overbet.
One 'pip' away from GTO
I've written about the right hands to check/raise bluff on the river with. They are hands with some showdown value if it goes check/check but have a blocker if Villain bets. 78 is one of those hands, it blocks the nut straight and sevens full of kings.
The solver prefers A7s & A6s for the check/raise bluff because they block boats and Ace King, which is a bigger part of Schindler's range.
While this is a deviation (the only deviation) from GTO, it still follows the principles of GTO. It is not a wild stone called bluff it is based on GTO logic. I suspect Addamo knows his opponents will over fold here (they are supposed to bluff catch with TT-QQ some of the time) and he knows that he is deviating from GTO.
I've looked at lots of Addamo hands and he only really ever deviates by one 'pip'. If a hand is a raise 20% of the time, he will raise it closer to 100% of the time, but he won't raise a hand that should be checked. If K6s is an open, he might open a hand like K2s, but he won't open some garbage like T5s.
He currently gets away with murder at the nosebleeds because nobody wants to play huge pots against him. The Addamo story may end with his opponents studying him much more than I have and counter-exploiting him, just like many aggressive players before him have been found out. But he may be one of the exceptions that stands the test of time, because the way he plays is much closer to GTO than his critics appreciate.
Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.
