Round-up: Did you keep pace with the high stakes?

Ending our current batch of high stakes hand reviews, we're taking a brief look at all the NL10K hands discussed and their conclusions.

Once again we've confronted you with decisions that actually had to be made by players on the highest stakes of online poker, all the way up to NL10K. Often our members were able to pick the optimal line, sometimes there were big differences in opinion though.

But of course that's not a suprise. After all, we were matched up against the best of the best, for instance LLinusLLove from Switzerland who can easily be regarded as one of the strongest regs on the nosebleeds.

Call a $5K shove with middle pair?

In the last hand we discussed, with more than $10K on the line, we wanted you to decide whether Katya_18 should call or fold against an all-in on the river by antoha1998 with middle pair.

In the actual hand, Katya_18 chose to call and lost the hand against . Whether calling was still the right choice in that spot is a tough nut to crack. There's no doubt it was quite a hero call and you should rather tend towards folding when looking at it in isolation.

If we had at least a diamond ourselves, then a call could be a bit more reasonable. Still, we also need to take into account that Katya_18 and antoha1998 play a lot of hands against eachother and hero calls are a speciality for the former. In the end, it's quite possible Katya_18 had a read on his opponent here and therefore decided to pull the trigger.

How strong is bottom pair at NL10K?

That was the question in our third high stakes hand review of this batch. The conclusion is going to be rather brief though, since almost 70% of all votes picked the optimal answer anyway—and that is to fold with ace-high.

Still, in the actual hand our previous Hero NLZWERVERNL decided to call, which is kind of alright as well since should indeed be a part of your calling range in 20% of the cases in such a spot. Small but important remark though: if the ace was in diamonds and we were blocking the nut flush, you could certainly think about bluff-raising.

Can you find the right balance?

This hand revolved around the best line to continue with a flush we hit on the turn. The vote was quite balanced, ironically, the slight majority wanted to play unbalanced to make it easier to get the weak player all-in.

However, since we are still quite deep in that spot, especially against the other reg who can close the action as the preflop aggressor, it makes more sense to continue with a balanced line.

If we were the ones closing the action and the reg already checked to us, then a big bet would certainly make sense. However, if we bet that big out of position, we're basically revealing that we only have very strong hands in our range, making it less likely for the preflop aggressor to counter with a raise.

In contrast, with a balanced bet of 1/4 potsize, the aggressor could very well still have a raising range that would allow us to get a better payoff with our flush.

Where did the money go?

After Belqi was able to hit a straight on the turn in a hand played on NL5K, a rather inconvenient flush got possible on the river. Your task was to choose between going all-in right away, check/raising all-in or check/calling a bet of up to 1/3 the pot.

The way the hand played out, you definitely want to check as much as possible in a spot like that since you wouldn't be able to move all-in for value with a large part of your range anyway. The focus should be on finding a range with which you can reasonably play check/raise all-in without leaving too much money on the table and just paying off better hands of the opponent.

We do have a straight of course, nonetheless the opponent will rarely still move all-in on such boards with a weaker hand if we check. Therefore, check/calling a bet of up to 1/3 the pot was the right choice for the hand in question.

More high stakes review articles