Poker Hand of the Week Setup
Jonathan Little made his debut at Poker After Dark this week just to find himself in dire straits in a huge pot against Chris Johnson.
Poker After Dark Season 12 Week 4 called “One Bourbon, One Shot, and No Fear” features Sam Soverel, Jake Daniels, Chris Johnson, Jonathan Little, Alex Ding, Justin Young and Jake Daniels, who we already know two from the new season of High Stakes Poker.
They are playing 6-max $50/$100 No-Limit Hold’em with a $100 Ante and a $10,000 buy-in.
Jonathan Little and Chris are both long-standing poker pros and therefore have quite some history. Chris has Jonathan covered at the start of the hand.
Poker Hand of the Week Action
Preflop:
Chris Johnson straddles and Jonathan Little raises UTG to $300 with A♦J♦. Alex Ding and Johnson defends his straddle. Pot Size: $1,025
Flop:
3-handed to a flop of 3♦10♦9♣, which is pretty decent for the preflop aggressor Jonathan Little as he flops the Nut Flush Draw to go along with his two overcard. He consequently choses a larger continuation bet sizing of $700 into $1,025.
His two opponents don’t have much and Ding quickly folds. Chris Johnson decides to stick around though with his gutshot and backdoor flush draw. Pot Size: $2,425
Turn:
The J♣ is the absolute dream card for Chris as he binks the straight with a redraw to the flush, while Little hits top pair top kicker on top of his nut flush draw.
Johnson checks and Jonathan fires a large second barrel of $2,000. When the action is back on Chris he sets Jonathan Little All-in and he quickly calls just to see that he is way behind. Pot Size: $26,575
River:
They decide to run it twice and Chris Johnson is a 80% favourite before the two river cards are dealt.
First Runout: 5♣ gives Chris a flush.
Second Runout: K♣ and Johnson makes another flush and scoops a nice $26,575 pot.
Poker Hand of the Week Analysis
We picked this hand as it has two important takeaways for cash games. Firstly, it is very important to continue on the flop with backdoor draws, when being heads-up.
Secondly, you should float with gutshots, when the price is right, as they are often very well-disguised and therefore offer great implied odds.
Let’s go through the hand street by street. Preflop is absolute standard and there is not much to say about it.
The interesting part of this hand is the flop, where Chris Johnson decides to call a sizeable bet with his gutshot. Some of you might think that this is a fold, but given the fact that he has an overcard and backdoor flush draw to go along with it and that Chris is in position justify a call here.
He gets rewarded by binking it on the turn, which is a very nasty card for Jonathan Little as it gives him top pair on top of his flush draw. I like the check-raise All-in by Johnson a lot, since the board is really wet and you therefore should protect your hand.
Jonathan Little calls All-in a bit too quickly in my opinion as I don’t think that Chris check-raises a hand here, which Jonathan beats. Multiple straight draws came in on the turn and Johnson could also do this with a set, which both have Little crushed.
Let’s take a quick look at the pot odds to see if Jonathan Little made the correct decision. He has to call $10,025 to win $26,575 giving him pot odds of 2.65 to 1.
That means Jonathan needs odds of 27% to win the hand to make this call profitable in the long-term, while he has 20%.
However, we also have to consider the fact that he has already invested 23% of his stack, so the call it is a borderline call and calling and folding is both fine in this spot.
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