When I speak to poker players who haven’t played much of the hyper-turbo format, they’re always surprised to find out just how much creativity can still come into play even at short-stack depths. Most believe games like Jackpot Poker are entirely luck-based or all about push/fold ranges, but there’s a lot more to these games than there seems. Let me show you what I mean with a highly unique hand I played recently. A play like this won’t come around every game, but it will highlight the type of second and third-level thinking that’s sometimes required to succeed in such a high-variance format.
The game is a $50 jackpot poker sit & go with a 10x prize-pool, meaning the three of us have a chance to win $500 in the winner take all format. After a lengthy battle (for a hyperturbo, that is) I ended up heads up against a good aggressive regular with a 6BB to 4.5BB chiplead.
Being first to act on the button, I begin the hand being dealt 64o. Although the solver prefers a fold at this depth, I elected to limp it as I had already trapped my opponent twice before and thought he’d be just gun-shy enough for my call to outperform a fold. Fortunately, he did check back his option this time, and we took a KQJ rainbow flop.
Since almost nobody balances well at such shallow stack depths, I knew it was nearly impossible for my opponent to have a strong hand on this board. Other than a small percentage of AA hands that trapped, all other good hands—from KK down to A2, from Kx down to JTo (at least)—would have either shoved or raised after my limp. That means my opponent’s only value-hands on a KQJ board are T9o and some low offsuit Qx or Jx hands. Understanding this range disadvantage, my opponent checked his option.
This is when that creativity kicked into gear, and it came from both sides.
Although the standard play would be for me to make a 1bb bet here, or precisely because the standard play here would be to bet all my bluffs, I elected to check.
It might seem counterintuitive, but think about it from my opponent’s perspective: what hands would a good regular limp at this stack depth and not try to take down on such a favorable board?
Would they really surrender in a proverbial gun fight in which everyone knew the other guy had no bullets? If the roles were reversed, I know my alarm bells would be going off.
Could I have made the standard bet and likely taken it down? Probably. But knowing my opponent liked to make moves in “wide configurations” (I have a lot of bad hands in my range too), I didn’t want to give him an opportunity to check/shove his Tx and even 9x gutshot hands against my minbet, as I’d expect him to often do. Besides, if I wanted any chance of getting a Qx or Jx hand to fold with barely any chips behind, I would need to tell a more convincing story than a standard limp/stab. Which is why I chose to begin telling that story by checking back the flop.
The turn brought another jack, making the board KQJJ and my opponent checked again. After not taking the bait, I was certain my opponent was giving up, and so I now slid out one big blind expecting the hand to be done. But to my surprise, my opponent had other plans. After a long pause, he check-raised the minimum to 2bb, leaving himself just 2.5BB behind. Not a great thing to see when you’re holding just 6 high.
Most of the time this would be a shrug and fold, and yet…something didn’t add up. If my opponent really had T9 or a hand like J2, I would expect him to either lead the turn, or, if he decided to slowplay, continue doing so all the way by letting me fire my bluffs again on the river (or at the very least, call the turn and lead the river). Thinking about it in that way, my opponent’s likeliest holdings seemed to be Tx, 9x, or a disbelieving stone-cold bluff. And if that’s the case…
My final consideration was my “perceived range,” or what it looked like I had.
Imagine sitting in my opponent’s seat and seeing me check back a board I should have bet, then bet the turn and call a raise. Name the bluffs you would realistically expect me to have there.
A naked Tx hand would have probably bet the flop. A 9x would likely do the same—or if it didn’t, would fold against the raise. That leaves…what exactly? With all the traps still in my range (including all the Jx hands that make perfect sense as a check the flop, bet-call the turn), where are my bluffs actually coming from? I would have to be an idiot with 6 high!
But if I were to call the turn raise, I thought, I would only be risking 1 big blind to potentially win a 6BB pot if my opponent elected to save his remaining 2.5BB stack.
Obviously if my opponent really had T9 or Jx, he would jam the river and I’d have the easiest fold of all time, having only lost a single big blind more than had I just given up. But if he had literally any other hand, I felt he was going to have a real hard time punting it into the abyss and risk getting trapped for a third consecutive time.
Because, while 2.5BB doesn’t seem like a lot of chips to non-hyper players, against an 8BB stack, that is only one double away from essentially being back to even. My opponent knew this, and my thinking was that the 10x prize pool would entice him just enough to want to stay alive.
And so I did it, I called his raise with 64o. And once my opponent used his entire clock and then checked the river deuce, I trusted my read and jammed all in. In hindsight, I probably could have bet just 1.5-2BB on the river, both making it seem like I was really trying to milk him and saving myself an extra 0.5-1BB if I ran into one of his unlikely value hands. But that could also leave the door open for my opponent to out-level my level and bluff one last time, though if he did that, he just deserved it more.
Eventually my opponent folded his hand and it took everything I had in me to resist the urge to show him the bluff, knowing it was just my ego at work and there was no need to give him free information in such a unique spot.
And so ultimately, this is what recreational players miss about hyperturbos, that the game isn’t just a bunch of lucky shoves and calls, it’s a battle to control the narrative of the hand.
And if you can use your storytelling skills to make your opponent see monsters where they don’t exist, you’re going to win a lot of hands, sometimes even with just six high.
