My analysis of Adam Junglen's superman call

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Daut

United States. Apr 02 2007 20:32. Posts 8955

When I first saw this hand I immediately thought it was the worst call I had ever seen. However, the more I think about it the more interesting the hand gets. For those of you who havent seen or heard about this hand, it came up in the monte carlo tournament a few days ago. Here was the spot:

Patrick Antonius makes it 1k from the cutoff. Adam makes it 3.2k from the button and Antonius makes it 9k. Adam calls.

Flop:
Qc 2s 4c

Patrick moves in for 34.5k. The break has just happened, but a crowd is developing around the table as only the two players remain seated. Adam keeps staring intently at Patrick, checking his chips, it'll cost most of his stack to call. Patrick sits impassively. Finally, eyes still focused on Patrick, Adam pushes the 34.5k into the pot, and Patrick visibly loses the colour out of his face as he flips over 3c 5s . Adam turns over first the Ac, then....the Jd ! Everyone including Patrick manages a double take. I hear people shocked, yet still somehow impressed at the call.

Turn:

8s

River:

As

Patrik raked a ~90k pot with a straight.

So as I said it came off as a bad call at first. I did a quick analysis on how adam does against a sample hand range of patrik's.

We are getting roughly 1.5:1 odds but a little bit better, so lets say we need 39% equity.

If we assume that patrik has air here 20%, a draw (clubs, gutshot, oesd etc) 30% and a monster (set/AA/KK) 50% then we get the following.

Suppose against air that Junglen has on average 75% equity. This fair because if patrik has 2 live cards hes about 25% and sometimes he has adam dominated (AK), sometimes adam has patrik dominated. but I have trouble beliving that patrik will often just shove hands like 68o where he missed completely, so i think 20% of the time is a generous estimate here.

Now, against a draw, lets say that adam has 50% equity on average. This is also fair because some big draws are more than 50% vs adam(like 56cc) and some gutshots are a bit under.

And against a monster, lets say adam has on average 8% equity. sometimes he will have a little more if patrik has KK, sometimes he will be murdered against a set, sometimes patrik will have AQ, whatever, 7% is fairly accurate.

ok, now his ev given these assumptions is .2*.75+.3*.5+.5*.08=.15+.15+.04=.34
34% equity. This is not good, in fact its quite -EV. If we adjust the hand range a bit to include more air and less monsters perhaps we can convince ourselves that adam has CLOSE to enough quity against patrik's range. (this would require a very very very good read because adam is getting very bad odds and patrik will often show a good hand here)

Now, let's backstep a bit before i continue.

I think the call preflop is terrible. Here is adam's quote on the situation, right after it happened:

His range for 3-betting preflop is so wide...When I called the 6k extra I was trapping. I don't care, I've played 10k comps before, his move in was a scared bet, I'd have probably called with King high.

how exactly do you trap with AJo? you dont hit flops often enough and when you dont you arent even certain of where you stand. It's a total reverse implied odds situation. I think that the call preflop is atrocious, and if he really thought his range was that wide, he should shove. he would be risking roughly 41k to win 14k, and he gets folds more than enough to make this a very good play (much much much more EV than calling here even though he has position). I wont bother running the EV calculations but I assure you this is very +EV if patrik is calling with say AA KK QQ JJ AK and is putting in a 3rd raise about 10% of the time (which would mean he is calling 1/3 the time and folding 2/3 the time). Ok, just for you guys ill run the damn EV calculation

Let's say that patrik calls the all in 33% and folds 67%. when he calls, AJo has 25% equity against that range.

.67*14=9.38 (when he folds we win 14k)
.33*(.75*-41+.25*48)=.33*(-30.75+12)=.33*-18.75=-6.25

so our EV of shoving here is over 3k. very very good.

I'll also add in that folding to this 4bet is just fine as well. Nothing wrong with it, havent risked a lot, AJo isnt all that strong. And it's also ok toflat cal with AJo in position here.

ok, back to where i was. now, suppose that we can convince ourselves that Adam almost has enough equity against patrik's range but it is still -EV to call. I think if we have a good enough read to convince ourselves of this it becomes a call postflop for the following 3 reasons.

1. we have a chance to knockout the best player in the world
2. we will have a big chip stack which we will be able to take advantage of because....
3. Everyone at the table will utterly fear us.

Imagine how scared the average poker player would be of a guy who just bitched the best player in the world and now has a stack. If he could have a 100k stack after this move, its at a point in the tournament where nobody will fuck with him and he can just run everyone over and build a monster stack in the next few hours. It would have such profitable aftereffects that I think having a slight -EV situation is overcome with ease.

The question becomes how -EV are we willing to go in order to still take this gamble? Unfortunately that isnt quantifiable, but I would guess that its around 35% equity, a little bit higher than I came up with in my EV calculation.

Now, note that I said i was giving patrik a generous range, and I still think that. I just dont see how we can assume he has air or a draw here much more than that, I would usually assume much less, but for the sake of argument i gave adam the benefit of the doubt in his read. perhaps adam was a little more sure of this and could push it into the 35%+ range. Then although it's still a -EV call, i say great move.

Kid's sure got balls to pull something like this. I still think the preflop call is atrocious, but after a lot of thought I have come to appreciate this postflop call. he gets my gold star award for the week, mainly because its the manliest call of all time, he obviously has some Bryan Van Dautsend blood in him to make patrik say matte.