River Decision!

This hand is from the High Stakes Cash game televised on sky sports today. The players in the hand are Phil Ivey is in the C/O position, Patrick Antonious on the button and Bryan Townesend in the SB.

If you have seen this hand, please let others have there say 1st. The history of the game so far is that Ivey has lost 3 x $100,000 buy ins, he's been getting pwned by the ever lovable Tony G which is enough to put anyone on super tilt!. Patrick is up a couple of hundred grand. I wont tell you Iveys cards for the purpose of the exercise.

Folded to Ivey who bets $2000

Patrick with Ad Tc calls the bet

Bryan calls in the sb.

Flop: As Ac Js

Brian chks, Ivey bets $6000 into $8000 pot.

Patrick raises $15000, Brian folds, Phil raises to $50,000, Patrick calls.

Turn: 5 (non club)

Ivey bets $100,000, Patrick calls.

River: Qh

Ivey goes into the tank, he literally takes 5 minutes to throw out a sick bet $250,000 Pot stood at like over $600,000.


what do you do?

What were the blinds? Not sure whether Ivey's pf $2000 is a call or a raise.

Cfpoker: the BB wasn't in the hand and there's few cash games with 1k/2k blinds so the 2k bet must've been a raise

its hard to analyze something at this level because it's soooo dependent on history and table dynamics that can't be expressed in a one sentence synopsis. i'll give a crack at it

given the action, the board and the size of the bet, it's hard to imagine ivey is hardly ever bluffing this river. basically ivey knows a) patrik isn't raising a lone J on the flop.. there's no point, he'd be turning his hand into a bluff.. so we can rule out that. and b) i doubt patrik is calling the flop raise and the very large turn bet with a draw on a paired board. so there's no draw to bluff him off

i think ivey is pretty sure patrik has at least an A, so i see his bet as being for value. AT doesn't really beat anything but a bluff. even if ivey has a weaker ace -- which i don't think he'd play that strong to the river -- they would chop because the QJ would play on the trips

i think ivey has AJ/JJ, maybe AQ. i think AJ/JJ makes the most sense because 1. the flop 3bet and 2. he might have been worried that patrik had AQ and filled up on the river and that would explain why he tanked trying to figure out what to do

Ivey is super aggressive but he knows when to back off if someone is showing strength. I think Antonius is a bit on the tighter side, not positive tho, so when Ivey bet on the flop, I thought he could easily have something like 10 8 of spades. Then when Ivey reraised Antonius's raise on the flop I thought Phil had ace rag. On the river I'd say Ivey has either JJ or ace - X where x is lower than 10.

patrick has to fold, surely patrick has to fold hte flop. What hand does he beat that 3 bets that flop? Leading out with big bets on all streets is surely the clearest of indicators that a,t is crushed. Id say ivey hit a full house on the flop to 3 bet it, so either a,j or jj, maybe even a,q but he was definately tanking to work out what value bet to throw out.

well as I tried to point out in my original post, this decision is mega complicated by the previous hands Ivey has played against TonyG. It's super easy for Patrick to instacall here because of this. He suspect Ivey is on super tilt, however, would Ivey put so much money in this pot without anything like the nuts. To his credit Patrick tanked for a while, and in the end he couldn't lay it down.

I think Ivey, going into the tank for such a long period of time, confused his opponent. He used his previous metagame to his advantage and realised that Patrick would probably call as a result of this.

Ivey turns over JJ for a full house to beat Patrick's trip aces and a pot of over $800,000.

I think I would have called as well. PA knows Ivey is capable of bluffing like this and Ivey could be on tilt. A preflop raise from Ivey means nothing.