Poker is a sliding door game. Just pick the wrong one and hours of gaming will go up in smoke.
A decision with potentially fatal consequences that a back it turned out correctinsert instead descent the street from Chris Brewer for the WSOP 250k High Roller bracelet.
The US player, considered by some to be the unluckiest player on the high roller scene, was actually delighted when he hit the cash zone.
“It’s the first time in my career that I’ve cashed in a tournament worth more than a hundred thousand dollars,” Brewer told players at his table after bursting with the humility that characterizes him.
The game situation
Later, with the tournament still 6 minutes to go, Brewer laid an important foundation to earn the win, which took first place in cash in a tournament with more than $100,000 in entries.
At 300,000/600,000 blinds with a BB ante, Chris leads the chip count with 9.3M. Kornuth and Martirosian are roughly around 11.5M, as are Smith and Kabrhel at 18.9M, with Bulgaria’s Kulev a solid chip leader with a stack of 33.3M.
The payoff is one that has us mere mortals shaking our wrists, literally:
| position | Price |
| 1 | $5,293,556 |
| 2 | $3,271,666 |
| 3 | $2,279,038 |
| 4 | $1,632,005 |
| 5 | $1,202,318 |
| 6 | $912,022 |
| 7 | $712,953 |
| 8th | $574,899 |
| 9 | $478,663 |
The hand
From below Smith opens 1.3M, two positions to the left Brewer bets 3.6M, Martirosian Pusha goes from the big blind, Dan Smith calls.
Chris Brewer looks disgusted and in less than twenty seconds he folds his cards, gets up from the table and announces to the table that he folded jacks.
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The opponent on his left, Martin Kabrhel, listens and congratulates him. After the runout, which would have given him a lost set, the Czech increased the dose: “You really are a genius, Chris!”
When the tribe is a finesse
As you can see in the video below, if he called Brewer, he had an 85% chance of getting eliminated.
That he survived is largely thanks to the line he held: In his place, many with a 15.5BB stack would have (rightly) pushed all their chips into the middle of the table, only to see the cooler to curse.
Instead, Brewer managed to stay alive and then claim the first bracelet of his career (and a five million super megacoin) against Artur Martirosian after folding more than a third of the stack.
The video: When the west tactic works
Martirosian, who in turn could have been eliminated from the tournament due to the hand in which Brewer folded. However, as you can see in the video below, as soon as the Russian realized he had “one foot in the grave,” he stood up, slung the fanny pack over his shoulder, and was ready to leave the table.
In this case, the “jacket tactic”, as my colleague Andrea Borea defined it, had the desired effect on the turnaround: To start the video, click in the field with the mouse.
