The action is three-handed at the 2009 Main Event with blinds at 500k/1m, when Joe Cada raises to 2.5m with Ad-Ks on the button. Frenchman Antoine Saout has been dealt 8-8 – a good, solid raising hand for three-way play, and opts to move all-in for 46m. Moon quickly tosses his 7s-9s into the muck to leave Cada to decide whether to call off half of his stack. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take the aggressive 21-year-old long to make the call and the pair are off to the races. Cada spikes a gut-wrenching King on the river to knock Saout out. So what? It’s A-K versus a medium pair, which happens all the time in tournaments. Standard, right? Not really.
Let’s dissect the play. Cada makes a small raise from the button to 2.5 big blinds and Saout ships it in for 46 big blinds. That’s hardly standard play by anyone’s reckoning. So why did he do it? There are several key factors in play here. Firstly, Saout is out of position, so he knows that should he call or make a raise that gets called he’ll have to play the flop, and possibly beyond, out of position on a board that is likely to have overcards. A preflop raise, on the other hand, will reopen the betting and could lead Cada to four-bet all-in, putting him in a tricky spot. (The action starts ten minutes in.)
An uncalled shove will pick up 4m, an addition of less than 10% of his stack, but if he is called he’s looking to be a coinflip or worse. Neither Moon (59m) or Cada (80m) is likely to call an all-in of that size with 7-7 or worse so Saout is turning most of the value he has in his hand into a bluff. If you’re willing to get it all-in when you’re that deep why not try to induce a shove from hands that you’re beating?
However, what can’t be fully appreciated is that four hands earlier Saout had lost a huge all-in (that would have seen him go heads-up for the title) with Queens against Joe Cada’s pocket deuces. With this much money on the line and knowing that Cada has it in him to four-bet shove fairly light, Saout decided to take the pot there and then. Any player is going to be feeling a little tilted after losing to deuces but the Frenchman is likely going to look back on his exit hand with deep regret.
More WSOP analysis: Shooting the (Darvin) Moon