While I’ve had my share of successes on the felt over the years, nothing compares to winning a World Series of Poker Bracelet. Now that the definitely-not-as-good-as-the-real-thing online WSOP season is in the rear-view mirror, I’m taking a trip down memory lane and reliving my favorite 10 hands from when I won the 2018 $5,000 No-Limit Hold’Em WSOP Bracelet.

World Series of Poker Las Vegas, NV June 11, 2018
Event #20:  $5,000 Big Blind Ante Day 4 (Final Table)
Level 33-60,000-120,000 blinds, 120,000 big blind ante, my stack=2,800,000 chips

Hand #192 of the Final Table: The chip leader, David Laka, had roughly a 4-1 chip advantage over me, and we were heads-up.

With K8oI opened from the button to 310,000 with K8o, and Laka called from the BB. The flop came J74hh, and I led out with a continuation bet of 450,000.  I hadn’t been continuation betting every time I was the pre-flop aggressor, so I was hopeful that if he didn’t have a monster, he’d let this one go. That way I could maintain a playable stack while still being able to be at least modestly selective before pushing all my chips in. Unfortunately, he called the 450k pretty quickly, and we were off to the turn. I had roughly 25% of my chips in the pot, and didn’t have a made hand or even a draw.

The turn was a second jack, and after pondering for a brief moment, he led out for 675,000. At a full table, this is usually a dead giveaway that he has a jack, although perhaps without a great kicker, which could explain why he didn’t have the confidence to lead or raise the flop. This was an especially realistic assumption on a board with straight and flush draws, where he may not want to give me a “free card.”  Having said that, I was confident that this was precisely what he was trying to represent, because I didn’t think he would check-call the flop with top-pair (and if he did, I think he’d check the turn to incite a bet/bluff from me, now that he’d made trips).  To put it bluntly, I simply did not believe the story he was trying to tell.

It is also important to note that I had enough chips behind that, with a hand like ace-high or a small pocket pair, he may have indeed folded if I were to go all-in.  I took a minute or so to be sure that this was what I wanted to do, and I went with my two reads—that he didn’t really have a jack, and that he would fold a marginal hand to a shove.

Moving all in was one of the most terrifying moments of my poker life. Knowing that if he called me, I would almost certainly be drawing dead. My dream risked coming to an abrupt end.  Thankfully, I had the correct read. With his bluff called, he folded relatively quickly.  This put me up over 4mm in chips, my high-point, only down roughly 2-1 in chips.

This hand gave me a tremendous boost to my confidence – confidence in my ability not only to read betting lines but also about to understand the mindset of my opponents. I was able to understand that although he was willing to splash around quite a bit, he was trying to avoid all-in scenarios and going out of his way not to be in a position where I could double up. 

We later saw that he had KQo in this hand.  I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that one of the most satisfying aspects of this hand was watching back the video later and hearing the commentary.  One of the announcers noted, no more than 5 seconds before I shoved my chips in, that “Wien is simply not going to turn a bluff into an all-in hand here”—I was used to being underestimated during my Bracelet run, but this hand may have epitomized it more than any other.  It was a pivotal hand, when I had to selectively make a big move—I did, it worked, and the rest is history.