Johnny Chan Poker Strategy

Johnny Chan is one of the biggest poker legends. He's a back to back World Series of Poker Main Event Champion (and was very close to the third consecutive win if not for "The Poker Brat" Phill Hellmuth himself) including the 1988 event, a final hand of which was immortalized in the movie "Rounders". He has 10 WSOP bracelets, 27 WSOP Final table finishes which - if we do some basic arithmetics - constitutes an insane final table to the first place finish conversion rate of 37%! Johnny Chan gets the job done.

"The Orient Express" won more than eight million dollars in live tournaments and given how lethal he is at live tables it's hard to estimate how much more he manage to win playing nosebleed cash games. In this article, we'll take a closer look at some of the interesting spots from Johnny Chan's career.

Johnny Chan is the Man

A great little hand from Chan. Preflop raise is arguably the least exciting part of it as it looks very standard given the dealer position. Flop becomes much more interesting. Normally, it can be argued that cbetting with gutshot and two overcards would be the preferred option especially against a small blind calling range which in theory should be somewhat narrow and broadway heavy.

However, this board might as well spell out "I love Daniel Negreanu" because everyone who followed the guy for any reasonable period of time knows that he's going to have a bunch of suited connectors in his range even he's not "supposed to". Queen on the turn is a great card to start betting especially if we continue with the assumption that the flop hits Daniel's range fairly hard. Johnny continues his solid line on the river and he's rewarded with a very tight fold.

Punishing the Wannabes

This hand kinda looks like that one scene in Rounders where Mike tells Knish how he managed to win a hand against Johny Chan... except if it was written by a good writer and Matt Damon's character lost. If you're in the mood to question "the champ" it could be argued that the preflop play might not work that well for him the long run, however he still had two players behind him who were perfectly capable (even somewhat likely given the amount of dead money in the pot) to re-pop with a wide range.

The rest of the hand is smooth sailing, Chan picked absolutely perfect sizing for the flop bet that was consistent with his perceived range and gave the opponent enough space to do something stupid - and he immediately proceeded with doing just that.

Insane Live Reads

This one is pretty damn impressive. It's impossible to justify Chan's line in this spot using poker strategy. Normally, this is a very trivial spot for at least two if not three value barrels against most opponent types.

As played the river should be an easy call for Chan even if you swapped one of the aces in his hand with a ham sandwich (given how passively the hand played out). The only sensible explanation for Chan's line is a sick live soul-read and given the fact that Chan is known for his solid, no-nonsense, aggressive playstyle it had to be exactly that.

Johnny Chan is the Master

It's only fitting that we finish this quick overview of Chan's strategy with perhaps the most important hand in his entire life. The final hand of 1988 WSOP Main Event secured him the place in a very exclusive club of back to back World Champion title winners (not to mention the famous Rounders cameo performance).

Johnny Chan was playing calm cool, collected and absolutely lethal poker before many of us were even born and he finished his WSOP Main Event performance in style. Cynics would say that it came down to flopping the nuts and that given the game structure Erik Seidel was bound to invest all of his money in even if "The Champ" used a different line. That being said "The Orient Express" did everything in his power to make Seidel's decision as easy as possible and that's certainly a mark of a great player.

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