Todd Brunson Poker Strategy

Todd Brunson isn't the most exciting player in poker history, he's not the most accomplished and the fact that his dad is practically the godfather of the game isn't doing Todd any favors as far his popularity is concerned. That being said, Brunson still managed to have a long and successful career with very little help from his more famous father. Todd's accomplishments are also relatively easy to overlook given how he's primarily a live cash game player. Even still, he managed to win one WSOP event and earn more than $4,000,000 in tournament winnings. We can safely assume that his cash game results are far more impressive.

According to a 2005 book "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King" Brunson won over $13.5 million in a two-day span playing heads-up, $50,000/$100,000 limit hold-em game. Given the nature of poker, every talented youngster can go on a short heater but the ability to fend off variance for decades is what truly deserves our praise and that's why we're going to take a closer look at Todd Brunson's game.

Thin Value For The Win

Todd Brunson has a reputation of being a rather tight player. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. Making sure that your ranges are stronger than the ranges of your opponents in important spots, was always a great strategy for winning at a poker table. When we combine that with increasing the frequency of the spots that we find ourselves with against the recreational players, we have a winning formula on our hands. Playing a solid tight-aggressive poker is also a lot more difficult in tough environments where other players try to punish us for conservative hand selection with frequent steals. Given how Brunson managed to thrive in the context of difficult Vegas cash games it's pretty safe to assume that he has this whole "tight aggressive" thing figured out.

In the hand presented above Todd combined both of the cornerstones of tight aggressive play - he made a somewhat loose preflop call in order to play a hand against a perceived recreational player and he showed up with the goods at the end of the hand. Cate Hall might not be your garden variety fish in a barrel, she's an accomplished player with more than $1,000,000 in tournament winnings, but a kinder riff on Mike McDermott's idea from Rounders would lead us to believe that there's a recreational player in every game, no matter how tough it is. It's simply a matter of degrees. In any case, Cate Hall certainly did nothing wrong on the first few streets of the hand seeing as both her 3bet with KK and the first two value barrels were pretty standard. Todd made a slightly questionable preflop call and he followed it up with a classic way ahead/way behind the approach, calling twice against an opponent that should have a somewhat polarized range.

The river is where the hand got interesting. Top card pairing the board is often fairly awkward for aggressive player with initiative given how he or she can no longer represent a top pair type hand with the same success. Also, top card pairing the board often means that the top of the range of the aggressor now loses to a passively played top pair. In summary, there are plenty of reasons not to bet on such a card in many spots, and betting again is often very dishonest. Brunson would no doubt fold against a river bet on any other card, but this one both made his hand a whole lot better and allowed him to read Cate's hand for what it was.

Still Waters Run Deep

When you think Todd Brunson, you don't exactly think about huge bluffs. That being said, truly great tight-aggressive players are self-aware and they know that occasional deviation from their core strategy can be massively +EV. In this particular hand against Shaun Deeb, Todd made a fairly standard value 3bet with AJ and followed it up with a value continuation bet with top pair. Brunson checked on the turn to control the size of the pot for a number of reasons. First of all, he was out of position, the board was very wet and lastly, his opponent wasn't exactly someone that Todd could extract a bunch of thin value from.

After Shaun Deeb decided to check behind, Brunson most likely put him on a kind of hand that he has. It made no sense for Shaun to check behind with the top of his range on such a wet board and while he could still have some weaker combo draws that got there on the river, Todd had the mother of all blocker in this spot in for of an Ace of spades and he decided to utilize his image of a very tight player in order to make a massively +EV bluff.