Alex Foxen’s $25k Six-Bet Jam: GTO Wizard Approved? Find Out!

The very best poker players of the world are in action at the 2024 World Series of Poker, and no more so than in the various High Roller tournaments.

These include the $250,000 Super High Roller which gets underway later this month (June 21), but there was still plenty of $25,000 High Roller action on display.

In the latest GTO Wizard Hand Analysis we take a look at a massive pot that saw Alex Foxen dust off the six-bet with three tables remaining.

The Hand

With 18 players remaining in Event #21: $25,000 High Roller Six Handed No-Limit Hold’em, hands were finishing at all tables ahead of the three table redraw.

At one table, Kevin Rabichow opened to 80,000 from under the gun and Stoyan Madanzhiev three-bet to 240,000. Alex Foxen was in the big blind and four-bet to 575,000.

Rabichow folded before Madanzhiev verbally announced a five-bet to 1,175,000. Foxen used a time bank before moving all in for 2,675,000 with Madanzhiev calling.

Alex Foxen: A♥5♠
Stoyan Madanzhiev: A♦K♥

There was a murmur as Foxen showed his hole cards, and he failed to overcome the ace-king of Madanzhiev on the 10♠8♣6♦J♦K♠ runout. Foxen was eliminated in 18th place for $64,429.

Wizard’s Wisdom

Thanks to GTO Wizard, we’re able to analyze the two major spots in this hand: Foxen’s decision to four-bet, and Madanzhiev’s decision to five-bet instead of shove.

Foxen’s Four-Bet

Analysis from GTO Wizard shows that Foxen’s cold four-bet isn’t recommended facing an open and a three-bet in this position. Why is that? Let’s find out:

In this scenario, it’s a given that we’re up against two uncapped ranges. That means, ranges which contain our opponents best hands at full frequency. Therefore, we need to be very tight with our value four-bets. Even a “value” hand like 10x10x always folds in this spot, as it’s too thin.

Since our bluffs exist to accommodate our value hands, we can’t be loose with our bluffs when our value threshold is very strict. Therefore, our bluff threshold also needs to be very strict to avoid playing an exploitable and unbalanced strategy.

Offsuit hands like Ax5x exist in 12 combinations. Even if he would only four-bet A5o half the time (six combos), in relation to our value raises (JJ+, 24 combos), we can see that this is a massively over-bluffing strategy.

Even if Madanzhiev doesn’t adjust to this strategy, bluffing THIS wide will improve Madanzhiev’s overall expectation by a lot, nonetheless.

To hit the point home, let’s look at Foxen’s GTO strategy:

This chart should make it clear that Ax5x offsuit is very far from a cold four-bet bluff. Even suited broadways are folding a decent amount. If both the opener and the three-bettor would play very wide ranges, it would still be impossible to justify bluffing A5o.

Madanzhiev’s Five-Bet

While Stoyan’s non-all-in five-bet is not approved by the solver, it’s still a fine play. He might’ve been onto something, though, because we saw this play motivated Foxen to put in the rest of his stack, which amplified his first mistake even further.

Five-betting to a non-all-in size when there are only ~50 big blinds in villain’s stack left is not optimal, but not a mistake per se. The solver does say that raising to around 30 big blinds compared to the all-in should yield virtually the same result.