Thursday, 28th March 2024 09:54
Home / Uncategorized / EPT11 Malta: A chinwag with Wrang

With two levels left on Day 2 of the Main Event, EPT8 Campione champion Jannick Wrang sits comfortably inside the top 10 in the chip counts. At a time when the average is just under 103,000, Wrang has a veritable monstrous 275,000 or 144.5 big blinds in new money.

He started the day with 55,100 and was at a tough table, but he had one of those dream hands where he got dealt aces at the same time as Sebastian Pauli had kings and Patrick Leonard, who folded pre-flop, held queens. There were about 90 big blinds deep, all the chips went in and the aces held to boost Wrang to nearly 200,000. Easy game right? Not quite. “I don’t think it was as simple as aces into kings,” he states. “I talked with a few other players about the hand and I actually felt like I couldn’t hide the fact I had aces. My hands were shaking a little bit because I’m tired,” said Wrang who hasn’t been sleeping well, before adding. “Shoving kings like that for 90 big blinds, I don’t think that’s a good play because I don’t know if he’s expecting me to call off with queens or ace-king because that was my first three-bet I think for two hours. I think he’s trying to make his hand look like ace-king so I’ll call with worse, but to be honest it’s so tough to get away from kings on Day 2.”

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Wrang – the beneficiary of kings into aces

And the action itself in the hand in which Leonard raised to 2,400 and Pauli three-bet to 7,200 was also far from standard according to Wrang, who plays under the name EDWARDHOPPER on PokerStars. “I made a pretty big four-bet to 18,000, in a normal situation I would only make it about 13,000 or 14,000. I was out of position, but the sizing was because I wanted to make it look like ace-king or a weird bluff of some sort.”

It worked and what’s more his tough table has long since broke but whilst he might have been hoping for an easier line-up surely moving tables and having to familiarise yourself with new opponents is a big disadvantage at this stage? “It’s a disadvantage if you don’t know the other players,” he says. “I talked with a friend of mine, he knew one of them, I knew four of them and then I figured out who another guy was and there was only two players I didn’t know. So perhaps it’s to my advantage if they don’t know me.”

And the table move has been good for the Dane who’s put himself in a great position. “I arrived at my new table with 170,000 and now I have 270,000. I’m doing well and there’s no table captain of the other players. There’s two good Russians at this table but they’ve been losing.”

Wrang is a picture of concentration at the table and as soon as he enters a pot the sunglasses come down from his head and when the pot is over they come off again. “I take them off because if I have them on all the time then I get too tired because I’m getting no light. But I try to remember to I put them on whenever I play a pot because you never know if it’s going to be a five or six minute pot and it’s better to get a read from a player if they don’t know you’re starring at them. I hope I pick up more than I give away. I’m feeling a bit tired today so I’m trying not to give away anything, sometimes people they read me and sometimes they don’t.”

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Wrang with his ‘in a pot’ face on

The 34-year-old from Copenhagen is an EPT regular who’s been playing on the tour since Season 6 so what does he think of the new stop on the tour? “So far I like the venue, the cash games are pretty good. I’ve been playing them when I’m not in a tournament. There are 30-40 cash game tables running and there have been no waitlists when I’ve been playing. It’s a good destination, the hotels are a bit cheaper than other destinations and there’s a lot of reasonable food so that’s a good start.”

When he’s not playing live Wrang can be found on the virtual felt and has had some decent success include an outright win in the Sunday 500, a second in a WCOOP event, two runner-up finishes in SCOOP events and a similar near miss in the Sunday Million. “I play tournaments on a Sunday, other than that I play PLO cash games most of the time. Right now I’m just mixing it up, I wouldn’t say I have a main game at all. I like mixed games too, I’m probably spewing in them right now but I’m trying to learn them,” he told the PokerStars Blog before adding. “I like to play the mixed game tournaments at the EPT, I haven’t had much success in them but I enjoy doing something different than just playing hold’em and PLO all the time.”

Sorry Jannick, if you keep going like this you’re going to playing hold’em for another five days.

Follow all the action from EPT Malta on the main EPT Malta page. There’s action from the Main Event on the Main Event page, and information from the Italian Poker Tour event on the IPT page. It’s also about time you downloaded the EPT App, available on both Android or IOS.

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