They had started with over six thousand players. On day eight, they had finally gotten it down to ten. The next player out would be forgotten, while the remaining nine would become celebrities...for the next four months anyway...so the play was tight and cautious. In situations like this it is often simply the first person to make a mistake that gets knocked out, and in the end that is exactly what happened - John Hewitt made a bad decision.
Up until that point Hewitts play on day eight had been very disciplined. The day had started with twenty-two men playing on three different tables. The feature table is designed to seat nine people comfortably, but when they got down to ten players the decision was made to make them all play at the same table. It would be more dramatic and much more television-friendly that way. As they moved all the remaining players together, Hewitt who was the short stack, commented that he liked his chances of cracking the top nine because he was "the tightest player at the table." This selective approach worked well for Hewitt at first and he climbed from tenth spot up to seventh when for some reason he decided to throw caution to wind and got punished for it.
Here is how the hand went down. It was level 36 and the big blinds and antes amounted to a pot of 1.15 million before the cards were even dealt. John Hewitt, with 13.72 million in chips remaining, looked down at his hole cards and saw king-queen off suit; a border-line hand, but he had been playing so cautiously that he must have figured that a raise here would likely win him the pot as the other players would certainly give him some credit. So Hewitt made a pot sized bet of 1.1 million; big enough to look very serious, yet leaving himself enough chips that he could fold if someone came back with a big re-raise.
The action folded to Badih Bounahra, who was in tenth place at that moment and happened to have been dealt pocket kings. Bounahra made a big show over his decision, pretending to agonize over what he should do. This play-acting, while an important part of the deceptive nature of poker, draws a lot of criticism from some people and is often derisively referred to as "hollywooding". ESPN commentator Phil Helmuth certainly thought Bounahra's acting was very transparent, saying such blatant hollywooding should be a clear signal he had a monster hand. The two minute performance ended with Bounahara pushing his entire 9.1 million in chips into the pot.
Hewitt thought for a moment then called. He showed little reaction when Bounahara flipped over his kings. Bounahara was a 90% favourite to win that hand and win it he did, going up to 19.95 million in chips. Hewitt had only 4.12 million left - less than half of what the player in ninth spot had. Hewitt was so far behind that he would need a miracle run to make it into the November Nine and that didn't happen. He was knocked out shortly thereafter.
Clearly Hewitt should have known his KQo was an underdog to ANY hand that Bounahara would be willing to go all-in with. Later, when asked why he called, Hewitt explained that he felt "the range of hands he (Bounahara) could have had included pocket jacks down to pocket eights. I was hoping I was up against something like that." Let's examine this sentence because, I believe, it perfectly illustrates the kind of bad thinking that even a very successful player can fall victim to. Firstly it contains the word "hope" - a word you hear poker losers use a lot. There is a word for people who find themselves making bad calls because they hope their opponent is playing the bottom end of his range. That word is "donkey". Hewitt made a donkey call. What makes it worse is that even if Hewitt's dream came true and Bounahara had something like 77, Hewitt would still be a slight underdog with a 48% chance to win. Why make a call when the best case scenario still has you slightly behind?
Some would say the 2.25 million in the pot gave Hewitt proper pot odds to call if he knew he was up against an under-pair, and that might be true if this hand occurred in a ring game, but this hand occurred when the penalty for losing the hand was to seriously cripple your chances of making the November Nine; a downside so big that it would be stupid to call. Which is not to say Hewitt is stupid but that he just made a stupid call.
John Hewitt will almost certainly never have a better chance to make the final table at the WSOP main event. For the rest of his life he will have to think about the one donkey call. The rest of us can learn from his mistake and hopefully never repeat it.
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