A friend played the following hand. I was railing him and after the hand he regretted his decision, so I want to discuss it with you. Review the hand by clicking here.

Buy-In: €1,000 FCOOP Main Event
Remaining Players: 230/1,269, 171 will cash
Stack Hero: 87.5 big blinds in the small blind
Stack Villain: 73.5 big blinds in the big blind

Information on Villain:
– Open shoved about 35 big blinds from early position with A-Q suited
– 3-Bet shoved several times with a huge stack without showdown

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We’re in the small blind and min-raise first in. First of all, I don’t like to min-raise from the small blind. Instead, I usually make it about 2.75 big blinds. In this particular spot, our remaining opponent is a rather poor player, so we usually won’t give away any tells about the strength of our hand. However, other good players at the table might pick up on this and we could get exploited if we raise three times the big blind and show down a rather bad hand.

Besides that, we have a premium hand in that spot and should try to build a bigger pot against an opponent who will probably call us down with third pair to the river. His previous shoves indicate that he is a sub-par post-flop player and is going to make big mistakes. On the other hand, he might fold his bad hands to a raise of 5,000+, but feel priced in and call with a much wider range if we only raise to 4,000.

We definitely want him to keep in with his widest range, but generally I think since he has position, the difference of our sizing doesn’t change his range by much or at all, so we miss value and potentially give away a tell to other good players by min-raising. Against the average player in such a tournament, we shouldn’t be looking to play many pots out of position. I think that would be an obvious leak.

Surprisingly, the villain shoves his whole stack in and we have to make a decision! My buddy’s argument for folding was that since the villain is not a great player, we could find a safer spot. Plus, we’re always flipping against A-K. Let’s assume the villain only makes this shove with A-J or better (note that our equity against A-K only is the same) and never with J-J or better and never with 9-9 or worse.

First of all, let’s look at PokerStove. It says we have 56.24% equity against A-J+. Now, let’s look at how much equity we need to call:

Pot after our raise: 8,250
Pot after villain’s shove: 151,202
Amount to call: 142,952

Odds we need to make a mathematically correct call = Amount to Call / Pot after Villain’s Shove / Number of Players * 100 = 142952 / 151202 / 2 * 100 = 47.27%

We have almost exactly 9% more equity than we mathematically need. Besides that, there are other arguments that make this a call, in my opinion:

1) Villain probably never has higher pocket pairs since even the most inexperienced players probably would induce with them (in which case we get coolered and go broke about 80% of the time).

2)Villain might go crazy because of players getting closer to the money with something like 2-2 to J-J and A-J+, in which case we have up to 65% equity. A lot of poor players don’t really think about ranges and could think it’s unlikely that you picked up a premium pocket pair in the small blind. So, they shove in any pocket pair and expect to flip in the rare cases when they get called.

If the villain is the typical low-stakes qualifier who doesn’t know about strategy at all, any pocket pair could be a very strong hand for him in that spot, but not strong enough to raise/induce with it.

3) You can’t really pass such a spot in such a tournament at this stage. It will be very hard to find good spots later on, so if you keep passing up +EV spots, you will get exploited and blinded down. I think you have to be much deeper in the tournament to justify such a fold, and even then you have to be sure that you’re going to be very successful with blind- and re-steals, which most likely won’t be too easy of a task deep in a yearly €1,000 tournament.

Fortunately, poker can be played in various ways! So, discuss this topic below in the comments and bring up points I might have missed. Also, check out my new Facebook page here. Feel free to Like it.

Results:
Hero called and won against A-Qo.

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