Handling Tough Situations With Stacks reduced MTT, By Chris Grove

Following an enlightening article by Chris Grove, which offers a useful example for how to deal with these situations in MTT. Thanks for telling me to Sergeon discovered! For many tournament players a stack of 13 to 20BB is the poker equivalent of that strange chair George Clooney had sex in Burn After Reading, having it is not bad, but inevitably will force you to confront difficult situations. When you have a rise across these stacks are sufficiently easy to play: you evaluate the range raiser against your hand and conclude whether to 3bet is probably profitable. Anyway, things get a bit more difficult when it is you who must decide whether to open the pot. In this article we will discuss a hand played by a member of PTP (jonrubs) in a recent Super Tuesday on PokerStars. The Super Tuesday is a buy-in tournament with $ 1k which usually attracts a rather small field and hard. A KQo jonrubs dealt with 17BB. The board is pulled up to him in the CO, with the following players yet to act.

Jonrubs basically have four options: Fold Limp-Raise Raise-fold call Shove What is the best? The answer is more complicated than it may seem to many. Complicated or not, go through each option is a great way to illustrate not only the difficulties of having to open the pot with a stack size and a medium strength hand (especially before you start to have before) but also the factors that have to consider when faced with this situation. We will consider every option from the more passive to more aggressive Fold This is the option with less risk and there is something to say about it. When you're working with a stack of 13 to 20BB, maintaining the same capacity to be effective doing robberies 3bet interested. In addition, Super Tuesday has a structure quite slow at this point in the tournament. The next level simply added before 20, and the next level is 150/200/30, and the levels go up every twenty minutes. On the other hand, KQo has a 40% equity against three random hands, and money in between represents at least 10% of your stack.

Limp Limp is an interesting option. Has obvious things against: it seems very weak, and the possibility of action behind you by a wide range of hands is very high. Since you can not hold a lot of action with KQ, the limp is the risk of investing money and then having to pull the best hand. On the other hand, keeps most of the range that you have mastered in his hand. Also hides your cards well, which is useful in a lot of post-flop situations. Finally, against certain types of opponents, gives you the option to limp-reshove. Open raise good thing to open raise is that you can take a few points without opposition, and when do you just call, have a hand that flops and probably get good play with position. However, in high stakes tournaments with stacks at this point, I think you will answer quite often pre-flop, and this is especially bad not having before, and you are risking 500 to win only 300. Thus the play needs to succeed in a number of occasions for you to rent.

When you fight back you can fold or call. Both suffer the same problem: put your opponent in a certain narrow range of hands in these situations is very difficult, so make the right decision once you've done and be open reraised raise is also quite hard. Let's explore some possible scenarios to illustrate this point. 1) You open up to 500 and the button makes all-in. You should now make call of 1,900 to win 3,200, or about 1.7:1. Is it a good price? If your opponent is very tight, not even close. If your opponent is very loose, for sure. However, if your opponent is in this broad band between the two is difficult (if not impossible) to make the call to say if the raise is good or bad choice to make a decision EV neutral or ambiguous to a bet when you have 17BB stack is not, of course, optimal in my opinion. 2) You open up to 500 and make you 3bet with a larger stack in the SB or BB Beyond the size, essentially puts you 3bet all in, so your price is 2,900 for about 7,000, or about 2.3:1.

Again, it is a good price on certain ranges, and bad against others, but as you raise can mean many things to your opponent, it is difficult to reduce to a narrow range. There is also another important point to comment on the above two situations: in both, you have inflated your odds committing money to the pot first. Think of it this way: let's imagine that no matter what you do and the button just going to go all in with QQ-AA and AK. Against this range KQ has a 20% equity. If the button does it clean and shove you're paying 2,200 for win 2,900, or 1.3:1. Call is not even close. But wait! If you raise pre-flop to 1,800, you only have to pay 600 to win 2,900. This is like 85 million to one, or whatever. Instacall! This is obviously an extreme example, but the point remains the same: when you talk to compromise effective stacks pre-flop, your true odds are a function of the above + vs effective stacks. effective stacks. So, in the case of the button, you are paying 2,400 for win 2,700, or almost the same as 1:1.

The order in which the money goes into the pot does not matter. So, in short: to open raise in this situation is problematic because you will probably not take the pot often enough to be profitable and when you reraise is difficult to put your opponents on a range, putting you in a very marginal . These situations become even more marginal when you consider that you usually have worse odds than it might seem. Moreover, even when the decision has a slight chip EV (CEV) or neutral, this does not take into consideration that you're risking your tournament on this hand. To go all-in shove seems a bit reckless. Arriestar 1.5BB 17BB for only three players still to act. Let's do some math to get a better idea of ​​whether, in fact, this move is bad. What kind of hands are going to pay your open shove? You have enough chips to force you to make calls with a very narrow range, despite the fact that the BB is relatively deep and could pay you with a somewhat broader range. Suppose you pay with TT +, AQs + and AK. This is about 4% of the hands, although your KQ can remove some of them, lowering the number to 3.5%.

So do you call 10% of the time, and when they do, you have a 30% equity. So your EV for this play is: EV = (0.9 * 300) + (0.1 * ((0.7 *- 3400) + (0.3 * 3700))) EV = (30) + (-127) = -97 can obviously make certain assumptions to make this EV is better or worse, but I do not think the play will be much better or worse. Let's make the rivals are somewhat loose, say 44 +, ATs +, KQs + garlic +. Now you will pay 25% of the time, and you will have a 36% equity when they call. So: EV = (0.75 * 300) + (0.25 * ((0.63-3400) + (0.36 * 3700))) EV = (225) + (-202.5) = +25 So tight opponents, to shove it probably neutral or slightly wrong, and against rivals loose to shove is probably neutral or slightly better. Again, it is important to remember: this review only reflects the CEV and just can not ignore the fact that when you shove and you lose not only lose all your points, your life also in the tournament. Okay, I read all this. What do I have to do? This is an article of poker, so the answer is obviously ... it depends.

Bam. In this particular situation I think of all your options open to raise is the worst. In every decision is probably more risk than a reward is less definable. Make shove and fold are very close to ESC, but obviously do more than shove fold risk, so I like to shove fold. This leads me to think that limp, which has some pre-flop cons but a decent amount of post-flop pros. Basically because I like the limp little risk, it masks your hand and leads us to have the most options pre-flop and post-flop. However, in a very passive table, for example, to open raise becomes an excellent choice as your opponents will have a much better defined range. Make shove still change a lot, but limp and fold to become less attractive options open to raise. In a hyper aggressive table to open raise and call can become a much more viable. So, summarizing: - Go all in for 17BB from late without it will not be profitable. - The more aggressive your table is more conservative you have to be open with your raises with 13-20BB stacks.

The more passive is your table, the more you should favor the open raise. A possible exception would be when your table is hyper-aggressive and they'll fight with many hands worse than KQ (or half-strength hand you have) to open so raise again becomes attractive. - Make open raise with between 13 and 20BB without considering your current pot odds if you get 3bet can put you in situations where you're probably overestimating the price you pay. - References to Burn After Reading would be more effective if the movie would have been better and more people would come to her (Translator's note: if the translator had bothered to find the title of the film in Spanish). If you're curious, the jonrubs hand he played, he did shove and was paid by the BB with TT. The hand held out and won the pot. Article Source: Part Time Poker

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