Mailbag: Commitment Decisions

Q: Level 6 of a Tuesday night weekly tournament held at Parx Casino in Bensalem, PA $100 buy-in, 20 minute levels, 10k starting stacks. Blinds are 300/600 with 50 antes. Hero (Me) is in the cutoff with a stack of 16,050. Everyone in earlier position folds and I find 8s7s. With no limpers I make it 1700. Button and SB fold. BB calls for 1100. BB was just moved to table 3 hands ago and has limped into one pot in EP and check/folded and has about 18,000.

Pot is now 3150 as we go to flop.

Flop is Js8c7h. Villain checks. I bet 2100 and villain check-raises to 6000. 

At this point I put villain on Jx with x being A-9, with small possibility of J-8 or a flopped straight with 10-9. Very unlikely he would have the last 2 sevens or eights and with pockets jacks I figured he would have re-raised preflop. I called. Pot is now 15150 and I have 8300 behind.

Turn is Qs. Villain checks. Hero now has two pair plus flush draw and villain has checked as an overcard falls on the turn. I shoved my last 8300 in figuring I was ahead of all of his holding except for QJ, J8, or 10-9 and I had 13 outs against QJ; 11 against J8 and somewhere between 4 (if he has exactly 10s9s) and 13 against the various 10x9x hands.

He ends up calling fairly quickly and tables Jh10h and the river is the 10d, sending me to the rail. I would be curious as to how you and the rest of the thinkingpoker readers would have played. Thanks in advance!

A: Thanks for your question! Let’s start by noting that you got your money in good, which is usually all you can ask for. I don’t know if this is why you’re asking about the hand, but I will say that if you mean to ask, “What could I have done to avoid getting busted here?”, that’s the wrong question. In tournament poker, you are going to have to put your survival in jeopardy often, particularly in a small buy-in live event. You could easily play a hand perfectly and get all-in as a substantial dog, so simply by getting all-in as a favorite, you’ve already achieved a good result. Don’t beat yourself up over this one.

That said, I do think there’s room for improvement here. The main thing you don’t seem to be considering is the idea of “pot commitment”. When the pot reaches a certain size relative to your stack and you have a hand as strong as two-pair, the possibility of getting away from it goes out the window, and the only question you need to ask is “How can I cause my opponent to make the largest possible mistakes?”

You start the hand with fewer than 27 BBs. You say there’s 3150 in the pot on the flop, but if you opened to 1700, then there ought to be 4150 in the pot and 14,350 in your stack. That makes for a 3.5:1 stack-to-pot ratio (SPR). Two-pair is a huge hand for a pot of this size, and you ought to play it for what it is: a very strong but vulnerable hand. Strong, in that it’s more than good enough to get all-in now, but vulnerable in that it could get weaker on quite a few turn and river cards. To be clear, that’s a reason to get as much money into the pot as you can now, not a reason to wait for safe turns and rivers to commit.

So I would argue that you are already committed upon seeing the flop. By the time you call the turn check-raise, the SPR is 0.5:1. That is, the pot is twice as large as your stack. Now there’s no getting away from your hand no matter what, so you might as well put the rest of your money in.

Since your money is going in regardless, make your opponent put the rest of his money in, too. You are only doing him a favor by letting him see more cards before deciding whether he wants to put any more money in. In this case there’s probably nothing that would have scared him off, but what if he had something like AJ and the the turn was a 9 or a T? He might end up folding a hand against which you are a big favorite.

You can read more about important concepts like pot commitment and SPR in Ed Miller et al’s excellent Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em (I originally referenced Small Stakes No Limit Hold ‘Em here, which is a great book but not the one I had in mind for this content specifically – thanks to kartman35 for the correction).

The last thing I’ll say about this hand is that, with stacks so shallow, I think your pre-flop raise size should be smaller. Your raise put more than 10% of your stack into the pot, and that makes it hard for you to get away from almost any hand and gives you less room to maneuver post-flop. Consequently, you probably shouldn’t be raising hands like 87s if you are going to put so much into the pot, because they will rarely flop strong hands and you’ll often be stuck holding something like middle pair in a bloated pot.

I’d rather raise closer to the minimum, somewhere in the 1200-1500 range. You may get called more often, but you’ll also have more room to use your skill edge post-flop. Also, you may find that you actually get re-raised less often when you raise smaller, which is nice when you have a relatively weak hand like 87s that has the potential to flop well and would really like to see the flop.

Thanks again and best of luck!