What’s Your Play? Tangling With the Chipleader Results

Thanks to everyone who commented on this week’s What’s Your Play, which dealt with playing out of position in a big pot against the chipleader at the final table of a daily live tournament. We’ve already said that it’s best not to end up in this spot by not 3-betting pre-flop, but now that we’re in this situation, let’s talk about how best to proceed.

There are two critical details to take into consideration:

1. The pot is huge. With 122K in there and and 210K left in Hero’s stack, we’re dealing with a Stack-to-Pot ratio of less than 2. Thus, your threshold for getting all-in must be rather low, despite the fact that you’d rather not risk elimination in fourth place.

2. Villain’s range is probably very wide. We know that he’s made some reckless calls before and it’s possible that he’s on “positive tilt”, meaning that he’s convinced he’s got a horseshoe up his ass after running hot so far. The Hero in this hand told me he put Villain on any two when he called the 3-bet. That seems a little extreme to me, but I do think his range is wide. Todd offers a reasonable approximation: ” any pair, any ace, any paint, suited connectors and gappers, and probably some Paint-rag combos as well.”

Taken together, these two observations mean that Hero should not be looking to fold second pair. As nyy214 says, “Q10 is generally good on this flop so I am having a very difficult time folding this hand against this opponent. So if he has a king the money goes in regardless. So we need to figure out the best way to extract value from worse pairs/bluffs.”

This is exactly the right way to approach the situation. Once you’ve decided that you won’t be folding, you must focus on either maximizing your fold equity or convincing Villain to put money into the pot with hands you crush.

Given the size of the pot, the relative strength of Hero’s hand, and his read on Villain, trying to make Villain fold anything with appreciable equity would be foolish. A few commenters advocated going this route, but Gareth had a good answer to them: “People are saying that we are really far ahead of his range then sort of talk about betting to take down the pot or bluff him off 10% equity.”

Hero’s goal here is to find the line that will get the most weaker hands to put money into the pot. Villain’s betting/raising range will almost certainly be wider than his calling range, so I think betting with the expectation of getting a lot of value from a call would be a mistake. If we though betting would induce shoves from a really wide range, I’d be in favor of bet-calling, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Many commenters even said they wouldn’t be comfortable getting it in to Villain’s shoving range. Although I don’t agree with that (Hero would be getting three or four to one at that point), I do think betting isn’t the best way to induce bluffs.

That leaves checking. This particular Villain seems quite likely to fire at least one bluff, so Hero should give him the opportunity to do that. If he checks behind, I’d check again on any turn, but I’d actually be willing to check-fold on an Ace. Anything else and I still feel that Hero’s equity would be too good to get away from.

Assuming Villain bets, which he probably will, I think it’s relatively close between shoving and calling, but I’d opt for shoving. Depending on just how reckless Villain is, he might be willing to just blindly barrel off, in which case check-calling is better. My guess, however, is that even for a reckless LAG, alarm bells will go when Hero check-calls a third of his stack. I’m afraid Villain will more or less shut down after that, which means that showing him the turn and river would just be permitting him to freeroll. I prefer shoving not because I expect to be ahead when called but because the pot at that point will be extremely large, I don’ t anticipate good implied odds from inducing further bluffs, and I don’t want to give free cards in such a massive pot. If we’re going to make clear that we have a strong hand, we might as well put money into the pot while we’re at it.

As played, Hero open shoved the flop. He and I discussed this decision, and I believe I convinced him that his stated goal of “maximizing fold equity” didn’t make much sense since better hands were so unlikely to fold. Then he told me the results: Villain folded QQ face-up!

In recent WYPs, I’ve admitted that surprising results call into question some of my assumptions and the line on which I settled. In this case, though, I’m chalking it up to an outlier. Even if Hero had reason to believe that Villain would fold JJ and QQ to a shove, which is a questionable assumption in the first place, he’s so unlikely to have them based on the pre-flop action and the overall width of his range that I’d still prefer check-shoving.

This is the kind of rungood that often goes unnoticed but that contributes quite a bit to winning a tournament!  Thanks again to all the commenters and to Sylvain for submitting this hand for dissection.