This hand comes from level 3 of the $1500 “Millionaire Maker” WSOP event, a two-day affair expected to draw a field of 5000+. With just 4500 starting chips, preflop shoves were commonplace. They’ll be commonplace in lots of the low buy-in tournaments in Las Vegas this summer, so if you plan to play any of those, it’ll be important to get these decisions right.
We were playing 10-handed. My table was probably tougher than average for this stage of the tournament, though it didn’t contain any superstars. One guy, who was thankfully on the other side of the table, was playing quite well, and most of the others seemed like they weren’t going to make huge mistakes.
Blinds were 75/150, and there was not yet an ante. UTG, who seemed like an experienced tournament player, had just lost a flip on the previous hand. He moved all-in for 750. A tight but decent player calls in middle position with 6K behind, a good and active player calls next to act with 20K behind, a tight passive player on the button looks pained but eventually calls with 4K behind. I’m in the BB with KTo and have 3725 after posting. What’s your play and why?
Post your thoughts and comments here, and I’ll be back with my own as well as the results on Friday.
If we could shove and isolate the UTG player that would be the best play. In this spot, however, I don’t see any way we will get the other 3 players who still have chips to fold. There will be 6,200 in the pot by the time it gets back to the guy with the 20K stack (assuming the tight decent player folds) and there is no way he’s not going to make the call. Going to battle with KTo against the UTG player is a good play, but against more than that means you are probably putting your tournament life at risk and will need to get lucky.
I don’t like folding with the possibility of winning a very large pot here. The implied odds would force me to make the call even though we are playing out of position.
It’s funny, in France the name of the person who presents the show “Who wants to be a millionaire” is Foucault.
I think flatting 16% of your remaining stack is probably not a good choice, however you do close the action. But if you don’t flop two pair or a heavy draw, you’re likely beat with a flopped one pair hand, though not always. Lots of flatting behind original raiser could indicate small pocket pairs, suited/unsuited broadway combos like JT, QJ, QT, but surely not TT+, as I think they would’ve raised to isolate with those hands. You could shove, but that really depends on whether you think you have fold equity against the field. Truth is these small buyin tournaments make you play faster than normal, if you haven’t accumulated chips after the first couple levels, you find yourself short if you’re still close to starting stack, so an argument can be made to just shove and take the gamble. This is a tough scenario actually, and I look forward to your thoughts Andrew!
Easy fold IMO. Too much action with weak hand.
Fold. Its inviting to lay out 4BBs to call a pot with over 20BBs but Im sure Hero is dominated more than once. Shoving is exactly what others might want as they seem to invite the squeeze. No FE here as well. Nah I fold.
The 750 shove is going to have a very wide range, and the fact that none of these other players are squeezing preflop is that they are speculating that he is shoving weak, and would gladly check it down. I doubt the fellow with 6K thought he would get so much action behind him. You are 600 more to call with a pot of ~3000 and would be first to act, so while it is a tempting call, you’d need to have a pretty solid plan for what would happen postflop(like shoving on a Khigh board). This early, other spots will come, and I’d be most inclined to fold, as my only course of action postflop would be to shove on a dry board IMO, and I don’t like it multiway.
Also, as an avid podcast listener and reader of your blog, it would be great to say hi when I get to town next week – I’ll be staying at the Rio 6/5-6/8.
edgie
So, this is embarrassing, but… I’m trying to tackle this question and can’t find good (Mac-compatible) software that can do what PokerStove does.
Any suggestions?
FWIW, my first guesses at ranges for everyone:
UTG: top 60%
MP: 100% of {AQs-ATs, AQo-AJo, TT-55}; 50% of {JJ, 44}; 30% of {QQ, AKs}, 20% of AKo, 10% of AA.
MP for purposes of approximate calculation: {AsAc, AKs-ATs, AQo-AJo, TT-55}
LMP: AQs-AJs, AQo, JJ-88 (could be convinced that several inclusions/omissions here are wrong).
BTN: AKs-AQs, AKo, JJ-TT.
I don’t think Andrew has big ROI problems here: the pot is protected. If anything I think he has a playing advantage after the flop. So just comparing his immediate equity to his immediate odds ought to do the trick.
FWIW, I found a program I had on my iPad. Also I think some of my ranges are wrong.
OK, playing around with these ranges, it looks like Andrew has 14-16% equity. He needs 15.7% or so to call if there are no implied or reverse-implied odds.
It turns out to matter what the first two callers will do with KQ. (I assumed that the button won’t have KQ.) I am also assuming that the good player with 20K will not set-mine with any pair, which I think is reasonable.
My first instinct was that this was a close fold; after some thought I then wondered if calling wouldn’t be better. I am now leaning toward a fold again, just because my preliminary work with PokerCruncher tells me that if the callers are somewhat looser than I thought they’d be, that is bad news, because the hands they have will be bad for KT.
I actually think that I’d have a playing advantage after the flop in many situations like this, but with some short stacks and at least one good player, I’m not sure that’s the case here.
Preserving the (at least) 600 chips has some value, too, so there’s another reason to fold a hand like this. Not to focus too much on factors other than immediate equity, it matters a bit where you are in the level: there’s a real playing difference between 3125 and 3725 at 100-200 (especially if you subtract the likely loss of a SB next hand), even more than there is at 75-150.
Curious to know what others think!
What program are you using instead of Stove?
PokerCruncher (for iPad). I’m also in the process of writing my own.
Ugh.. so complicated…
I don’t hate folding here. We still have 20+BB without ante and a 10-handed table means we are def. not desperate.
Calling is an option but being out of position sucks. And we could potentially be dominated. I can see people calling with stuff like ATo,KQs. I’d be more inclined to call with something flops well such as QJs, 89s etc…
If the BTN has any goods like AK he should be happy to shove instead of playing a multiway pot. So I take his pain being genuine.
I think we need to be mostly concerned of the tight 6k stack and the active 20k stack. Esp. the 20k bc he probably wouldn’t give BTN credit for having a monster and he’s going to get good odds to call. The tight 6k player is a lees of a concern bc he’s sandwiched between you and the 20k and he has to think of the action of the 20k to his left.
Assuming 20k stack is the only player calls. It’s going to be $3800 (750*5+50) for the main pot and $6250 ((3725-600)*2) for the side pot.
I honestly don’t know how to handle these types of situations….So please go easy on me if i said something ridiculous… I guess we should give ppl ranges and see how KTo is doing in both main pot and side pot?
I assume UTG is shoving 40% of his hands and 20k is calling with 20% (minus QQ+ and AK) of his hands. KTo has about 30% equity in the main pot and 46% equity in the side pot. We need 15.7% equity in the main pot and 50% in the side pot to break even. So with some fold equity to bank on I think it’s a +EV shove.
But i also think it’s close… against a good player with a big stack he would probably correctly not give you credit for having a monster to squeeze here. Although ppl at the table are not making obvious mistakes, in a large field full of weak players i think we can find an excuses to fold and find better spots to get our money in.
I agree that we ought to be thinking about future side pots, but I’m not sure hot-and-cold equity is the best way to do that. People play quite honestly in these spots, which is why I took the approach of worrying most about what’s going on in the main pot and then adjusting a little bit up or down depending on how we figure to do on the side.
I think that 20% for Mr. 20k is a bit too wide–you really think he has things like A9o, J9s, and so on?
Nate, the reason i mention the side pot is bc when we shove and Mr.20K calls, there’s going to be a side pot right?
I do think 20% is a little wide for him….I messed up. I just checked my poker software (ev++) and found where the problem was. I drag the bar below to give him a 20% range before removing hands from above. I thought the number indicating the % of hands would change accordingly but obviously it didn’t. i think maybe 12% is close to the truth…
Aha! Now I understand–thanks for replying.
I think shoving is a mistake–since the pot is protected, we’ll be able to play OK after the flop. Because of that and (mostly) because our hand is a pretty serious dog here, I think calling is better than shoving.
hmm….
i actually don’t hate shoving although i think it’s marginally +EV. If i’m in a field full of players better than i am i’d take these spots to negate the disadvantage in skills. But i don’t think Andrew need to do this.
The danger of calling is we could be easily dominated. I do agree with you ppl tend to be honest when the pot is protected. On the other hand, I don’t think calling is that bad if we can comfortably fold the hand facing a big bet on flops like K92 or T32..
On T32 I think we need to open-jam if we call pre. On K9x there’s an argument to be made for checking, one element of which is that we can fold the hand sometimes.
Agreed that we can be easily dominated. If that means we will put money in bad after the flop too often, then we should certainly fold pre (if my range estimates are correct).
I don’t want to shove $3725 into 5 players because I can expect to get called here by hands that dominate me. (More specifically, the $20k stack is never folding to the shove here.) Calling with KTo in the BB (OOP) is just giving away $600 to another players (TBD).
Shove-fest or not, I’ll sit this hand out.
FOLD and if I would have made a straight, spend the next 10 minutes telling the table that I folded the best hand 😉
IMO probably break even shove…unless you are convinced utg+1 has AA/kk.
not sure about the structure but if it is super fast I could be convinced to ship-it.
If 20bb is going to turn into 15 bb in a hand or two…
Mostly because UTG+1 will probably fold knowing utg+2 is behind with 20k.
My soul read says Andrew folded 🙂
Is MP(2nd to act, not utg+1 sorry) really just calling with AK??? with a 20k stack behind him?
feels more like he called to get away or re-ship AA/kk
“tight but decent”…me thinks he 3bets AK (more often then not)
Obviously Hero has a better read then the rest of us…
I think the most important piece of missing information here is, as others have mentioned, at what point in the blind level did this occur?
For instance, I would say that if there is going to be 45 minutes remaining at 75/150 you can afford to flat here getting better than 5:1 on your call based on the facts that:
-you’re getting a good price and you’ll be the last to act pre-flop
-despite being out of position post flop, your hand should be fairly straight forward to play and you’ll benefit from all the money in the main pot being protected. So when someone does decide to put money in after the flop, Hero will have a good idea of where he is at on most flops.
-if you do release to a post-flop bet, you’ll still have a 20BB stack with enough time before blinds increase and an hour and 45 minutes before antes kick in.
On, the other hand, if there is under 10 minutes left in the level and your 20 BB’s will soon turn into 15, I can definitely see the argument for a fold.
I don’t see how this could be a shove spot though based on Hero’s reads of the two players in MP and the one on the button.
Effective stacks are too short to shove because you won’t get heads-up often enough and KTo doesn’t have enough equity 3+ handed against reasonable ranges.
You can’t call and play fit or fold because you won’t fit often enough.
You could call and shove any flop if it is checked to you (stack sizes look decent for that) but how often are you going to get checked to? Probably not often enough although it may be close.
I much prefer folding but my second choice is to call and shove the flop if it is checked to you.
Dang, where’s the edit button??
Ha, missed our position.
Being in the BB makes calling and shoving any flop that doesn’t have an ace a decent option.
I still prefer folding but calling and shoving isn’t so bad IMO.
“Being in the BB makes calling and shoving any flop that doesn’t have an ace a decent option.”
I think this is a poor option. You are unlikely to fold out decent pairs on the flop, given that they will be getting >2:1. And even if you do fold out better hands, you still need to beat the all-in player.
Let’s look at calling first. You need to win 15.69% or greater of the time for the call to be +EV solely looking at direct odds. Your hand is probably only @ 10 to 15% vs. the 4 opponents range of hands (20% is par and I think KT is slight worse than the average of what they have), but you will have some implied odds, especially if you are good at reading the board and opponents post-flop, so my guess is that calling will be slightly +EV.
For shoving, it really depends on how often you are going to get called. I don’t think you will get called too often by the two shorter stacks (but when you do you will be well behind) but I think the good/active player with the big stack will call you alot, maybe 50 to 60% of the time, because he is going to recognize that this is a good situation to shove and he has the stack to absorb the loss. You are also shoving for 82% of the pot, which makes it more enticing for opponents to call. So I am going to assume you are going to get called by 1 of the other 3 players 2/3 of the time (and only one player for simplicity). I’m also going to assume you have 55% equity against the all-in player and an average 30% equity against the other 3 villains when they call. That comes out to an EV of -311 chips. So shoving is not good with those assumptions. If your EV vs. the 3 villains rises to 35.6% then it is plus EV; if you are only called by the 3 villains 55.2% of the time then it’s +EV; if you win 70.28% of the time vs. the all-in then it’s +EV. There’s 3 variables, so it’s tough to have great confidence in the answer, but my best guess given the situation is that shoving is not correct here.
I call, it’s probably slight +EV, and if you just fold post-flop (or check-down and don’t win) you will more opportunities (and still enough chips) to profitably shove later.
I fiddled with ranges for a while and concluded that this call was somewhere between breakeven and significantly -EV (in terms of immediate pot odds). Do you disagree with my ranges? Why do you think KT is only slightly worse than the average of what they have, given that their ranges should be (among other things) pretty AK-heavy?
I disagree slightly with your ranges. I think UTG could be as high as 80% (aren’t you supposed to shove almost anything in this spot UTG w/ M < 4?), I would include some suited connectors in LMP's range, and I would include some combos of 99 and 88 in BTN's range. If your ranges came out to 14 to 16% then I would imagine then mine would come out slightly higher. I should have stated the ranges, but I wouldn't be able to do the poker stove type calc from work (the shove analysis I did in excel), so I just went with my general impression which is that it probably is dominated much of the time but not always.
I agree with the sentiments that you and MattK stated about capping the action, people playing straightforward, etc. so that's why I'm leaning towards calling.
Interesting.
FWIW, I just ran the program with UTG having 80%; it makes very little difference. And I still doubt he’s that wide, though some UTGs will be (or will have 100%).
I don’t think it’s so likely for the later guys to have suited connectors. There’s not much behind to win if they make big hands, and they can’t bluff their way to the main pot. I think they’ll be sticking to hands with hot-and-cold value, usually at least.
hmmm good one let’s think about all options.
1) calling is no good imo. you’re risking 20% of your stack to see a flop. you hit the flop now what? pot is 3750. a “normal” bet here is getting you to commit your stack. you can’t bet fold. and if you check and are up against a bet you have to ship with top pair. best case scenario with a call pre is a) you flop really hard (straight, top two); or b) you flop pair, check, and you see fireworks allowing you to fold when action gets back to you, or c) you don’t flop diddly and you can check fold. how are any of these scenarios any good?
2) to raise means to ship for max fold equity. Even if all fold your risking 3725 to win 3900 and u have to now hope it’s a coin flip to break even. U are never dominating (or even ahead for that matter) of utg’s range. If u get called by one or more well now you’re probably way behind and have to rely too much on what the board will bring which u have no control over. The fact that utg “just lost a coin flip” is irrelevant. Sure he might be shoving lighter than normal but still he only has 5 bigs. U have to worry about the deeper stacks who might have better king not willing to fold as they’re still getting better than 2:1. This option would be like saying utg open shipped all in 3725 and u know (for whatever reasons) his range is Kx+, folds around to u in the bb and now u call off ur stack w KTo. Huh? Nobody’s calling there so i don’t really see the difference.
The only good thing that can come out of this option is multiple callers or reshippers pre and u get lucky and win, knocking out the utg, crippling a few of the tough players, chipping up, and showing the table ur willing to gamble. But it’s a gamble. And a huge one. U still got 25 bigs if u fold and I’m sure better spots are in your future.
3) therefore, thru process of elimination, folding must be the best option. but let’s just make sure… …yep bc i don’t make it a habit of 1) puting myself in tricky spots like KTo oop multiway relatively shallow (come post flop); or 2) gambling it up.
Of course tho, there may be arguments I didn’t consider so curious to see what others commented. Time to read the replies…
O-M-G with the percentages!! And to two decimal points too!! lol. This was a live tourney and I presume the question assumes u can’t bring out ur poker stove calculator in the middle of a hand. Ok ok I’m being too harsh but maybe it’s bc I don’t use poker stove type software and I’m hating on u all right now. But seriously all joking aside. I think most of us are arriving at the same decision, fold seems to be the majority ruling here. Do we really need all those ranges for all the players in this particular spot? Too many variables and assumptions on what percent of the time they’re doing this and that with this and that. But that’s just me. What ever happened to good ole old school logic?
I think columbo here said it best especially in that last sentence of his reply.
In order to play devils advocate, and because I already seem to be one of the bigger proponents of calling, I wanted to expand on one of my points above which some others seem to have differing opinions.
I personally think that Hero’s hand is going to play very straight forward post flop which others seem to disagree with. My reasoning for this is based on a number of factors, first, consider that none of the players remaining in the side pot have shown any aggression pre flop, and with so much value in the main pot, I would say it will be unlikely for any of the three others to get too far out of line post flop.
In my experience in live tournaments, a lot of times in pots like this you’ll see it get checked around post flop on a number of boards because people aren’t going to bluff into a side pot of 0 if they aren’t certain they’ll take down the main pot, and in many cases when people do hit a hand, they think they’ll be unlikely to get value from worse because of this fact (that people know they’ll be less likely to bluff).
Ignoring all situations where the flop hits us well enough to where we know want to get all the money in (Hero hitting trips, a straight or top two pair… although I think if that’s where this hand goes, it would be an interesting decision on how to get max value) and all the situations where we completely miss and will just check/fold, I think there are a few potential categories of hands we can make post flop that would lead to a decision:
A. 1 pair hands on a dry board
B. Straight draws
C. Pair with a draw
In situation A, I think you can comfortable fold any middle pair or worse to any bet. If the board comes 10 x x, I think its a shove as Nate mentioned. So, I think the only decisions will come from a K x x boards. Which I think there’s a good chance may get checked around or you’ll need to make a read based on who bets and their sizing, since any bet will likely commit your whole stack.
I think with either B or C, it depends on what Hero thinks his edge would be with 20 BB’s in future spots and how high variance he wants to be. Gut-shots I would think would be an easy check-fold. But I think flopping either open ended or say K J 9, I would say could be either open-shove if you want to be high-variance or check and evaluate if you don’t.
whats everyones shoving range in this spot? id certainly be shoving 77+ AK/AQ/AJ/A10 id certainly be shoving. KQ dominates alot more hands than K10 but it also plays better v both the OR range and potential calling ranges.
I also thinks its worth mentioning that calling and losing in terms of chips takes us from a 25bb stack to a 20bb stack which does somewhat limit our ability to 3b/f and defend somewhat.
I think Nate’s point about depth of the level is an important one.
I think I fold here if its early in the level, and think hard about shoving if blinds are about to go up, but i shove too wide in alot of spots anyway.
Are people saying 15% equity assuming everyone calls a shove? is that really going happen?
If we shove aren’t we getting kq, kj hands to fold except maybe the big stack? Those are the 2 hands we hate to see if we call and flop a k.
Good question.
15% is the approximate equity against all the hands–it’s the equity we have in the main pot if we call.
I don’t think anyone has done a careful analysis of our equity if we shove–I certainly haven’t. If we fold out hands, this would improve our equity in the main pot. However, I’d expect us to be a pretty serious dog on the side–probably enough to overwhelm the gain we’d experience in the main pot.
So my guess is that shoving is worse than calling. But it would be nice for someone to actually guess at calling ranges and run the numbers.