SCOOP Day 5: Super Progressive Knock-Out

7 thoughts on “SCOOP Day 5: Super Progressive Knock-Out”

1. 4s are not strong enough to call an all-in. Shoving yes, calling no. Even with bounty.

   • Why’s that?

     • Ok, first of all. This is my first time ever commenting anywhere. Definitely the first time in a poker forum. Furthermore, if I had to name somebody, whose poker insights, his skill of THINKING poker I respect the most, it would certainly be you (and Nate, of course ;). I have been playing poker for 8 years (low stakes) and I am a winning tournament player, and you and your podcast, which I have discovered only a few month ago, have turned me, so far, in a winning cash game player, which is awesome (finally).
       So, it is exciting to communicate with you, about a hand you played, but I also do not feel qualified and am pretty sure, that I am missing something in my thought process.
       So here is why I do not like the call with 4s.
       To me it seems fairly simple. You have 38 big blinds. Not a lot. But also not in immediate danger zone. I could arguably agree on a gamble with less than 20 BB. You have enough BBs to wait for a better spot. With a low pair, in a preflop all-in situation, no matter what your opponent’s range is, you will be in a race a lot of times, at best, or dominated by a bigger pocket pair. I know I am not telling you anything new, which makes me wonder even more why you picked this spot to gamble. Now, had you had 80 BB’s, I could agree with the gamble, because of the stack sizes. You would only risk a quarter of your stack for the chance of getting a bounty. But with your stack size you will be left crippled. If it was a clear race, all right, gamble. But with the decent chance of being dominated, as eventually happened, the gamble was not a well chosen spot, mostly due to your stack size. Not enough to take players of the table with mediocre hands, and too many to shove and pray. In my humble opinion.
       Now, I did not pay attention to the BTN, since I am not sure whether he folded preflop, or not. I believe he did. With action behind you the 4s are even worse, right. In fact, whether he called or folded you were dominated by his hand, too.
       One more word about bounties. I think they should influence your decisions only very slightly, if at all. If you run deep in a tournament, you will eventually take out players. The bounties will come on their own. There is much more value in running deep, cashing and collecting bounties on the way without focusing on it, than playing more risky early on, or basically at any point, just to maybe get a bounty. Much more value in passing a bad spot for a potential bounty.
       I am not a native English speaker, so the last sentence is confusing me, but I think you know what I mean.
       Best of luck to you in the SCOOP, hope you take one down.
       You rock.

       • Thanks for the kind words, Tim. I don’t often post “standard” hands here, because they aren’t interesting. I deliberately post unconventional hands because I think there is something interesting (or at least brag-worthy!) about them. I want to encourage discussion, debate, and even criticism of my play.

         In that spirit, this second comment is a lot better than the first. I’m aware that 44 would not generally be a hand good enough to call a shove of this size. I tried to explain, in the original post, why I considered this to be an exception. If you disagree with that, I encourage you to explain what you think is wrong about my analysis, as you do here. I’ll admit that your original comment was a bit frustrating because I took the time to write up an explanation of why I played the hand in an unconventional way, including some number-crunching and even a test of just sensitive to Villain’s range my analysis was, and in your first comment you ignored all of that and simply said “this hand isn’t strong enough to call.”

         I appreciate that you took the time, in your second comment, to explain why you thought that, and I’ll try to do you the same courtesy now and explain why I think you are incorrect. You are relying on simple rules and rough estimates (“either flipping or dominated”), which are the best you have available to you at the table, but when analyzing hand away from the table you should get more precise by plugging ranges into an equity calculator, as I did. It matters just often you are flipping compared to how often you are dominated, and it matters what price you are getting on the call. I didn’t “pick this spot to gamble”, I called because I thought doing so had a higher expected value than folding.

         I also think it can’t possibly be right to play a bounty tournament and then ignore the bounties, particularly when, as in this case, winning this player’s bounty would be worth 25% of the entry fee for the tournament. That’s a huge portion of the prize pool to ignore, and it absolutely should affect your willingness to call when you have the chance to eliminate a player.

         What I’m not sure of is just how much it should affect it. After looking at my equity in greater depth, though, I realized that I wouldn’t need to rely on much $EV from the bounty at all to turn the call into a correct one. In game I had to rely on feel and rough guesses to make a decision, but my hope is that, now that I’ve looked at the hand in greater depth, I’ll have a better intuition the next time around.

         I hope I’m not being too harsh here. I do appreciate your reading, listening, and commenting. Take care,

         Andrew

         • This also felt bad to me, esp. just calling and then calling it off. But I think the hand description doesn’t help (it’s not obvious what we need to call, and what the pot is).

           Not everyone has poker stove, plugging this into PPT:

           http://www.propokertools.com/simulations/show?g=he&h1=4d+4s&h2=77%2B%2CKQ%2CAxTx%2CAJ%2CAQ%2CAK&s=generic

           This gives us 38.65%, we’ve called off 2bb and need to call off another 18.25bb to win a pot of 45.94 so we need 39.73%. 1% is a lot less than I’d have thought (but still bad, no?). Somewhat more interesting is that as villain adds 1bb we need roughly 0.45% more equity (but it goes down as more are added) and if villain shoves 66+ we lose 1% and if villain only shoves 88+ we gain 1.1%.
           As you say the big hit comes if villain shoves less overcards AJs,AQo+ (even if he only does 88+ with it).

           I’m sure you know all this, but I’m discovering/reminded again how combinatorics distorts everything so it quickly becomes impossible to balance overcards with paris.

           • OK, so then add in the bounty and it becomes a clearly profitable call, right?

             • Oh, yeh, no question the bounty makes it a call.

               I was mostly running numbers on my own to agree with you (I’m so good ;).

               My “but it’s still bad” was mostly to clarify your “it’s barely a fold even without the bounty”.

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