I heard this hand discussed on a podcast.

Effective stack 29 BB 5 handed ante 0.2 BB

Preflop (3.5 BB) HJ raises to 2 BB, CO calls 2 BB, BTN folds, SB calls 1.5 BB, BB calls 1 BB

Flop (9 BB) AA6 SB checks, BB open folds

In the podcast they dismiss BB's play as weird and don't really discuss it (the podcaster is the HJ). The question is should we ever just open fold in a spot like this and with what hands? If not here then should we do it on another board or situation?

The kind of situations I'm thinking about are ICM heavy, where tossing our cards makes it easier for the CO or SB to play back against the HJ's continuation bet and we potentially gain more by letting them knock each other out than any EV from potentially winning the hand.

I don't have this as part of my game at the moment but maybe that's a leak.

At first i was thinking its stupid to open fold because you could hit runner runner and bluff catch with it. Plus by folding the villains would know you don't have anything thus when you don't open fold you probably have something. BB could get into a leveling war with these players and then not open fold the next time to simply represent a big hand

Hearing about folding to induce action between the remaining player in ICM situations sound like perfect sense though

yeah often I love to open with crap to steal the blinds and when I get two callers I helped building a pot that one of the two left players is willing to fight for with an all in.

If you're out of position and have less than 10% equity you will basically never win so in a vacuum it would be an OK play. The problem is if you play a repeated game and you don't open fold in a similar spot you give away info about your holdings and lose ev in the process.

What an interesting post. I've never even considered doing this but certainly food for thought.

I can imagine spots where sacrificing our negligible showdown value which we are often not going to realize is going to be of less of a cost to us then increasing chance of collisions from which we can equity by ICM.

As some one mentions it would strengthen our checking behind range, but I think this is a spot we can analyse in isolation.

For these reasons:-
Its not a frequent event and I assume we are only sacrificing the weakest part of our range that really has little value. So if this is the case an event that occurs rarely when in the presence of significant ICM pressure combined with the frequency where we have that sacrificial part of our range. means villain(s) (if he is going to be paying attention to all this) can eliminate the bottom of our range to some degree. All of this happening in a multi way pot where initial raiser has other ranges to consider.

I suppose this could become a factor if we sacrificed more hands? How much equity are we sacrificing?

There is not much point in discussing what hands we think the BB should sacrifice here as we do not have enough info, such as the stack sizes and the icm pressures.

But I will try and be mindful of this moving forward. Hope some one post a spot where we have more information.

I think it's not so much the hands as the board. Here I think it matters a lot that there is flush draw and villains are not going to take each other seriously and they might try to semi-bluff or assume the other is semi-bluffing. Also when someone has trip aces they often assume the other player can't have the other one.

On a paired board like this it's possible to have very low equity against 3 villains. I would like this better if there was something like a T instead of the 6 and BB had undercards - so we were drawing to runner-runner 6 outs followed by 2 outs even against a T (but to still lose against an A) - though of course maybe BB really did toss something like 54 here - which is runner-runner 6 outs followed by 3 to beat trips.