For most experienced players, this is a relatively simple situation, but this hand came from one of AMT’s students, and I think the target audience here is mid-to-low stakes advanced beginner SNG players. At the end, I will try to discuss some more advanced implications.
The original post:
Quote:
Poker Stars $15+$1 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t100/t200 Blinds - 4 players
SB: t1180
BB: t1215
Hero (CO): t3940
BTN: t7165
Pre Flop: (t300) Hero is CO with A Q
Hero raises to t3940 all in
Is this push ok? or should i make a standard raise? if i make standard raise BTN can shove atc and i have to fold imo. sngwiz suggests folding here
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Here is my basic setup for the hand, with all the calling and overcalling ranges set. The most important thing here is the EqF%, which is Hero’s prize pool equity if he open-folds the hand. This is the number to which I will compare all the others for the $EV_diff values.
As you would expect, the calling range for BTN must be very tight in order to make open-shoving profitable. If BTN will call a shove with {77+,ATs+,AJo+}, then it is a bad push for Hero.
There is a better way to play the hand. Making a standard raise to t550 and waiting for something to happen. Most players would say the best way to play the hand is to raise and call a push from either of the two shorter stacks, but fold when the big stack pushes. Others might say “But doesn’t that make your opening raise hugely exploitable by BTN? Can’t he just shove any two cards over you and profit?” Well, yes, he could, but he won’t. The more important question is: “How often does he need to shove over your raise to make open-raising worse than open-folding?”
Here’s how I set the hand up.
- BTN will shove over Hero’s opening raise with some range that we will vary as a parameter. Hero never calls. For the sake of completeness, this could also be considered a calling range for BTN, with the condition that Hero never puts another chip in the pot and never wins the hand at showdown.
- SB pushes over Hero’s opening with {33+,A4s+,A8o+,KTs+} if BTN folds and Hero always calls. If BTN shoves, SB always folds.
- BB pushes over Hero’s opening with {33+,A2s+,A4o+,KTs+,KQo} if BTN and SB fold. Hero always calls. If BTN or SB shoves, BB always folds.
So this is all the numbers.
The last three ranges that got cut off are:
{22+,A2s+,A3o+,K9s+,KJo+,QJs}
{22+,A2+,KTo+,K6s+,QTo+,Q8s+,JTo,J7s+,T7s+,97s+,87 s,76s}
{22+,A2+,K4o+,K2s+,Q8o+,Q2s+,J9o+,J4s+,T8o+,T6s+,9 8o,95s+,87o,85s+,75s+,64s+,54s,43s,32s}
They get away from the S-C ranges a bit, so their x-position on the graph is only approximate, but it is close enough.
The detail of the plot over likely pushing ranges:
The conclusion that can be drawn from all of this is that unless BTN is pulling some sort of move more than about 1/3 of time, raise-fold is still better than open-folding, and both are likely far better than open-pushing. I would not expect an unknown BTN to be pushing more than 30% at any buy-in. Since the original hand came from a $15+1, my guess is there’s no way, without some sort of very solid read on BTN being a complete LAG-monkey, that anything other than a standard raise is correct here.
And finally, the $EV difference in % between the more complicated raise/fold line I described and open-pushing for each BTN push range:
What does this say about how the hand should be played against different opponents? First, as SB and BB get more aggressive, your equity actually increases as their range opens up. This can be seen by the positive slope of the $EV_diff vs. SB and BB range beyond the obvious 10% or so of hands they are getting in anyway. If the stacks are slightly different, and you can coax some bluff-raises out of the shorter stacks with AQo, the situation looks a lot more like
this post. The difference is that the big stack prevents open-pushing from ever being the best play, so hands such as KQs and 44, that were open-pushes in the other situation turn into folds in this one.
Of course, the big stack’s play is really the key to this hand. A good, thinking regular who sees you as a decently-tight player may shove a lot over your raise, but it all depends on how much folding equity he thinks he has. Then, it is a case of “what does he think I think his range is,” and that game can get quite complicated and imprecise. Obviously, against a known nit, raise-fold is still the better play. The interesting thing is that as BTN pushes wider, the raise-fold line actually gets better compared to open-pushing. It is probably not a good comparison to assume BTN is calling a shove and pushing over a raise with the same range, but the information is all there to make other comparisons. Between about 10% and 25%, where I would expect most player’s ranges as BTN for pushing over a raise to fall, the raise/fold line is the superior one.
Another interesting property of how this analysis is done is that since Hero is folding 100% of the time to BTN’s push, his actual hand only matters against the two smaller stacks. Because of this, it is possible to make very accurate decisions in-game by evaluating your hand against the short stacks’ ranges. You already know pretty much everything is a fold against the big stack, maybe {QQ+} is a call, so you can separate that out from raise/call against the shorter stacks, and we already know how to find that range.
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