6 player STT $1.10 on skypoker
Blinds 25/50

UTG 1450
UTG+1 1650
CO 1755
BUT 1440
SB (Hero) 955
BB 1495

Hero has 2c2h

UTG folds
UTG+1 folds
CO call
BUT call
SB (Hero) call
BB call

Flop: Kd2d5d
Pot: 200

SB (Hero) raise 150
BB all-in 1495
CO fold
BUT fold
SB (Hero) ????

****************************

I raised to protect my 3 of a kind against the flush but the bb shoved in... I usually play quite safe early on as most players where I play absolutely suck so I just need to wait for the right cards while working out who I'm up against but I called this one thinking he likely had only 1 diamond (70% to win), and even if he had 2 I still had some outs (30%). But was this right in the early stage of an STT?

More importantly, in general at the beginning of an STT with very fishy players should I play more safe, or take risks like this to double up?

Btw he had 2 diamonds and I didn't hit any outs.

Easy call, don't worry. Betting out was also good, can bet bigger tho.

You called pre to set mine and I don't think you can fold. Villain has a flush sometimes but your beating draws and some two pairs hands that he shouldn't have limped with. As you noted yourself you have outs and at this level players simply take daft lines that make no sense. I wouldn't be surprised to see TPTK here as well.
Generally playing tight in the early blind levels is advisable as there is so much value in preserving your stack. As you improve you can widen your range in the early levels and start mixing in some bluffs in the right spots. The weakest players tend to get knocked out early so playing more hands in the early stages means you are more likely to get involved in hands with these players.

i like the flop lead, sizing is good too

you have to call because youre "flipping" equity wise vs his range...but youre not realy flipping cause of the dead money in the pot...
-200chips from the preflop action
-and 300 from the post flop action (youre lead, plus his call)
...this is the money you are profiting when you stack off here

more specifically you need to pay 805 to win 1310

witch is like 1.7:1...so you need 38% to break even here...you have about 50% IMO...witch makes folding is a huge mistake

its hard to say how much % you have exactly cause we dont know if he jams Kx with no dimond or Kx with dimond....or Jhigh flushes or only baby flushes to "protect"

i gave him the following range and we have 50.2%:
http://prntscr.com/f023kc
if we give him Kx no diamond it will go up...
if we take away the medium size flushes it will go up...
if we give him all flushes however, it will go down...

but 50/50 is a good estimate


dont play too tight early on, esp. in easy games

i just saw i forgot K5o...just putting that in brings us to 54%

that with along other random spaz jams with Kx makes it even more a fist pump type of spot

You guys are widely overthinking this, randoms are getting it in with Kx a ton there, some do with worse. Bet huge & call shove ainec.

Snapcall! In low buy-in there are many fisch that can push also K7

Inviato dal mio ONE A3003 utilizzando Tapatalk

yeah i now see its a 1$ game...
my point was even if OP is against flushes, 2pairs and strongish Kx with a dimond ITS STILL A CALL

if the players at these stakes shows up with random week Kx no dimond occasionally or even often,
that just makes it even more of a call

You can fold here occasionally.

Why ?

Because a portion of the time not only is he going to be crushed 70-30, but ICM is not on his side.

haha

you shouldnt look at what happens a "portion of the time"

look at youre hand vs his whole range in contrast to pot oods, and yes, with ICM in mind as well

...but here ICM is not a factor that should be taken in to account while looking at what to do

this is baisicly a chip ev spot with zero ICM....theres 6 people in and 2 get paid
...on top of that, he is the shortest stack

its also a mistake to "fold occasionally" as you said...how do you know when to fold vs this play and when to call, feeling?
calling here is either right or wrong

He is in a tournament with a payout structure and that means every chip he wins at this point is worth less than the ones he already has. That means in SNG that you need better odds to call all-ins like this one than you would in a cash game. It is true that you could eliminate the guesswork and intuition and always call in a spot or always fold, but if you want to step it up to the next level then you can start using other indicators to narrow down the villian's range. For instance, many times after playing with a villain for several rounds I have an idea of whether he'd play a one or two diamonds in this situation. When I narrow the probability of his anticipated range, I can then begin to fold correctly here.

Furthermore, let's say I have a situation like like where I do not narrow the opponent's range and know he holds either a pair, a flush draw, or a flush, I stand to lose a certain percentage of the time based on equity.

(Ugh, there is some really ugly math I have to do here, I'll continue in the next post.)

K, I'm not going to go through the math. Not only can it include ICM calculations, but equity calculations and so on and so forth.

The fact is that by calling this all of the time he is going to lose 65% of the time that his opponent already has the flush. If he folds correctly even one time then he improves his equity in the money positions. If he folds incorrectly then it is true he'll lose money. The important figure is how much he stands to gain or lose if he is correct on more than 50% of his folds here. You can actually arrive at a number that is like: if he folds correctly more than 72% of the time, then he stands to make money by not always calling and occasionally folding. However, that is a number that I am not going to calculate. It is just an example, but what I am saying is that it can pay to occasionally fold this hand when you strongly believe that you opponent holds a flush already. However, you need to be right. You can actually be wrong a bit more often, though, since you're in a tournament.

You can actually calculate another number that would say, for example, that says it is right to make the call 87% of time and fold 13% of the time. This is based on the number of probable times that he has the flush in his range as opposed to the other possibilities and the equity that you would lose. It would also be a number that would consider that you would be wrong a certain percentage of the time in proportion to his hand. You would actually need no narrower read for this number.

Again, I'm not going to calculate it because it a pain in the ass and relies on a rough estimate of how often he holds a flush as compared to the other part of his suspected range.

Lastly, I think the villain holds a flush here much more often here than has been insinuated.

If he's holding a flush 60% of the time, then you'll lose 39% of time. If he's holding 1 flush card 25% of the time, then you'll lose another 7% of the time. If he's holding Kx 15% of the time, you'll lose like another .5%. That means that you're going to lose this hand like 46.5% of the time, if my estimates are correct. There may not be as much value in this hand as it seems.

I would expect a higher level player to shove this with one flush card more than a lower level one. Higher level players rely on fold equity knowing that their educated opponents don't want to call. A low level player would do it as a semi-bluff not really understanding how much fold equity he was accruing.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. It is in fact correct to fold a particular percentage of the time in certain spots as opposed to always folding or always calling.

Maybe I think the villain is holding a flush too often, I don't know. I haven't played $1 tourneys in a long time.

Actually, and this is my last post since I've made about three too many, a low level villain probably isn't even going to semi-bluff this flop all that often. Low level players are usually concerned about making hands, they aren't worried about developing fold equity and what they'll do if they don't make them. I'd expect this to be a flush much more often at a $1 SNG than most other places.

The player might be God-awful and shove a pair, but c'mon isn't it most likely that the beginner made a hand and is trying to double his stack????

i read the first post...then saw a wall of text.....and saw the last question witch has 4 question marks in the last post

like i said icm doesnt have a meaningful significance in this spot, at all

and what you are talking about when arguing a fold is basically changing his range based on reads to include just flushes...this is possible with solid reads, but OP gave no reads here

he MIGHT not be semibluffing but he sure is likely to over play and "protect' week hands(like a KQ hand)...not to mention the 2par combos

Argueing (readless!) in any way that involves folding is just a lack of experience. Randoms get it in with a range there that makes calling hugely +ev and I promise you're not gonna find any solid long term grinder that has a different opinion on that. But sure, u can occasionally fold and feel for w/e reason to be right, not that it harms anyone but yourself

P.S.: I'd be pretty interested in the method by which you pick these "ocassions". Is it voodoo again?

Dude you are in a $1 SNG. Donks are pushing all-in with KJ (no diamonds) on this flop. If you are even thinking of folding here, why bother playing? I wouldn't fold this on the bubble let alone as the short stack on a full table.

Please don't start with the ICM talk. At this point in a 6-handed SNG ICM means nothing, especially as the short stack. He needs to double up and if he gets busted, register another one.

Even if your opponent has a flush you have outs to improve. The only way you are completely dominated here is if it is set over set, and that happens, but you just don't fold here.

If you are looking for reasons to fold sets on the flop, Hold'em probably isn't your game. Maybe try some Omaha?

Pretty interested to hear how it can be correct to call in a sng with any given hand some portion of the time, and fold some portion of the time in any given spot.
Expand on this please hrmmmmm, maybe I'm wrong but I didn't think this was possible.

he already did explain, or at least tried to

dont get him started again please

I'm so confused - it looks like we fold if its the most + ev thing to do and call if its the most + ev thing to do - and we're describing that as a mixed strategy?

Sorry pop, open the can of worms again... I always was a trouble maker

A mixed strategy is to do sth. some % with a part of your range and 100-% the other part. This is for most cases just part of constructing a gto range and affects just a minuscule part of the overall range as well. A random example for illustration is to mix in A5o 33% of the time into a certain 4b range and fold it 67%. You can find a lot of examples with programs that can calc a gto range for certain spots like HRC or PIO solver.

Posting a hand here is reducing hero's range to a single hand, doing anything mixed with it is very very unlikely the best thing to do. In this particular hand it's a disaster to do anything that involves folding which u can also confirm yourself by assigning ranges to other players and calculating the ev of getting it in vs folding at a certain point.

Generally answers like "you can occasionally do blablabla here" are highly likely to be just wrong. There might be more than one way to play a hand profitably, depeding on circumstances one of these is likely better than the others and u should 100% of the times perform this action with this hand in this spot (or u might also be indifferent between some actions). Just performing an action some % of the time with a certain hand and 100-% the other times to "mix it up" or w/e reasoning ppl find doesn't make terribly much sense.

U can think of it like this:
Sure, there are ppl with a range that justifies folding in this hand. If u're able to confirm this by a read on this player, folding 100% with that hand is good. If u can't, jamming (or raising some other size) is good for 100%. Unless u have some kind of wizard skills to find randoms range readless and click the right buttons at the right time, it makes no sense to mix any strategy.

Ya agree, the two essential requirements of a mixed strat situation is that the ev of both actions is necessarily exactly the same, and that you must know with a high degree of confidence that your opponent is mixing.

It's hard to imagine in almost any poker situation 99.9% of players can come even close to the accuracy of both read and ev calculation on the fly to be confident a spot is a mixed strat, let alone when you take ICm on top.

I like your point leakssuck that whilst it may be possible to play a hand +ev in different ways, + ev is not the same as highest ev, which if any of the options is, we would never ever mix, otherwise we are sacraficing ev