Heya, playing a ton of NO8 MTTs lately.

Apart from all my other leaks, I figured, I am folding way too many hands preflop to shoves. Giving away blinds/antes for free every 4th hand really adds up, especially since I am mucking a lot of hands, I'd normally play.

What's a reasonable calling range, assuming my villain is the standard hooray-preflop-micros shover (ie. A2XX, TT+, bunch of goodlooking Hi only hands, etc).

*Edit: The games are usually 6-max with the occasional 8-max.

Hey Canterina. No offense but your question is impossible to answer as it depends on the stage of the tournament. As your chip stack ratio to blinds goes down your calling range gets wider.

You should not really be calling with high only hands that are not aces in many spots in a split pot game but of course there are situations you can.

Okay, let me try to narrow it down.

Early stage: I'm not calling with any but the best AA hands, because there is so little to gain.

However, especially in the "turbo" environment, people start pushing really hard all the time, once they have around 25 or less BB left.

Once most of the hard pushers have busted, things slow down, until we reach the bubble.

I am mostly interested in the "middle" phase, where all the very lose players shove their 20-30 BB stacks all the time.

As for my stack, I usually have around 20-40 BB at that stage.

Edit: I am also very interested in the art of defense, against open shoves by big stacks very frequently around bubble time.

edit,edit: As for the hands in parentheses, I'm not calling with those, it is my estimated shoving range of the guys around me.