Disclaimer: this turned out pretty long...

Inspired by pghfan's thread, I thought I would make an attempt to quantify calling vs shoving in a few short stacked spots. In all situations we'll assume that button min-opens 40% (I've used 22+,A2s+,K2s+,Q6s+,J7s+,T7s+,97s+,86s+,76s,65s,A2o +,K9o+,Q9o+,J9o+,T9o,98o which is not perfect but whatever). Preflop pot is 2.5bb, so we're getting 4.5:1 to call. I'll start with a trivial stack size and go from there.

Stack - 2bb
So this is trivial, getting 4.5:1 to shove all hands have the necessary equity, we call it off.

Stack - 3bb
If we shove, we're getting 5.5:2 and so need 26.7% equity. 32o has 29.87% so we can profitably get in any 2.
What about call? We can safely assume our opponent will put the last bb in regardless. We'd be getting 6.5:1 on the flop, so we need 13% to get it in. The important part is: if there are any flops where we can correctly fold then we're better off calling pre. It turns out that we have <13% equity on about 30% of flops in this instance. So in the case we have 32o, if we call pre and fold the 30% of bad flops, then our equity on the remaining is ~38% (I've explained how I reach this number at the end and since it is an approximation I've rounded down).
EV(call)=.3*(-1)+.7*(.38*7.5-2)
EV(call)=.295bb
EV(shove)=.2987*7.5-2
EV(shove)=.240bb

So calling wins about .055bb more than shoving. Now I'm sure people have 2 initial reactions: 1. WTF who cares? and 2. Great now I have 1bb left 30% of the time instead of a (very slightly -EV) shot at 7.5bb. Well #1 I don't have much to say about, but re: 2 when you have 1bb you have a guaranteed profitable spot in the sb and if you win that get a whole orbit with 3-4bb where you will likely get several more. Moving right along...

Stack - 4bb
Now getting it in we're getting 6.5:3 and need 31.6%. We should now fold a bunch and the worst hand you can get in (used holdemviewer for this) is 63o with 31.8%. EV(shove)=.318*9.5-3=.021bb. Again I think the him autoshoving flop is a very good assumption, so let's look at call. Postflop we're getting 7.5:2 so need 21% to get it in. In this case we actually can fold 45% of flops! And our equity on the flops we don't fold is about 45%. So,
EV(call)=.45*(-1)+.55*(.45*9.5-3)
EV(call)=0.25bb

Now this is actually a real gain. Shoving 63o in this spot is pretty clearly worse cEV wise than call/fold bad flops. We should also note that we can almost certainly take some hands that are slightly -cEV shoves and turn them into +cEV calls.

Stack - 5bb
For this one I thought I'd pick a decent hand that we can clearly get in and actually flops ok to see what happens (picking AA or something is stupid since there are of course no flops we can fold). So we're getting 7.5:4 and need 34.8%. We'll use 98s that has 40.75% and so EV(shove)=.4075*11.5-4=.69bb, super easy clear shove>fold.

Postflop we'll be getting 8.5:3 and need 26% to get it in. We can fold 40% of flops. Our equity on the flops we don't fold is about 55%. (As an aside, we're still folding 40% of the time and our opponent is shoving 4 at 5.5 so cbetting any 2 will still show a profit for him and our assumption is still pretty reasonable.)
EV(call)=.4*(-1)+.6*(.55*11.5-4)
EV(call)=.995bb
and EV(call)-EV(shove)=.3bb
That's pretty damn significant, and worse hands will be able to fold more flops and should (I think) show a bigger difference.

As our stack gets deeper our assumption about our opponent always shoving gets weaker (I think up until now it is near 100% accurate) so I'm going to stop it there, but here's a summary and some of my comments:
1. If our opponent never folds preflop and always shoves flop then call/decide is better than shove with all hands where there are flops we can correctly fold. If there are no flops we can fold (eg if we have AA) then call/decide=shove.
2. Some of the gains even with extremely small stacks are non-trivial.
3. The wider our opponent opens the fewer flops there are we can correctly fold and so the smaller the call edge gets.
4. Since we're always unsure about exactly how wide our opponent opens we can just err on the side of putting it in on more flops to ensure we aren't making mistakes that makes call<shove.
5. As our stack gets a little deeper, we'll probably just shove our value hands to ensure our opponent doesn't fold postflop when he hits his worst flops, so our range is actually quite weak to defend. This gives him a pretty strong incentive to cbet and makes the "opponent never folds postflop" assumption stronger and I think will allow this model to extend to slightly deeper stacks fairly accurately.
6. When our opponent starts bet/folding some and checking back some I don't really know what will happen. Checking back seems like it will be a net positive since our range is really quite weak but I could be wrong.

How I calculated equity on the flops we don't fold:
Take the 63o example. Our equity pf is 31.81% and we're calling 55% of flops, folding 45%. If x is the avg equity we have on the flops we call and y the avg equity on flops we fold then .55x+.45y=.3181 We want to know x. Looking at the graph, from the 55% to 100% on the x-axis, equity goes in a near straight line from 20% to 10%. So our average equity on the bottom 45% of flops is .5*(20%+10%)=15%. This is y. Then we solve for x=(.3181-.45*.15)/.55 and get x=.4556. Because there's some estimating used there I rounded down to 45%.

Because the assumptions don't hold as well later (and because this is quite a bit of work) I don't want to try extend this to larger stacks right now. But I do want to note that our intuition about what is correct play with short stacks can be quite wrong, even in seemingly obvious situations. I think the T9s example from the other thread is an absurdly easy call. We can't profitably shove, but by calling and folding bad flops, and on good flops sometimes winning a cbet, sometimes getting it in with decent equity I think we'll show a substantial profit. Also, if our opponent chooses to not cbet often then I think we get the better of that. If he were to promise to check it down we'd have a hugely profitable flat (like 1+bb), I think the more of our equity we get to realize without more money going in the better.

If anyone actually finds this interesting, maybe at some point I'll try to find a decent way to approximate some slightly deeper stacks. If anyone smarter than me wants to try to do that, that would be nice

Also, I have tried to read through this and edit/check math but there are a lot of words/numbers so I may have made some (hopefully small) errors. If so, feel free to point them out and I'll try to fix them.

It looks like a physics paper. And I've never taken physics.

Interesting stuff/nice work. I didn't see the Pgh thread, but my one criticism of this post is that while your calcs are theoretically interesting, I don't quite see the practicality, as I find that villains tend to auto-shove on me (or fold, and on very rare occasions limp-complete) when I have 5 BBs or less. Do people actually sometimes min-raise BvB when their opponent is super-short?

holy **** this was interesting, thanks a lot Steve.

oh man great post and all obviously but its fu_15esque (glorious shove by djk)

gonna refrain from posting itt again so it doesnt get bumped!

commenting on hands ya w/e but teaching people how to learn meh oi

very nice post.

in a 1k i had a spot where chris ferguson played his hand pretty good. we just broke the bubble of a 1k itm and he had 3bbs total in bb. i minraised the hj and he defended 62o just peeling with 1bb left. it did get me thinking a lot about what u just posted.

+1

wish you didn't post this

Nope please don't, not interesting, /thread

Hey Steve - just wondering how it is that you can assume our preflop equity is equal to the equity on flops we call plus the equity on flops we fold multiplied by their respective frequencies?

.55x + .45y = preflop equity.
I get that we never shove flops because there is neglible FE when we have drawn type hands and with value hands we assume he is always shoving so why give him the minor although neglible chance to fold.

I am sure that there is a very straightforward explanation to this but I just can't see it. There is a very big chance this is a newb question and make me look stupid.

Very interesting post, but I have a question regarding the analysis above. If you factor in the later +EV spots the 1BB stack after 'call/fold flop' puts you in, shouldn't you also take into account the (much bigger) +EV spots the 7.5BB stack puts you in when you shove (or call/get it in on flop) and win? You’ll be in the 7.5BB spot slightly more often when you shove than when you call.

I.e. ‘calling / fold some flops’ leads to the following situations:
30% of the time we have 1BB left
38%*70% = 26.6% of the time we double up and have 7.5BB
62%*70% = 43.4% of the time we are eliminated

Shoving:
29.97% of the time we double up and have 7.5BB
70.03% of the time we are eliminated

So basically the question is, is it better to have 7.5BBs 3.4% (29.97-26.6) more often vs having 1BB instead of 0 26.6% more often (70.03-43.4). I don’t know how exactly to calculate this but, while it is not exactly 0, the cEV/$EV of that 1BB stack (in the SB) cannot be that big, can it (compared to the EV of the 7.5BB stack)?

An attempt at calculation:
If x = EV with 1BB stack in SB and y = EV with 7.5BB stack in SB, calling is only better than shoving if
.3x+.266y+.434*0 > .2997y+.7003*0
Which leads to x>.112333y

So the EV of 1BB has to be over 11.2% of the EV of 7.5BB. I’m not sure how to calculate the EVs of the stacks exactly, so I’ll appromixate:

If we’re a winning player, the cEV for the very next hand of the 7.5BB stack in SB is at least bigger than 7BB (subtracted 0.5BB cause we’re in SB). No idea what this EV is exactly (7.2BB? 7.5BB? …), but I’ll just use the absolute bottom boundary of 7BB.
This means that the cEV of the 1BB stack (actually 0.5BB cause we’re in SB) has to be >0.786BB (11.2% of 7BB) for calling to be better than shoving.

Once again, not sure if this EV can be calculated exactly, there are probably calculators for this but I’ll continue my work anyway.
Excluding extremely rare bubble/ICM exceptions (which would’ve probably made simply folding the 3BB stack correct anyway, so these situations are not relevant), we call off the extra 0.5BB every time, so we will be eliminated quite often. OTOH, if we win, our stack will be 3BB+ x BBs from money put in by other villains than the BB. Just to put in some numbers: if we are eliminated 80% of the time, and our stack if not eliminated is 4BB, the EV of our 0.5BB stack is .2*4 = .8BB. Hmm, very close to the required 0,786BB that I calculated earlier. But that was the absolute bottom boundary. If our EV is actually 7.5BB, this means the EV of the 1BB stack should be >0.84BB.

It should be possible to calculate the last part more exact, but my conclusion at this moment is that shoving and ‘calling/folding some flops’ are very very close, and based on the guesstimations in the last paragraph, I give the nod to shoving.

I think.

"remaining 1bb and having a guaranteed profitable spot next hand from SB" isnt an argument imo and shouldnt be a consideration. And as some other people mentioned, +0.05bb is really insignificant, especially when we cant be precise with most of the assumptions.

though, for deeper stacks like 5bb++; calculations should be quite interesting and taughtful.

So now I need to 2.5x+ when there are short stacks in the BB I guess.

stevepa

really interesting read, thanks.

That's actually why I used the button to open. If button/sb are not short but bb is short, min open is still standard. BvB this doesn't matter because sb will always shove.

This is pretty straightforward. I've just divided the flops into 2 categories and calculated equities for each category. Our total avg equity = weighted average of the equities. You can think of it as our total equity = equity on each flop * frequency of that flop. In that case the frequencies are all the same since KsJs8s comes as often as KsJs8c, etc. but it's the same principle.

re: the 1bb sb thing, I was simply addressing the problems people might have with folding leaving 1bb behind and saying they're not as big as one would think since we get a guaranteed profitable spot next hand. That was a separate (and probably unnecessary) thing.

I considered adding this to my comments as I do think this is an extremely reasonable adjustment.

Glad people liked the post

Well for 3bb we can be pretty damn precise, he's never folding postflop. Also, the 4bb and 5bb cases I showed +.25bb and +.3bb gains, which are not insignificant. I also rounded down our equity to help ensure my estimates weren't overstating the EV difference in favour of calling and made a reasonable (imo) argument for why the assumptions I made should still hold.

Really cool thread, thanks a lot Steve.

pablito, the sb spot with 1bb is better than you're giving credit for.
Case 1 - all fold
We put 1bb in to win 2 in a flip. EV=.5bb and the stack is worth 1.5bb

Case 2 - someone raises, all fold
We put 1bb in to win 3 vs a strong range. We need 25% to break even and a random hand has 25% vs JJ+/AK, so our stack is worth >1bb

Case 3 - multiway
This is probably the worst but we're getting at least 4:1 so I strongly doubt we'll be losing more than a trivial amount and our stack will be roughly 1bb after.

Insightful read. I have a question regarding your assumptions - is there any adjustment to buy-in level or live vs. on-line? I think this would be very interesting on the bubble of a live event.

Yeah true, our stack is probably worth quite a bit more than the .8BB I had guesstimated previously.

But even then, we get eliminated so often in the next hand(s) or orbit(s) when we start with 1BB in SB. Intuitively it just seems strange to me that our EV in the tournament would be higher because we have 1BB instead of 0 26.6% of the time more often than the case where we have 7.5BB 3.4% more often.

Basically, I think at such a small stack sizes, pure cEV calculations become less valuable because the stacksize itself becomes so important.

Put differently, our cEV for the very next hand is indeed slightly better if we 'call/fold some flops' vs if we shove, but if we look at our cEV *after* that hand, the numbers will move in favor of shoving; and if we look for example one orbit later; the cEV of having shoved our 3BB stack will be significantly higher than the cEV of 'call/fold some flops'. Simply because we get eliminated so often with the 1BB stack, because we still have FE with the 7.5BB stack, because doubling the 7.5BB is so much more valuable than doubling the 1BB stack, etc.

I have no real rigorous math to back this up though.

This would also seem to have very positive ICM implications at a FT, superb post stevepa!

As for extending it, I agree that it will make this much more difficult as if you only call pre you start to lose value from your big hands, and if you shove the big hands and call the weaker ones you are no longer balanced (which is of course sometimes a problem, sometimes not).

Stevepa, since the profit of call/d vs shove is marginal at the very short stacks (<5bb) what about value we lose when bad flop we fold turns into winning board if we would see all 5 cards (if we would decide to shove).

Probably it`s significant if we`re talking about folding 40-45% of flops.

Comparing EV(shove) to EV(call/d) takes into account the flops we fold when we would win if we were all in (we get equity*pot in EV(shove), in EV(call/d) we lose the 1bb on all bad flops in EV(call)). On bad flops we're happy that we get to fold and keep chips instead of sometimes win but have our whole stack in, that's where the difference between the two comes from. Hopefully that clarifies, I'm struggling to find words to clearly explain.

Right, lol. Seems pretty easy. I switched my attention to math, forgetting about poker....

But still people would make mistakes, trying to figure what flops can be qualified as good, since good flops are around 60% of all flops.
30-40% of good flops are pretty clear for unpaired combos, but another 20%.....

The conclusions you come to make a lot of sense (given the assumptions) but it makes me wonder is why are we even calling (or shoving) with these hands that have low pre and post flop equity in the first place? If we are going to fold a significant percentage on the flop, is it just better to preserve your stack for a situation where your equity is higher by being first to act (or waking up with a premium) - also including the value of tournament life somehow in the equation?

Edit: i guess since we're in the BB the odds are so ridiculous that you can profitably call. But I do think there has to be some value to the chips you lose by calling in the first place.