Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob148
I think this is backwards. Your value shoving range should shrink as the size of your investment increases. So if you're shoving over a 3x raise with 11 big blinds, your value range should be wider than it would be if you were shoving over that same 3x raise with 20 big blinds.
Then as the size of your investment increases, you get to add more hands through polarization; these hands benefit from fold equity as you explained, but I wouldn't polarize with pairs; typically A2s-A5s, and suited connectors make for much better hands to do this with.
Let's get into the details of this, because I can't tell if you've just got a completely different perspective or if you're addressing the wrong scenario.
Let's say that there's a late position open-raise to 3x. You're sitting on 11 BB in the small blind. You believe that your opponent's open-raising range is big enough that 66 is ahead.
If you play this hand, you're pretty much committed to showing this down, aren't you? Calling to see the flop and giving up leaves you with only 8 BB and you're pretty deep in push-fold territory.
If you shove preflop, your opponent will be looking at a pot size of 15 and needing 8 BB to call. That's about 2:1 and, especially since it's an all-in, he's just got to estimate your pushing range. Overall, the price isn't that bad. It's an all-in with no reverse implied odds against a short stack, so he might call a good amount of the time, even with somewhat weaker hands. (Of course, this becomes more true as his stack gets larger, making the relative risk smaller.)
But let's say you call the raise and push every flop. After your flop call, the pot size is 7 BB. Your push is a pot sized bet. The unpaired hands in his range are likely to have missed the flop (roughly 2/3 of the time), and you were almost certainly flipping against those hands preflop. But I don't think he's calling a pot sized bet with nothing. So you've now managed to win a fair number of pots you would have otherwise lost. You will *still* lose to most of the other hands as well as hands that paired up on the flop, but you would have lost to those in a preflop shove scenario anyway.
I'll admit to not having seen a lot of numbers on these types of scenarios. I don't have enough tournament experience to have a good sense of the types of opening ranges you might be facing at these times. So here are the places I could be wrong:
* 66 is ahead of villain's range.
* 66 is a hand to be committed with with an 11 BB stack.
* Villain will call a preflop push with a wide range of hands.
* Villain will not call a pot-sized push with a wide range of hands on the flop.