Playing NLHM $200 live tournament. We're in the money, 14 left. Blinds 5,000/10,000 with 10k BB ante. We've just had a table redraw at 18 and I've been at this table for about 15 minutes. Most of my table was from my other table plus 2 unknown players. I'm the short stack at the table, but no one has more than 35 bigs. I have 110k (4 players have in between 140 - 180k). The villain wants to get involved and has been actively trying to bust players. He busted a player that had 30% of his stack with A6 off, and a mid-stack player that had 50% of his stack with A10 off. He has 260k.

I'm dealt AQ off in the cutoff and it folds to me. I raise to 22k. SB and BB call. Should I always be jamming this pre? I think so. It's 18% of my stack, I can probably just take it down, and I don't mind a call.

In the moment, I was thinking the villain was too aggro and there was a good chance he would try to apply pressure with a late position raise.

Its pretty standard to just have a push/fold range with 11bb from the co. And given your read of villain you are going to be called by a lot of hands that you dominate.

You can probably construct a minr range that includes very strong hands to call a shove and weaker hands with blockers that fold.

Yeah I always shove at that stack size. If anything a regular raise might scare off the aggressive guy, make him think you want action.

(Which one is the villain in this hand?)

Raise is really bad. It is possible to minraise with a polarized range. However, with AQo, you are happy to take the pot or gii, and it will be tricky to play if you miss.

My standard is to shove with <15 blinds pre-flop.

In this case the problem is that if you are forced to fold to a flop shove you will have only 9 bb's and will be in a tough spot if you don't get a shovable hand before you hit the BB.

Playing only push/fold with 14xBB is bad.

I get that the solvers don’t play push/fold, but how much ev are we costing ourselves by doing so?

FWIW, in soft fields I agree, in tougher fields it is easier not to have to try to split ranges and play as Mr. Rick does

In tougher fields, you do not want want to lose value pushing JJ+ and do not want to miss steal spots because your hand is not good enough to push.

I do understand the reasons why, I am wondering how large this effect is.

As an example, if you give PIO a lead range on connected middle boards, it will use that option, but ignoring that and checking range usually costs virtually nothing in EV.

How much does playing push/fold at 14 really cost, vs having a split range? Is it greater than .1BB? If not, I'd stick to that when I am 'outclassed', which is hopefully not too often...

Yea jam pre. I might open qq/kk/aa here to a min raise pre bc I feel it gets more value somewhat. Probably ripping AQ/AK here along with all pps other than the 3 above.

With 11xBB, in CO you should be shoving a much wider range than that, something like 20% of your hands. I agree that raising QQ+ and balancing that is a little better than shoving everything even with 11xBB, but your range for doing that should also depend on how the table will react to the raise and how comfortable you are playing postflop short stacked. I agree that with AK/AQ or say 99, shoving is way better than raise/gii.

I mean op should ship those 3 hands also at a freq. I think KK and AA atleast for me- I like to min open and play postflop with bc you rarily find a flop where it’s not easy to get it in by turn or flop. Sure you are going to get owned a small % of the time when the bb defended and flops a big draw or 2 pair but that is the risk you take in tournaments.

I just think you lose some value if you rip qq/kk/aa and it goes fold fold fold. I feel people will spazz with top pair when you min open these hands and get a favorable flop (over pair to the board). Again I don’t study pio/ solvers so I can’t say what I think is correct per se. maybe you are supposed to just jam these hands so that your shove range also has some top of range hands in it and your play isn’t obvious. A min open on a 10-15bb stack does look very strong obv bc most people aren’t going to just open 55 or 88 in co and rather just pile pre on that stack size.

Shove AQo.