We are mid to late Day 1 of the Venetian Ultimate Stack $600 $300,000 guarantee. The money won't happen until Day 2. We are nine handed.

I have about 37 blinds and look down in the SB and see AKs. Not sure what the blinds were at this point.

UTG+1 is chip leader who has been aggressive and he raises pre-flop 2x exactly. Fold Fold Shove for about 22 blinds. He has been waiting patiently.

Fold, then Call by the button. This is an extremely tight older man. He has played nothing but premium hands. But his call surprises me because I would have expected a shove. His range here is TT+/AK but I know he is more likely to have AA/KK/QQ than JJ/TT. And I also have an odd feeling that he would have shoved AK/TT/JJ and probably QQ.

I have a little bit more chips than the guy who called and I know that if I shove he is always calling. My guess is that if I shove UTG will fold almost all of the time (I think he will call only AA/KK which are extremely unlikely hands for him to have).

I am baffled by the call but am thinking that it is most likely AA or KK. I can't shake that feeling and I fold. Did I do the right thing?

So you have the sort of stack that can become a shorty real quick, a blind increase and a bet or two with losers and suddenly you are under 20 bbs. You need to chip up. And you have a pretty good hand.

But a guy who has been folding everything suddenly goes all in, and a guy who is tighter than my pre-pandemic clothes flats behind with only 8 or 10 bets left.

I'm not saying that this is a bad time to gamble, necessarily, because getting the better part of a tripple-up would be a good thing. But I think that as often as not one or both of those guys will have AA's or KK's.

I don't mind folding and never telling anyone.

I'm gonna roll me eyes and ship it. Live players do too much random ****.

I mean my first instinct is to fold vs some old man coffee. His range for calling is pretty tight
But tripling up when they both have like qq/jj or smth looks kind of enticing.
I think just rolling like some folds is kind of a decent idea so you can just say ok I’ll fold like a third or half of the time could be a decent idea.

It's actually a pretty ho-hum breakeven FGS spot at best vs these ranges. If you feel like you have any kind of reasonable edge on the remaining field <40bb, I think it's a pretty trivial fold. Well played.

Agree with this above. It’s not a great spot but I don’t think you can fold here. Sure it sucks if we lose to aa or kk but we block both and we have AKs. Even if it’s QQ vs 88, we have lots of equity. Think it’s a tad too nitty to fold here. We need all of the chips to win the tournament.

How deep was the guy that flat called the 22 bb jam? I feel that’s a big deal. If he has say 30-35bb to start hand, just don’t think we can fold here. It’s not great even if say 22bb has 88 and other guy has say AQ but gotta win pots to get all the chips. Fold is fine though here also vs omc I guess. He’s going to have 10-10+ here and flatting seems very top heavy of his range. Im not folding though. Under 40bbs can get short very quickly and to me in a tournament- once you start getting to 20bb- you have to run insanely well to do anything and a cold few orbits can really crush your stack.

For example- you will see a lot of crazy things in these tournaments (at the Venetian). A guy I though was pretty tight and snug jammed 60bbs one to my left ....over my utg open prior to dinner break in a $800 tourny with AJo when I had QQ. Idk, sometimes live players just punt bc they get bored etc. AKs is the nizzle under 40bbs. If we lose, we just laugh and say who cares we lost $800. We gave ourself a shot to get a stack in a big field mtt.

Before this tourney I would have said I can't agree more.

On two occasions in my past I folded AKs in a spot similar to this and would have tripled up if I had called. One was the Borgota Million guarantee where I raised EP, a guy shoved, another guy shoved for more, then a guy raised again. I could have shoved for like 60 to 70 blinds but I folded and would have hit a flush and won (vs AJ, 77, and QQ). I made myself promise not to do that again.

Then in the Golden Nugget whacky tourney with a $300,000 Guarantee where if you bag twice you get $1,500 for the least amount of chips (which turned out to be the equivalence of 25th place out of 3,000+ entrants). I shoved AK in virtually this situation and was up against ATs and QQ and lost it (I didn't care, was trying to bag a second time).

So here I can't even say there was a tell. The OMC could have had QQ/JJ or AK. But he actually had KK. He didn't even win the hand vs 99 who turned a straight while I turned a flush draw. I figured the flush would hit on the river, but no. I would have had like 2 bb's left had I shoved.

But I try not to be results oriented, so I wanted to see what the consensus was here. In the future I will likely make a go of it and shove.

I think the fold is reasonable. And it's very simple. Your AK doesn't have great equity against the range of a small stack shove followed by a super nit's under-calling that shove situation. Call, you'll either triple up or be left with effectively nothing. Fold, have some blinds to play with and and get a possible pay jump.