Hello all,

I have some doubt about how a hand I played deep in the sunday warm-up (50 players left out of 5k).

Villain is a pretty solid / aggro player who we have seen 3bet in good spots which questions us on the value of his hand.

Blinds are 17,5k 35k, ante 4,4k

We have 900k, and villain barely covers us.

We are in the BTN with T9s and make it 70k. Villain who is SB repops it to 220k.

I believe all actions are possible (fold, call or gii bluff). Which one is best and why ?

Bonus hand. Same tournament, we are in the previous level (15k-30k, 4k ante). We are HJ again with 25BB with QQ and face an MP raise from a somewhat weak aggro player of 2 BB. Villain has 13BB. We make it 5BB, villain calls.

Flop is A 2 4 r.
c/c
Turn 3 and villain jams for 8BB on a pot of 12BB. What do we do ?

Call the T9 hand pretty much 100%. We have other hands in our range that are worse hands we can fold. I generally don't like using decent-ish suited connectors are bluffs, T9 doesn't have great removal from SB's 3-bet value range so I'd much rather have an A in my hand. I could also see using some small pairs as jams as well because those hands don't want to play post flop and unless we're up against a bigger pair we're never dead, and getting Kx/Ax hands to fold when we have 44 is a huge win.

With QQ in that spot, I think all of our options except folding are fine pre. Some of how I'd approach this hand depends on stacks yet to act, but I certainly think 3-betting this is fine and jamming probably can't be that bad. There may be some merit to calling but probably not against aggro players who are going to call way too much.

As played I'm not sure we can fold, we have to be good about 29% for this to be +EV and while this is primarily going to be Ax, I've seen enough spew with all sorts of weird stuff to think we could good 1 in 3 times here.

I think calling is the better option in hand1... I think it would be difficult for villian to shove-bluff in flop as you are kind of pot committed. When he checks you shove in flops where you connect...

Hand2 i think you had to 3bet larger.. to 8-9BB (practically putting him all in). Then jam in any flop... (basically you were putting him all in preflop)

A button raise in the first hand is okay by me but I think fold is the best option after Villain 3-bets. I don't really want to get that much of my stack in with those cards. I think people tend to overplay suited connectors and IMO calling or raising the 3-bet here would be a good example of that. Remember that suited connectors are only a marginal improvement over the same cards unsuited.

In the second hand I would put the Villain in preflop. I know that button and blinds are yet to act but I would probably raise enough to put the short stack in and let the cards fall.

std call in hand 1, folding is ridiculous.

gotta call hand 2 as played for the reasons mentioned. not loving it obv but the price us just too good/he has too little behind to fold.

In the end, I did fold both hands.

Hand 1 : I still believe the two best options would be shoving bluff and fold. Shove as I think V's range in that spot was way too big as he must have somewhat rightfully seen me as weak after seeing me fold hand 2 and he wouldn't have wanted to play for stacks with marginal holdings (AJ- maybe) this close to FT and I would have had him fold all the hands dominating me (TJ+, 9J+) making me a good 25% chip up without seeing a flop. Folding for the reasons 2pairsof2s mentionned, need to protect the stack.
I don't like calling because most of the time when I hit, I hit a draw or a second pair on an SPR of 2 and will meet something close a 100% cbet of 1/3rd pot from this V. And I'm not sure of what he'll do on turn that will a bring a decent pourcentage of the times a scare card. Not an ideal situation to be on...

Second hand : I guess I just made a blunder by folding. Sure it's definitely not a great situation but as mentionned by all, the price is too good to fold here. I guess I had a too big of a will to protect my stack which was on the limit between still being able to make somes plays (see flops, 3betNAI, r/f) and having to play push / fold. Still was definitely a sigh call though.

Shoving in H1 would be pretty bad. We block none of V's calling range and a decent chunk of his 3b bluffing range. We're IP and can flop really well vs what's been described as a really wide range. Folding seems too tight but I can be convinced otherwise.

H2 sizing preflop seems really bad. Just shove. You're so far ahead that not GII pre is really, really bad. No postflop comments because preflop is so egregiously bad. You'll even GII good vs CO, BTN, SB, and/or BB occasionally while denying max equity vs them.

Shoving here can't be horrible as we would break even using the following the conditions :
-If we are called we are 30%-70% in average (we are 40-60 vs AK, AQ and 80-20 vs bigger pocket pairs)
-Villain folds 50% of his 3betting range on this spot.

I do believe V would have folded a way more than 50% of his 3betting range there as for the mentionned reasons I suspected him to be picking chips on me. Which kind of was confirmed later as he 3betted my next open once again.

If we use the condition, V fold 80% of his range there, which seems to me more realistic. We make 5,3BB on the spot (that's 530BB every 100 hands !)

This sizing allows :
1- some lower PP to come along here, hands like 99-JJ can still 4bet shove behind while they'd fold when we shove.
2- it protects my light 3bets later so that my sizings can't be exploited later.

Concerning postflop play, I agree on having made a blunder by folding there.

Regarding H2, you dont need light 3bets (presumably you mean 3bets that will fold to a 4bet) when a 15bn eff weak player opens the pot. Agree you can widen your value range but the wider you go the more equity you better deny, hence jamming 15bb eff vs the opener. What hands exactly are you "protecting" and why is that a higher EV strategy than a strategy which has only iso allins, flats, and folds when this particular V opens the pot?

As I said, I think a lot of our 3bet sizing strategy in this hand really depends on the players yet to act. If we have a lot of 20-30BB stacks and we think those players are capable, a 3-bet to 5-6BB makes sense. If we ship we're not getting called by 99-JJ or AQ very often, but we will certainly get 4-bet shoved on by those hands if we 3-bet.

For me, equity denial is more important farther down in our range, stuff like 88-JJ, AQ, AJs, where I think if we 3-bet those hands and got jammed on we'd be in pretty gross shape, where as with QQ we're pretty comfortable just calling off. That doesn't mean we never jam QQ, but if we want a strategy that can mix jams and 3-bets QQ should mostly be in our 3-bet range.

Ali and JP, I really do like to think I'm pretty much a simpleton who's open to all ideas, and I acknowledge you may be right about our 3b sizing, but I'm still not convinced, and here's why:

-When V opens the pot, he's significantly concentrated his range. This is obviously crucially important, it means we're getting snapped off a ton and when have the 3rd best possible starting hand vs a 13bb (described fishy btw) opener we really, really, really wanna get snapped off as soon as possible. We're never r/f anyway, and I recognize you aren't worried about GII and coolered by AA or KK, but its not like we're ever valueowning ourselves by jamming

-So, the only real argument is if we're valueCUTTING ourselves, and I really do think we are if we're NOT jamming. 35% of the time an A or K pees OTF and this important not just because we lose a good chunk of the time (since V is never folding really any Ax to our 5-6bb sizing--it's not a contradiction to say equity denial still contributes a ton to EV when we have QQ even tho ideally we wanna GII pre) but I think even more importantly is we've now given V an opportunity to fold his hand postflop. That's tragic, especially since there's an imbalance in the sense that V is always gonna be GII good on [Axx] and [Kxx] textures since he's never folding a pair on those textures. If that's gonna happen, we need to punish the 55-JJ, AT-AQ, QJ, etc. portion of his range that's likely GII vs a jam so that we always win the max on good textures for us to balance out when V wins the max on bad textures for use. It's tragic if V folds 55, etc on [J98] when he'd otherwise GII pre when meanwhile we (almost) always GII close to dead when V binks postflop. We're letting V off the hook big time by not jamming, is what I'm trying to say. BTW, I don't know if I'm articulating this very well, I'm kinda struggling to put my thoughts on this into words, so sorry if this doesn't make sense.

-I guess put another way: I feel like our most +EV line is to prevent V from ever being able to get away cheap while also benefiting from max equity denial which quite frankly is always important. Even if that means we always lose on [Axx] and [Kxx], which I think is irrelevant bc I doubt it's ever correct to fold postflop on those textures anyway. Worrying about whether we GII on [Axx] or [Kxx] is therefore equivalent to worrying about jamming pre and running into AA or KK.

-Worrying about the 4 players behind snapping us off with 99-JJ, AQ is valid but not as important IMO as you may think. Even if you expand that to 66-JJ, AJ-AQ we're talking about 5% of hands, or a 20% probability any V behind has those hands. And it's not like those are all auto folds to our jam. So maybe 10-15% of the time we allow the players behind to get away unscathed with these hands. Is that ~10-15% enough to sway things in favor of small 3b? I honestly don't know, but I'm doubting that to be the case--think ensuring we max punish the opener is way, way, way more important than extracting from players behind. It's like the opener has teed this one off for us--we have to take full advantage of that NOW, not later, especially when it can backfire for us later in ways that don't exist when we just jam.

When we are snapped by a 13BB EP 2x open, we're usually vs AA, KK or AK. as they'll usually open shove their other value hands. In this precise case, I believe his range to be very much wider.

Most of the time, people will either reraise jam to the raise or fold as they'll be committed to the pot by just calling (SPR<1), so I won't really worry about valuecutting myself here.

Though I agree we put ourself in a tough spot when villain just calls and an A or K hits the flop. In those case I think we should mostly gii anyway post as we're pot committed. That was my biggest mistake of the tournament which even cost me the tournamment I guess (as I was legitimately then viewed as weak after folding on this spot and players started picking on me at the worst moment (<25BB and card dead))


The issue with this strategy is that we leave ourselves very exploitable. If we shove, we can pinpoint our range to TT-QQ and maybe AK / AQs and when we 3bet small we can then remove these hands from our range which makes our range much weaker and allows the alert player to 4bet us light.

@Eggs - the real issue is that fishy, bad players do fishy, bad things. And we have no idea how fishy bad players who min raise off 13BB are going to react when we put them in. We cannot assume our opponent is always going to call off 13BB with the same range they call 5BB, because 5BB is not for their tournament life but 13BB is.

It is possible this player's min raising range off 13BB is really polar, but it's also possible it's really wide and linear. Raising to 13BB not just lets our the original raiser play better (as they'll only call when they feel like they have a strong enough hand to get it in) it lets the players behind play better vs. us as well.

So against a "normal" villain you're doing what then? Flatting and hoping to fade an A or K OTF?

Except that didn't happen here. Not being results oriented, but I think you're overestimating this particular player type is gonna do that when they have the option to see a flop for a relatively non-committal sizing getting like 3.2:1 immediate odds.




With all due respect, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If you think V's are perceiving you as being capped when you shove, then shove AA and KK too and print. Explain how you, if you were a players still to act behind, will exploit a shove-only strategy, meaning what hands will you now fold, call, or raise with you otherwise wouldn't.

You say when we 3b small we can remove hands from our range with which you're actually doing precisely what you're describing i.e. 3betting small. Are you referring to how you think V's are gonna perceive your 3b small range?

What are you doing with the following hands: AJs, AKo, JJ, AA?

We don't need to assume they call it off significantly more often to make GII for 11bb more a better option than extracting an extra 3bb and letting V off the hook.

How do you reconcile this with the fact that V can x/f postflop with hands he'd absolutely otherwise be GII pre (like 55-77 and AJs, there's not a doubt in my mind he has these in his range btw) or even bluff us off our hand or construct his range postflop on precisely the bad textures for us like [Axx] and [Kxx] so that we always GII on those textures with 10% equity and he never GII when he's behind our QQ?

I'm sorry, it's my fault, it wasn't clear what I wrote here. What I meant here, is that I have a strategy of 3betting light when the situation in the appropriate circumstances.

If I'm a V playing behind and see me shoving QQ here. In a later hand I won't hesitate 4betting light (being a V playing from behind) if I see me 3betting light.

You're making a big assumption here in that villain is going to call off with stuff like 66 or AJ. I have seen enough players (at least live) bet/fold off 15BB stacks because they "don't want to flip" to know that it's absolutely within the realm of possibility.

Again, he doesn't need to call it off anywhere near 100% to make jamming and sucking an extra 11bb out of him better in expectation than 3b small and sucking 3bb out of him and potentially letting him off the hook.

That's especially true if we concede we're not folding QQ on [Axx] or [Kxx].

While we may disagree about how often V calls if off with 66 or AJ (he's certainly not folding 100% that's for sure) I'm sure you agree he's folding really damn often on those exact textures with all hands that aren't Ax or Kx.