I have a bit of a theoretical question for this forum. I play in a local home game tourney league and a buddy of mine has managed to dominate the league since he started playing in it 5 years ago. This is my third season. He's the first to admit he has little poker success outside of this league and other home games, so it's not like he's a poker genius or anything. I think he runs really good but he's obviously figured out how to exploit this crowd too.

Anyway, fairly early after I started playing I picked up on a pretty big bet-sizing tell from him. I'm sure other people have noticed it too (one player was challenging him about a play on break the other night) but it seems that nobody can figure out how to combat it. So I started to wonder if it is simply an unexploitable play.

What he does is he will make unusually large raises and shoves with hands he doesn't want to play postflop: hands like AJ-AK and middle pairs even up to JJ. The one hand that sparked the discussion at break was on the final table bubble and a player opened for 2.5x and he just shoved like 25bb and showed AQs from one of the blinds. The other player folded in annoyance and at the break asked him why he wouldn't just call and see a flop.

Now unlike the player who challenged him about the play, I understand exactly why he does it but I'm trying to figure out how to beat it. There have been so many spots where I've seen him make a similar move and I've predicted almost exactly (and sometimes exactly) what hand he's holding.

Is this simply an unexploitable play? The only way to beat it is either to wake up with a monster or to make a call for your tourney life when your best case is likely flipping.

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The fact that you know what he's doing makes it exploitable. Yes as some points in tourneys you have to be willing to flip and win flips in order to chip up, so you will have to take these spots vs him.

I think part of what makes it so effective is that these tourneys play more like STTs than MTTs, so there is less incentive to make a marginal call against him. Now that I think about it, that's probably why hes had so much success in the league but hasn't had much success in other MTTs, live or online. He'll get looked up more by people willing to take the risk.

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Try not to give him good spots to do this (e.g. try to make your raise less than 10% of his stack).

His range to do this should depend on how wide the person opening is - so mostly what position the initial raise comes from. Watch to see if he seems to jam the same range against all positions or not and plan calling range(s) accordingly. This is a place where software packages like HRC can help - (or HoldemViewer for a free package)

But generally what he is doing is a normal part of shortstack poker.

There are plenty of situations in poker when someone's range is face up but you can't do much about it - e.g. when they jam 15BB from the CO/BTN they mostly have low pairs but you don't get dealt high pairs enough to call them off

First, I don't know if you think it, but shoving 25BBs after a 2.5x raise is pretty super standard. Anytime your stack is 10x the size of the current bet, shoving is standard.

He's playing solid fundamental poker.

In fact, against about any raise, I would shove at least AQ+ and 99+ there. Against a loose open, I'm probably going to start shoving 20% of hands.

I think the difference in running well at these games as opposed to brick and mortar or online MTTs is the field size. When I played these about 10 years ago when I first started playing, the field sizes were roughly about 20 - 30 players on average. Much easier to go really deep against that field size.

When I transitioned to brick and mortar, I was now in fields of 100 or more on a regular basis. Much harder to final table that many players. This is where sample size makes a difference.

Yeah like jjpregler said hes just playing solid abc poker here. But just plug this into a chip ev calc and figure out what you can call with. Infact this is something you should be doing anyway all the way down to like 13-14bbs what you can shove over/what you can call with when you m/r and someone ships so that you know exactly what to do before you even open.

Before i even open from late pos. i look at my stack and my hand and then over villains stacks and right away know what im going to do vs other players shoving. good thing to have down to a tee which is why the chip ev calc like icmizer helps a ton!

assuming you open to 2.5x and he ships on you from bb for 25 bbs with AJ,66+ then you can call AQs,AK,88+. easy peazy if you think he shoves wider plug that in and find the correct calling range

I suppose you're right - I play this way when I play online MTTs but what makes it seem unusual is that it is so out of place in this particular league. I'm probably just frustrated that I know what he has every time he does it and yet nobody can seem to combat it.

The oversized opens are even more frustrating - when he's raising 3.5-4.5x with those same hands in the middle stages. He knows that stacks are too shallow for people to call with speculative hands, so he forces people to fold everything but the best of their range. And if someone decides to call, he builds a nice big pot he has a chance to take away postflop. It's so annoying because adjusting raise size based on the strength of one's hand is donkey poker 101 but it seems to work.