45 man sng.

No Limit Hold'em Tournament T500/T1,000
Buy-in: $3.19+$0.31 USD Hold'em No Limit
PokerStars
4 players
Formatted by pokercopilot.com: Poker HUD for Mac and Windows

Stacks:
UTG - UTG (T10,986)
BTN - BTN (T10,528)
SB - Hero (T15,929)
BB - BB (T30,057)

Preflop: (T1,740, 4 players) Hero is SB with Ah Jc
2 folds, Hero raises to T2,000, BB raises to T29,997 (all-in), Hero calls T13,869 (all-in), Uncalled bet of T14,128 returned to BB



So I'm not posting this because I lost it. That doesn't bother me. I know I can push with this hand, but can I call with it in this spot?? Preflop I'm pretty sure I'm ahead, but not a huge fav. But what else is there to consider? moving up in pay spots, not "needing" to make the call because I still have 16 BB?

I'm a newby. How do I think through this hand?

push from the first place. EZ game, no headaches

As played, if he shoves top 11% or more, it's a +EV call. If his 3b% is 3% or more, call. if not, shove from the first place next time.

Anothe posibility is that BB saw you a bit defensive and may shove wider only you. You'll get to know this the more you play.

Raise's fine but in these buy-ins just shove.

You got looked up by the top of BB's defend range just about. You do good v most pairs, so you only get 55% of 55/45's.

The flaw with rai 12-20BB stacks instead of open-shoving, especially from SB, is the fact you are OOP and miss a ton of boards and have to double-barrel. (either rai/flop c-bet or rai/ckck/turn c-bet, latter has good strength.)

So your 16BB stack rapidly becomes a 10-11BB stack if you give up turns. Not the worst thing because you have an entire orbit to shove 1x-3x, but... Mix in raising and shoving until you get the feel of playing aggressor OOP.

If you can track down Greenstein's post or discussions about hand values rising somewhat incrementally when hands are folded to BvB (perhaps there's even something in his books, dunno...) you can really get a sense of how wide you can shove from SB.

In general it's better to shove because not only can you shove AJo, you can shove Q3s.

Good luck, man.

make its 2.1kish then snap call. AJ is way to strong to just jam

You need to have your c-bet frequency down cold (including delayed ones) so say about 55-65% or more?

Can you explain? So that he won't jam pre-flop?

Despite your relative hand strength with AJ, you're still out of position. You can't just bet every flop because whether his hand is stronger or weaker, he will connect with almost as many hands as you do with relative strength, perhaps slightly weaker overall but not always.

So check/fold some flops, check/call some flops (including A's and J's on rainbow boards but mix bets/checks, or low flops with 2 hearts and at least a gutshot [QT4]) if your hand can improve instead of always betting.

As for the 55-65% bit, probably bet 6 flops, call 4 (some will be checked through, allowing you to pick up at least 2+ more bet spots on turns as delayed turn c-bets, making it about a 4:1 ratio). While that might seem a relatively low flop % to be betting as aggressor, you can increase the strength of your overall OOP (out of position) lines by donking into turns when Villain bets that QT4hh flop regardless of if you have a heart or not. (i.e. QT4T, QT48, QT4X)

Being OOP demands an understanding that Villains will defend and float. So blindly raising preflop then betting flops is suboptimal. You need to vary your play, and make sure this variance in your play isn't dependent on the hand you are playing, but overall a long-term attempt to get to optimal Nash equilibrium strategies in common areas in tournament poker.

Also, bookmark this thread and read: Poker Theory: Theory Terminology <--- despite the title, it's not a dry thread, and there is great value in it.

Also, pick up a Theory of Poker. It will not be the easiest read, but it is not the easiest of games to succeed in. So a literal textbook approach will go a long way.

Take what you need out of this post, discard the rest because someone else will need a different chunk of this post anyway.

Ask questions in other threads also. Try to approach threads as hands being played multiple ways by multiple people... Simply because they are.

Most of all, just have fun even if you're picking up an education around this forum.

i would do exactly what nofear said. maybe make it a little more just my preference.. like 2.3k then snap call a jam and cbet pretty much 100%.. people fold far too often to cbets in these lower stakes games. note im not cbetting 100% from all positions just from sb here i would especially against unknown villain

Raise-calling AJ all in is ICM suicide here. Really, the range we can raise-call for value is so narrow that we shouldn't have a raise-calling range. If villain has no idea what he is doing both pre-flop and post-flop then an exploitative raise-fold might be ok.

But assuming we would call as everyone else is, when villain:

a) has a hand that would fold to the min bet and fold to the jam.

b) has a hand that he would call an open jam with and would shove with if we min-bet

it makes no difference anyway, the result is the same whether we start by min-raising or jamming.

The only categories that make a difference are

c) he has a hand that would flat both the min-bet and the jam

d) he has a hand that would fold to a jam but call a min-bet

e) he has a hand that would fold to a jam but shove over a min-bet.

As regards c) we don't want to play post-flop OOP with a massive ICM advantage in his favour. If he's competetent at all he can put too much pressure on us. We pretty much have to play fit or fold. If you think he's really good then you can level him by check-raising all-in because he "knows" you must have it, but I don't fancy than much in this game.

As regards d) - same again, we'd rather just pick up the dead money by jamming against those kinds of hands.

As regards e) - due to ICM we don't want to induce and flip. Growing our stack by 10% by him folding is by far the best option against the 98s type of stuff.

So without a min-raising range, Nash Calculator gives an open-shoving range of:

SB jam: 39.4%, 22+ Ax+ K2s+ K9o+ Q4s+ Q9o+ J7s+ J9o+ T6s+ T9o 96s+ 86s+ 76s
called by BB: 12.7%, 55+ A7s+ A9o+ KJs+ KQo

IMHO pretty much all of this is in category b), so there is no category c)

To give you a taste of how much ICM pressure we are under , here's our calling range to the wide range of the CO, who doesn't even cover us:
CO jam: 18.9%, 22+ A2s+ ATo+ K9s+ KJo+ Q9s+ QJo J9s+ T9s
called by SB: 5.9%, 88+ AJs+ AQo+

http://www.holdemresources.net/h/web...=&s8=&s9=&s10=

Here are the EV values of various outcomes (in cents but the payouts are based on the $1 45s, however they scale the same to the $3.50 ones)

EV at start of hand 838.76

EV after fold 831.88
EV after taking it down pre: 853.87
EV after winning flip with BB: 1010.91
EV after losing flip with BB: 511

So this is the basic point, compared to just taking it down pre, winning a flip is less than half as good as losing a flip is bad.