$45 Live Tournament

9 players remain: 9 paid

I don't have the exact payout structure, but payouts range from $80 for 9th to $800 for 1st. Payout jumps are relatively gradual until 4th place, with bigger jumps from 4th to 1st.

Hero is one of the three bigger stacks, with 18 BB. There are two or three short stacks, which are in the 5 BB range. Villain to hero's immediate left is extremely aggro, and has approximately the same size chip stack as hero.

18 BB effective stacks, no antes

Folds around to hero in SB, who looks down at KJ offsuit.

What is your plan?

This is the first hand at the final table. Hero has a decent amount of experience with villain. He is an extremely aggressive thinking player. Villain has a fairly good understanding of the game, but tends to error on the side of playing too aggressively at times. He will run over the table if they let him.

Hero expects villain to respond to a minraise by folding the worst 30% of his range, flatting the majority of the time, and 3-betting a polarized range (difficult to estimate the total frequency with which he will 3-bet, but he's aggro enough that I would not feel good minraise-folding as a default). If he flats hero is stuck out of position playing a hand that does not flop particularly well.

Also worth noting, blinds are going up next hand.

So this is like a $45 tournament with 90 players or so...

I believe it's profitable to just flat out jam the 18bbs in his face, but if he's really that aggro then it's probably best to just complete and call if he raises preflop. Then you check-call him down when you flop a pair most of the time, and check-raise with gutshots.

Easy game.

I think jamming is preferred option. Second option is to complete, and 3 bet jam over his raise when it comes.

Thanks for the responses guys. This was a $45 tournament that I'm guessing had around 85-90 entries on this particular night.

I did end up jamming, but I'm not sure whether it's exploitable for me to jam kj 18 bb deep? Villain will likely discount the top of my range, and can theoretically call wider than would be expected.

Also, do you guys know of any free resources for studying ICM? I've got one free ICM tool, but the program is in German, so it's of limited use to me.

At the time I made this shove, I assumed it was worth risking my stack to give myself a better shot at winning the tournament, and that he would not call very wide at all.

But after I thought more about it, I'm not so sure. I had actually concluded that this was probably a pretty bad shove. But I'm struggling to figure out a better way to play this spot. I don't really like taking a passive line here.

Completing and then shoving over the top seems like it could be a decent option. That way there's more in the pot to make my shove-steal worthwhile. The downside is that I give him a chance to see a flop for free when he checks behind.