This was a 10€ tournament with 400€ guaranteed and 39 total buy ins. As you can see, I was a big chip leader and this was a chance to eliminate two opponents.

7 got paid, 4 left. Here's the payout structure. Note that about half of the 400€ guarantee lies in the bounties.

1st place: 50€
2nd place: 50€ (don't ask me why it was the same as I do now know)
3rd place: 35€
4th place: 25€

There was also bounties involved, so each time you eliminated someone you immediately get half of the bounty as money and the other half goes towards your own bounty. The winner of the the whole tournament would of course get to keep the total bounty money on his head as well.


The bounties were something like:

BTN: 11€
SB: 8€
BB: 8€
Hero: 13€

So, if I eliminate both I would get 8€ immediately and another 8€ added to my bounty. And if I eliminate both I would of course climb two price ladders and possibly if I win the whole thing I would get about 30€ extra from the bounties. If I don't win this all in, I would still be in good shape to continue the tournament without having to yet rely on desperate preflop all ins.


SB and BB were loose, random-ish players. BTN was very tight and passive and he was the one I would have wanted to face heads up, especially as a huge chip leader. I could have just slowly depleted his stack by stealing blinds.

So, knowing all this, should I make this preflop call? It's obviously -EV in chips and I'm nowhere near pot committed, but the complex nature of the payout structure means I have actually no idea whether I should gamble here or not?

The money itself is not important to me here, but I do care about playing correctly. In a normal tournament I would snap fold here, but this had a weird payout structure.

I would probably fold because stack preservation and laddering up are both real things. But I don't think it was a huge mistake if you chose to call. A little reckless maybe, since they likely have hands like AJ and KQ and sometimes pairs. So yeah, probably a fold.

Just open jam.

Firstly, it makes sense that 1st and 2nd pay the same bc the winner keeps all the bounties. Let's pretend that first place is actually 80€

Secondly, I'd expect QJo to be dominated quite a bit here against a 3B Jam and what's effectively a call. Let's assume you have ~20% equity vs the two players. This is probably generous.

Starting equities are something like this. (Calculation from Primedope's ICM Calculator)

[PHP]Stacks
======
Player 1: 473,466
Player 2: 161,334
Player 3: 152,199
Player 4: 238,001

Prizes
======
1.: 80
2.: 50
3.: 35
4.: 15

ICM Distribution
================
Player 1: 59.14 [HERO]
Player 2: 38.19
Player 3: 37.12
Player 4: 45.55

[/PHP]

If we call and win 20% of the time our equity jumps to ~73€ (+13.86€). The EV of this outcome is 2.77€

If we call and lose 80% of the time our equity falls to ~54€ (-5.14€) The EV of this outcome is -4.112.
So the EV of a call is [2.77€ - 4.112€] = -1.342€

If we fold our equity increases to ~61€, or +1.86€.

IMO, this is a clear fold with QJo.

Are you factoring in the bounties in that equation?

Only for first place as an early example. Since you asked, I fired it up in ICMizer and it seems to agree with the fold, at least with the payout structure we were given (50/50/35/15)

https://www.icmpoker.com/icmizer/#HGEAuW

I'd prob run it as cEV and not icm in a bounty since ICM matters less. Which it's partly moot since it's such an easy open jam.

Edit- Also looks like the bounties aren't input correctly.

You need ~30% equity for cEV to be positive. I'd have a hard time constructing ranges for our villains that get us there in this scenario.

I did get the bounties wrong and I apologize for that but it actually gave one of the blinds a higher bounty so it makes the call even less profitable if we were to reduce the money we can win in that spot.

You're absolutely correct that an open shove is +EV here.

https://www.icmpoker.com/icmizer/#UYFUAi

Right, it's just a trivial jam.

Preface: I'm a few years out of poker [and a couple more years on top of that from when I last played NL MTT's with any regularity]; so there's a lot of rust I'm looking to scrub off as I think about getting back into it.

Can you elaborate on why this is an easy [trivial] jam?

My general thoughts.....
Couple shorter stacks, but nobody is so critical that they'll have ants in their pants and be ready to make a stand with any half-way decent hand (obviously their CALLING all-in range would be much tighter than their open-shoving range anyway).
So I realize that would seem to give hero a lot of fold equity; but they'll also be realizing [presumably] that it's short-handed and hero is likely playing the bully with his big stack.....so not TOO much fold equity.
I was thinking of some reasonable calling ranges for each villain and I suspect hero gets three folds roughly 62-65% of the time.....and wins a little less than 2 bb in that event.

When called, I'd further guess that he's behind 100% of the time [no matter who the caller is], and behind by a lot [like perhaps more than 2:1 underdog] if it's the BTN (whose range I'd expect to be the tightest). Only slightly better than 2:1 if it's one of the blinds.

His equity ~20% [though possibly marginally less] if he gets two calls, and obviously still worse [14(ish)%??] in the extremely unlikely event of three calls.
I might be off on some of my range estimates [again: lot of rust], though my range estimates did land me right at about 20% equity for our hero against the two callers in the blinds (right in line with what another poster suggested above).

So without consideration of the bounties/pay-out, but rather only looking at the poker equity of the move, the spread of potential outcomes [I only did a rough mock-up of the math, fwiw] seems like the average expectation is a net-loss of chips.

So how is it an easy shove?


Supplementary question(s):
What is the WEAKEST hand you're open-shoving here?

Would you still shove QJo if you were the chip-leader by a much narrower margin (let's say 40bb instead of 67.6)?


Thanks in advance for replies....

To answer OP....

Multiple posters are advocating an open-shove; I'm still skeptical, but hoping to be convinced (see prior post).
As played, I think this is an easy fold.

The weird payout structure with bounties and all is a little bit of a brain-bender; but bear in mind that if you win the tourney you'll still get a fraction of those bounties even if you don't eliminate the 3rd/4th-place finishers yourself--->because part of it will have gone on to the other bounty hunter(s) price tags.

I feel your focus should still be primarily on winning the tournament. And you're going to move up the ladder one step closer after this hand even with a fold: one of them is going to be eliminated [or near enough] without further participation from you. Don't jeopardize your chip lead with what is [as you noted] a clear -EV call.

If you call, roughly 20% chance you get down to HU with a massive chip-lead.
But the most likely outcome (~80% of the time you call) is that you get down to 3-handed [or near enough, with a 4th irreparably crippled], but with you now in 2nd-place in chips (and only a little ahead of 3rd).

By folding you also get down to 3-handed [or near enough], but still maintain a sizable chip-lead. That seems a much better circumstance than the balance of the spread I've described above (even if you do sacrifice a fraction of [potential, unlikely] bounties to do so).


A better question might be: what's the weakest hand we SHOULD call with in this spot?

40 blinds vs 60~ means if I double the 20 blind stacks I'm not chip leader anymore which I think is pretty relevant.

There's more value in gaining a bounty than I think is being applied here potentially. To start it's very valuable to win a bounty since that's half the prize pool allocated into that part. The other is that they also just don't want to bust. Sure ICM means less in PKO tournaments but they're still kinda handcuffed here. So I think it gets through more often than 65%~ I'd venture it's closer to 80%~ since they're likely calling a pretty narrow range.

Worst hand to shove, who knows honestly. PKO's are very confusing to quantify that. But prob like something like 9Ts approx.

OK. But otoh, those narrower ranges mean hero is that much further behind the times they call. He only wins <2bb when they fold; but he can potentially lose up to 34bb when they call.

I again did a rough mock-up of the numbers (made the SB/BB calling ranges the same, and a little looser than the BTN's).....
The extremely tight ranges necessary to get an 80% probability of THREE folds pf makes it so that hero's equity is only about 31-32% against one of the blinds, and only about 28% against the BTN's range.

His equity if he gets TWO callers is now <20% (probably only 18% or so), and likely down to <13% if all three were to call.

It's not as negative as it was with my prior estimates, but it still is a clear negative expectation.

Just so I'm clear: I'm not considering the bounties or other pay-out dynamics here; I'm ONLY talking about expected value in terms of hero's chip-count (though that chip-count is a big factor toward his probability of winning the tournament).
And from that stand-point, it's still a -EV move even if we expect it to fold thru 80% of the time.

As far as I can tell, we'd need folds somewhere around ~87% of the time before this becomes a break-even move in terms of EV (which I would say is highly unrealistic).

So idk, I'm still a bit of a skeptic, though maybe I need to go through the various computations of how the payout/bounties works.

Trex, luckily nowadays there are plenty of tools you can just plug numbers into and play with ranges that makes studying such spots far easy than you seem to be making these spots.

Default calling ranges (what we can shove) https://gyazo.com/dd6720ff81c4aef21f38c256ff1dda74

Slightly adjusted ranges https://gyazo.com/f570d59f596e3c554914a63f2a2ae711

Calling range vs sb and bb shoves (QJo is too loose) https://gyazo.com/3070fe4e5d94f5c96785ca51b1d167a9

Fwiw I'd just be minraise folding here as standard - I doubt they reshove wide enough and while open shoving is +ev, would rather not dump off 20bb when wake up with dominating hands. Depending on table dynamics I might just rip (if they are restealing a bunch etc, if i've raise/folded a few times)