Hey guys, long time lurker, first time poster. Had to create a profile here just to ask this question.

I reached the final table of a live poker tourney yesterday after 8 hours of playing. At that point I was 2nd place, but the chip leader had like the Mt. Everest of chips, in fact he was the chip leader for the whole tourney, that thing never seemed to diminish lol - it was like the guy had a beam of light coming from the sky and illuminating him all the way. Anyways, just so you can have a notion of the disparity, he had at least 4x the amount the chips I had as 2nd place.

So after a folding a couple of hands I got AQ at middle position. I raise 3BB everyone folds except the chip leader (who calls), I am thinking "nice, I can get a nice chunk of that stack now" .

Flop comes A 10 6 rainbow. All went all in immediately on an impulse, and the villain instantly calls (which made me regret instantly doing that). We went to showdown and the bad news hit - he had pocket 10's and flopped a set, of course, just because I decided to go all in... And obviously I did not hit another A so this play cost me the tourney. I was enraged lol.

This is the range I had him in more or less:



Just wanted to know if I did the right move, or was I too reckless and over confident? If I had won the hand, then I would not even be thinking about it, of course we would be thinking we did the right play and that it was a great play.

Thanks for your input

Payout structure? How many left at final table.? How big were the other stacks? How big in BB are you and the others? If you have say 10BBs the analysis is very different than if you have 80BBs.

Your all in seems designed to only get called by better. Given your assumptions you are trying to get an A worse kicker to pay you so closer to 33-50% of pot bet.

Hello there Polarbear. I had just made final table and there were 9.

Payout was up to 5th place.

At the time of final table the BB was 40K with 15K ante.

My stack was 780K as 2nd place, the 1st place was over 3 million easily.

From 3rd to 9th the stacks were a bit shorter than mine, I would say between 400 - 600k tops.

you got 17bbs with 6.5BB-7.5BB (depending if BB was villian and since you were first to act it seems post its probably 7.5BB in pot)

You shove nearly 17 bigs into a 7.5BB pot.

I like a bet of 2.5BB-3BB post and if he shoves we are getting it in. shoving aint too bad like how you did it.

I don’t think you played it horribly. SPR is under 3 so you probably are going to stack off in this spot fairly often. Just a couple of points re your post though.

1. Don’t post results. Results don’t really matter in any case, and posting them makes it harder to do an objective analysis without being influenced by that result. In this case, for instance, post all the details of stack sizes, payouts, positions and preflop action. Then post the flop cards and either post your action or just ask “How do I proceed on this flop?”. That puts all of us reading your post in the situation- we have the same information you had when you made your decision. We can therefore give better advice.

2. You said you probably wouldn’t be questioning your action had you won the hand. That is a huge mistake. Like I said above, results don’t matter. A good player questions all his decisions regardless of outcome. Losing the hand does not necessarily imply that you played it wrong, but likewise winning the hand does not necessarily imply that you played it correctly. It is a good idea to get into the habit of Regina’s questioning any hand that you find problematic whether you win or lose.

3. There is a sub forum on 2+2 for tournament strategy. It is fine to post hands like this in beginners, but you might get better responses from the folks who play a lot of tournaments and read that sub forum than you get here.

Just a little thing that might help you in the future. When you say "obviously I did not hit another A so this play cost me the tourney" the implication is that if you hit an ace you would have won. But be careful with this. If another ace had hit, you would have had 3 of kind and he would have had a full house - and you still would have lost (unless you boated up, too). I'm not saying anything about this hand - just pointing out how far behind you are when you have a pair and someone else has a set. In deep stacked situations, you might catch trips on the turn, but always be aware that having trips on a paired board is not anywhere close to having a nut hand.

Hi guys, thanks for the replies and tips.

@stremba70 I didn't post in this section, some moderator moved here.


@VBAces my bad buddy, tunnel vision in thinking so It completely missed my mind when I was writing the post, yes obviously he would have won either way.