I was playing 10NL the other day and ran across a villain who literally did nothing but shove preflop. He started with about 40BB in his stack, and naturally his stack. He was at my table for about 15 hands before I called him and stacked him and he quit. During that time, I believe he folded one hand and shoved PF all others. It did not matter what action preceded him or what his position was - he was shoving everything. There were several hands before the table caught on where there was an opener before him and he shoved regardless.

Obviously the best adjustment against this villain is to fold any hand that I’m not willing to call his shove with. I limp when OOP relative to this villain with a hand I will call with and obviously call when IP and I have a hand worth calling. My question is what kind of range should I have been calling with? It ended up that I called with KJs and stacked him, but I am not sure whether that was a bit too loose.

A big factor is how many players are left to act. It reminds me of time in a live game the BTN straddled half his stack in 1/2, about a $50 straddle of his remaining $100. Folds to me in the HJ. I have A2s. Clearly good enough to go with against the BTN who is calling 100% if I shove. The problem was the CO woke up with KK. I'm not sure if my play was good but that sucked.

If he's shoving any two cards and you have last action, Q7o is sort of the break even hand equity wise vs a random shove. I think maybe hands like JTs or T9s might still be calls here, not sure. Definitely any A or K is good enough. I think even 22 is, but you could punch this into equilab and see. I've really only used this concept the few times I've dinked around in play money land and there's always guys who just shove any 2.

What you say about other players absolutely makes sense. However as a practical matter it kind of took care of itself. That’s why I was limp/calling. If I limped from early position and one of the non-shovers also entered the pot, I knew it was pretty likely they had a big hand and I could easily just fold instead of calling the shove (unless my hand was good enough to call both opponents). After the first orbit or so, everyone else quit putting money in the pot when we weren’t planning on calling the shove so it was pretty common for only one player to limp prior to the shove.

Honestly since the situation probably won’t arise again I was just interested as a theoretical matter. I thought i should probably be calling 22+, Ax, Kx and maybe some Qx hands, but I really was unprepared and I couldn’t actually bring myself to call with some of the lower end of that range.

Knowing the breakeven threshold against an ATC range is a surprisingly useful thing to know, especially if you ever play live. Before pot odds it's 22+, K2o+, Q6o+, J8o+, T9o+, Q2s+, J6s+, T7s+, 98s. If you're in the BB facing a guaranteed ATC range, that's roughly the range you should be calling. Obviously you need to tighten up significantly in other positions when you have players left to act behind you, but you should still be pushing it way further than what feels comfortable. If I'm UTG+1 and a guaranteed ATC fish shoves 100bb from UTG, I'd probably call something like A9o+, KQo+, A7s+, JTs+, 99+ (I'm going pretty conservative with pocket pairs because it's a disaster when you're dominated and even random trash has decent equity against low pocket pairs). Using a limp only strategy is absolutely the only thing you should be doing when you act before the player who's shoving ATC.

The real problem here, however, is that you can rarely assume the range is actually ATC if you aren't playing live, so you have to use a sort of Bayesian approach and slowly open up your range as your confidence increases that the fish is actually shoving ATC. And since the fish can stop shoving ATC any time he wants, you should always assume the range is very slightly stronger than ATC even if he shoves 20 times in a row, because you never know when he reaches the point where he's going to stop on the next trash hand he's dealt (he doesn't know either). I'd still almost always be getting it in with hands like decent Ax and suited broadways from most positions though.

22 has almost exactly 50% equity against a range of ATC, so you should not be calling with 22 against a range of ATC in almost any realistic scenario. If anyone is left to act behind you it would actually be a pretty serious punt.

The situation for 22 is so bad that 22 vs two ATC ranges in a 3-way all-in is actually in last place.



(Ignore the slight difference in decimal values for the two ATC ranges. That happened because they were calculated via monte carlo simulation, not analytically.)