Hi All, I'm relatively new to online tournament poker and a newbie to the forms, (first post). The following situation happened to me during the FTOP mainevent, and I'm losing a few hours of sleep thinking about it. I'm hoping by posting it here, I can get some answers from the forms. I have yet to learned how to use the hand converter, so I'm just going to describe the action as best as I can, please bear with me, and thank you for all your comments and feedback in advance. -Jasmine.

blinds 300/600, antes 75, 9 handed, (4th hour of the tournament, about 900+ players remaining, top 720 ITM, I was maybe around 600th place..)

Preflop Pot size: 1575

Preflop stack size:
UTG Villain : 26,716 (M~17)
Hero in middle position: 25,187 (m~16)
Shortie on Button: 8,367 (m~5.3)

Preflop Action: UTG Villain raised to 2400, I flat called 2400, Shortie goes all in for 8,367, blinds fold and comes back around to UTG Villain who shoves rest of his stackfor 26,716. so my pot odds is 37.7%. (22,787 to win 60,316)

My line of thoughts: I felt like was reading the table pretty well, when Villain initially raised 4X utg..my gut instinct was that he had a premium..JJ+, AQ+ looking at both of our stack sizes, I felt if I put in a reraise, it would effectively commit me to the pot if he shoves over..so I thought my stack was deep enough to take a flop with AKs and proceed...now shortie goes all in..when it came around to Villain, I was praying he wouldn't shove, but he did...so here I am..staring at my beautiful AKs....at this point, I narrow the Villain's range to JJ+, and AK, (definitely no AQ..)..in the heat of battle..I didn't really know exactly my pot equity, just knew that I was behind, and I'm calling for my tournament life, and didn't want to race against a pair..so I ended up MUCKING it...(plus till this day, I'm still not sure how to evaluate stack size..is it by M, or number of BB...after I called the initial raise, my M dropped to 14.4 (low in the yellow zone described by Harrington.), but I still have 38BB left which appears to be pretty healthy...so which parameter should I use..? Can someone please comment on this? )

Using pokerstove..( hope I did this right..), not considering the shortie's range, against the Villan's hand..here's my pot equity with AKs..

38.3% against JJ+
42.8% against JJ+, AKo, AKs

now if I include the shortie's all in range to TT+, AJo+ ( his range could also include lower pair since my flat call represented weakness, plus his low M..)
my AKs pot equity drops to
28.7%

I would love to hear what the form think of my play...Is this a terrible laydown considering my stack size and my place standing at the tournament? Is it time to "gamble it up"? or a good laydown...or can I even just fold it preflop..? or reraise preflop? how Deep is really my stack..? 38BB sounds pretty healthy..yet M of 14.4 is really not a spot to sit back and wait...or is it?

Please comment,

Thank you all very much,

- Jasmine

re-raise pre, get it in, etc...

ya, re-raise pre, get it in

Call/Call

actually don't have a fold that much considering how you've played it. Obviously we don't care about our tournament life, but we are likely to be in bad shape here vs vills range

That being said, 3bet pre to get it in

No we aren't, that guys probably isolating his whole range of opening hands.

edit: if you mean the shortstack, the guys iso shove has us freerolling against him anyway

re-raise pre / get it in

Based on your read, I think reraising and calling are both acceptable preflop but you certainly have to call the shove.

Ryan

im re-raising pre and getting it in for sure...if i do flat the original bet pre im going to call off here with AKs

it appears the form is in agreement!

I want to thank everyone for their feedback, it appears "get it all in" is the consensus...considering my stack size (M~14, or 38 BB), and 28% pot equity ( against two villain's range) to 37.% pot odds..it appears to be negative EV..is there an argument for a "fold" here...? Is my stack size to short to fold in this spot?

-Jasmine

If the villian isn't a complete nit, then I think you have his iso'ing range all too tight...I would say its at the very least 99+ AQs+, but it could potentially be wider than that. I'm def. in the category of 3b/call, tho.

if you think your opponent never has AQ in this spot a fold is correct.

However. the UTG raiser has a dilemma. If he has AQ (or a medium pocket) he wants to get value out of the probably weak shorstack pusher. But he can't really call voor 6k more, because he will be comitted (or think he is) if you shove.

the problem with your flatcall in this situation, is that you look weak (to the UTG raiser). For typical players your flatcall indicates a hand like a pocket pair, or AJ more often than not. So the UTG raiser might think his AQ is ahead of your range.

the allin reraise also takes AA out of his likely range. This improves your equity in the side pot somewhat.

I agree with the rest of the form. Also, ZOMG A GRL

cgidd8, MrMudd76,

Thank you for the further analysis of the hand, much appreciated. Perhaps I should conclude the discussion by letting the "forum" (please excuse the misspelling in my initial post..) know what the two villains had...so the UTG raiser had JJ, and the shortie's all in shove had AQo...

thank you all for your comments.

-Jasmine

P.S. Would anybody still Call/Fold in this spot if you saw their cards face up?