stevepa,

come on you know everyone in this forum is to good to show math, jesus. we just know the right answer magically, don't you?

stokkbroker,

are you saying you would take a -cEV spot as a resteal just to preserve fold equity? you say FE is crucial to mtts...aren't some other things crucial to mtts, like building a stack & not going broke?

if villain opens ~15% of hands & calls with 55+,ATs+,KQs,AJo+, you're going to net approximately 1BB by shoving. you're going to get overcalled sometimes but not enough to negate the equity of the shove. IDK the value of flatting which is hard to quantify, but shoving is a money printing strategy that causes villain to fold the best hand sometimes while ensuring we never fold a winner postflop.

This is probably about right. Of course the overcalls cut into the 1xBB profit you estimate.

If you flat call, there is less chance of busting out, as a lot of times you fold or he folds or it goes to showdown not allin.

With the flat call, T9/J9 flops are good for you and you can get allin. Also, on low choppy flops with a bdfd if he doesn't look real strong. Then he may give up on low flops sometimes figuring you have a pp. If he cbet/folds, you pick up about twice what you do with a resteal.

I like a flat call better a little deeper or shallower where the push doesn't have FE. Still, this is a really good hand to flat call with.

Think the flat call has advantages for reducing variance and if you have a skill advantage postflop.

Not sure what is best, but flat calling isn't terrible. I agree with Stevepa that the push may be best, but I don't like the tone of a lot of the propush replies.

I don't think we're going to have any skill advantage postflop considering all our decisions are shove/fold on the flop.. We have way more FE jamming pre than we do flatting and jamming over a cbet.. pretty std shove imo

That's true but not really a convincing reason why shoving is better. I mean if he just auto jammed flop after we flatted pre (ie we have no FE by flatting), we'd need 40% to stack off on the flop. Using Steve Williams' 15% opening range, we have at least 40% on about 47% of flops, with average equity of ~73% (see this graph here). So 53% of the time we lose 2.2bb, the other 47% we have 73% equity in a 32.5bb pot.

So EV(call)=.53*(-2.2)+.47*(.73*32.5-15)=2.93bb

So in this (unreasonable but not completely insane) case, calling is vastly superior to shoving.

(aside: 2.93bb feels too high so there's a chance I made a math mistake but I don't see one, someone want to check it for me?)

Don't forget that when we flat we dont close the action and jamming can fold out some hands that might elect to squeeze here...

That's a valid point, I ignored it partially because there's a similar (but smaller) effect from overcalls of our shove. But either way, a difference of 1.93bb (using Steve Williams' 1bb profit from shoving) is enormous, vs the opponent I described there's no way that shoving is best. And while that's the best case scenario, if the raiser is some clueless lag who's going to cbet 100%, then it's not that bad an approximation and I'd be pretty confident saying that call>shove.

Interesting math. I would say it also depends on OP:s image. If u have made some calls earlier at high blinds, then I'd say the chance that someone squeezes is very high. If this is the first time you flat, then that might look very strong to the other players (AA, KK) and then maybe as stevepa and others suggest calling might be a good option.

Normally I'd say we push here without much of a thought.

I'd like to inform you though that smokingjoep is a winning MTT player with an ABI at $175 while OP according to OPR is a non profitable player with an ABI of $28 so it could be a good idea to start to sort out which players are good and which are not.

As played, we have to fold when two players are already all in. smokingjoep must be worried that OP has a hand (unless u have been flat calling a lot) and so we can be 100% sure that he has a hand and it's also possible that the squeezer also has picked up something that crushes your marginal hand.

If you flat, there will be a squeeze a significant amount of the time. It is actually fairly close whether to call if the initial raiser folds, but an easy fold with 2 players allin. There will also be overcalls to the small raise, particularly from the BB, which you don't particularly mind.

Can't see how flat calling can be way better than pushing. I think pushing is probably best, but I am not sure. In the BB, I think flat calling with this hand is definately best. Also, as has been pointed out, this is a perfect restealing size, and flat calling is better deeper or a little shallower.

Think the main advantage to flat calling is you get to see whether you get a good flop before putting the rest of the money in. This is the approach you would often take in a PLO tournament.

I'm not saying call is best, I would ~always shove here. Just pointing out that saying "call is horrible" is pretty lol and there are non-crazy conditions where calling is best

No, I am not saying calling is the most cEV line. I am saying we not only have to consider what has the highest expectancy, but also how we are approaching playing a 6M stack, in terms of maintaining our FE and staying ahead (not letting our stack drop below FE). If we call and have to give up, we don’t have FE anymore, meaning we have to pass up on what would have been +EV re stealing if we had FE (since a lot of the value in re stealing comes from the amount of FE). Firstly, this limits our play, and gives us less ways to pick up chips. Secondly, re stealing profitably enables us to maintain a large stack, which also gives us much more options in our play, like stealing blinds, c-betting and giving up without being crippled or even having lost FE, and just being able to apply pressure in many other situations.
We might not be way ahead, but certainly ahead if he is active.
I don’t see how spotting an easy re steal shove without going into math is magic.
Again, I am not saying shoving is –EV, I think its clearly +EV, and by a big enough margin to do it. My only point is that I am not arguing with someone who has some math that shows that calling might have a higher expectancy (I don’t have an opinion on that, I don’t know whether or not that is true, and I don’t know how we can calculate it with certainty). My point is that shoving +EV, and it has all the other benefits of maintaining FE and a large stack, which allows us to re steal profitably in later hands, and have more options in later play.
I also agree that KQs is a very good hand to call with in position a little deeper (shorter I prefer to shove it even without FE). But with a 6M stack, with a perfect re steal stack, I think it’s a no-brainer.

When I say “call is horrible” I am saying it because shoving is so much better, not because calling in itself is necessarily horrible. But its horrible when we clearly have a better option. If we have two options, 1 and 2, and option 1 is decent, while option 2 is good, then I`d say its pretty horrible to choose option 1.
You can lol as much as you want.

This is rather off topic but I somehow got to thinking about this graphs and am confused about something. I (think) I understand how these equity graphs work, but the far-right end doesn't make sense. How can 5% of all flops give you less than 5% equity against such a broad range as [15%]? The line even touches down at 0% equity.

Maybe I'm being dumb but I can't come up with any flops where KQs has even as low as 20% equity against that range. What am I doing wrong?

Good question, I have no idea. One of the guys from propokertools posts here a bit (or at least he does in ssplo) maybe someone can pm him a link to this thread?