blonde poker forum

I am a bit unhappy with a hand I played yesterday in a tournament. Would like some opinions on it. The situation is that it is a £20 buy in with what can only be called a fairly low standard. When this hand comes up I have manged to be come short stacked with 3600 Chips, the blinds are 100/200 and about to go up to 150/300 in the next 5 minutes. In early position (9 handed) I pick up AQos. I make a raise to 800. A it folds to the cutoff who has been pretty active up to now. He reraises to 2000. He has only been at the table for a short amount of time and he has raised more pots than most and seems to be a decent player. This is also the first time he has 3-bet. He looks confident making the reraise and I really do honestly feel like he has a strong hand.

What play would you make?

Given he is active I would get it in but against a lot of live players you are crushed here as their 3betting ranges are so tight.

Also I would open to 500, 600 at most. The fact you are considering passing here, you are burning 200/300 chips when the decision would effectively be the same, also it allows you more room post flop if you get flatted.

once you have raised to 800 you cant fold - you have 1/4 of your stack in the middle.

YOu simply cant flat his re raise here

And when you shove - he isnt passing (providing he understands poker and isnt a full on donkey)

So, this goes back to the usual point - before you act have a plan - knowing you cant raise fold - then you could either limp and under rep and play tricky or fold pre.

I think you stack is too low to fold the hand - so i would be raising and going with my hand I think in this spot (assuming the ave is something like 8-9k atm) - but nothing wrong with the limp either

There is 1 other point to pick up here - you should be raising 3x - not 4x! - There is an arguement to say that you could fold here if u just make it 600 leaving 3k back - but that would be tight

i think i would pass given that his re-raise is so small though obviously commiting him to call if you shove. at this level buy-in a player will re-raise larger the vast majority of the time.

however, your opening raise is far too large. as longy says, this is just burning chips.

i would open to 500-550 and then pass to the reraise. if the player is young, the reraise is larger and you have good reason to be suspicious of him, i would shove

Yes, the raise is too big (at that stage it should be 3xBB I suppose). I did push, he did have me crushed with QQ (I won but that is not the point). I think this mistake was caused by the fact I have spent so long playing nothing but online poker. Doing the maths is somuch easier when you can see all the figures on the screen. A bit more live poker is going to be the order of the day between now and the end of the year.

open, jam, get there.