blonde poker forum

This one has irritated me for a few days.

There are 5 left, I have 3200 in the cut off, SB has 3150, BB has 1400 and is a bad fish.  The others have 1050 and 400, I think the 400 was UTG but can't be sure.  Blinds are 100/200 and I don't think antes had started.  next level is probably 100/200(25), followed by 200/400(25).  Payments are 1950 1st and 1300 for second .

I raised last hand from the button with my fellow big stack in the BB and took it uncontested.

I get AK off, and raise to 600.  SB is a thinking player and is the best player in opposition he reraises all in.  I have seen him do this before with a wide range in situations like this.

Now the question is what was best here, bet hoping to induce a push from my oppo or just shove?  I know I would autoshove any of the smaller stacks than my own.

I lost obviously, but that shouldn't alter the decision.

Raise to 500 and call any shove is completely standard here.

heed your own words?

Super standard infact.

Blatant "I play $500 STTs" brag thread imo...

Id definitely make it less and call it off, assuming making it less would widen his shoving range. I think from an ICM point of view, if this paid the top 3 it would be a closer decision, I mean i never fold anyway but thats why i dont play sngs but I could see logic for making it like 450 and folding to big stack if it paid top 3- but as I said its not something I would ever do.

I think it isn't a question of if I should call, I was always going to.  My thinking is that it may well have been better ICM wise just picking up 300 chips than having a 60/40(I am guessing I am something like that vs his range) for 3000 more chips, yet a 40% chance of getting nothing. 

I hadn't done the maths, but was thinking pushing could well be best.  I have done the maths now, and think I need to be 68% to make raise calling better.

As it was he shoved over the top with KJ off, and I slated him at the time.  But thinking after, my calling range here should really be a very small proportion of my raising range that his move is fine, and my move is pretty suspect.  But if you make an "error" it is nice to know you would be in good company.

I think it is probably a function of the very uneven stacks.  The raise call would probably be much better if we were all even in stacks.  I had a very similar situation in a multi not long ago (7 left and me and my fellow big stack each had more than 3x more than the 3rd place when we clashed, and thought I ought to learn to avoid these big clashes then)

FWIW I ran with 3125/3075/1400/1000/400 as the total should have been 9000.

when you have to make the decision whether to shove or to raise to induce you are opening the pot so have no idea of sb's range so how are you making a decision assuming you'll be 60/40?

Are you taking into account that is overlay in the pot if you raise/fold? Also the added advantages of winning this showdown are massive, as you will be chipleader on the bubble.

Payments are 1950 1st and 1300 for second. So it isn't the bubble,

and surely his bet has made no difference to whether I am 60/40 vs his reraising range or not?  I have no more information on his reraising range, all I know now is that he has reraised?

no but you're asking if you're better shoving to pick up 300 or raise/calling and taking a 60/40


at the time when you have to make that decision you can't possibly assign him a range so can't know it would be a 60/40 so can't use this as a factor in your decision making

This is a level?

I thought so when I first read the op, then I thought you might be serious, now I'm not sure

It is an interesting hand because I induced him to get all his chips in way behind, but I think he played it well and think I may have played it badly.  It involves a lot of counterintuitive logic.  I didn't think I did anything wrong at the time, it was only after when I thought it through that I thought what appeared a simple hand on the surface was really quite complex when you really thought about it.

His range isn't really an issue for two reasons.  1) I have played upwards of 500 games vs him, so can have a decent guess at his reraising range and 2) I would have to be 68% vs his range to make my move right. 

But despite all that, saying I cant have a guess at anybodies reraising range before he does it is just plain wrong.

Whats your h2h record over him ?

I really doubt you need to 68% fave here.

If you call and win: Your equity= 47.7% of the prize pool

Call and lose: You equity = .03%

Fold = 18.7%.

If my maths are right you can get it in as 40/60 dog and it will still be a good call.

I ran it through an ICM calculator and on a 60/40 split.  If I just push and don't get called I am 35.48 afterwards.  If I win vs big stack I am 52.33.  If I lose I am as near zero as makes no difference.  .68 x 52.33 is roughly 35.48.

My choice here is either push or raise call and that was what I did the percents on.  I never raise/fold. 

he is slightly ahead long run.  My roi is 2% with him at the table and his is 4% over 350 games, but don't really see that as important.  And there are probably quite a few games missing, so it isn't conclusive.  As I said earlier I think he is best at the table.  If there were 5 others as good as him at the table I wouldn't have sat down!

Ah ok yeah raise/folding isn't an option i get it now.

Though running it on never getting called isn't realistic as you will get called a certain % of the time.

He's weighing up raise-call line vs shove pre line

ofc, running it without anybody calling isn't realistic, but is a lot easier!    I think it probably cancels out abit.  As I am going to be at least 50% vs a typical calling range by any of the stacks after me?

This assumes villain's 3 bet range is 100%?

Surely the result sometimes when we raise is that villain folds, we win blinds, or go up against 1,400 BB player.


Also, as Longy points out, you winning only the blinds only is not the only possible result from a push. If villain has QQ,KK,AA he is going to snap us. Other factors (such as big blind calling) will help pull the number the other way.


There will be a certain amount of cancelling out with the big blind between the two lines.

I think you wil be crushed by villain in the small blind though if he calls your shove. You'll be lucky to have 40%. (and even if we were 50% vs his calling of your shove, that would mean we could ignore cEV, but not $EV.)

this is the point I've been trying to make. badly it would seem. if we're saying that his rr range gives him 40% equity vs AKo then we're assuming he doesn't always rr

Probably more complex than I first thought.  But I think if he has AA, KK and QQ there is no difference in the result.  I raise/call and am in a world of hurt or I push and am in a world of hurt :(.  

It will signifacantly reduce your 35.48% pp figure that you were using as the result you'd get from a pre flop push.

unless sngwiz has changed since I last used it isn't it going to ask you wtf you're doing shoving 16x and suggest you look at another way of playing it?

not used it for at least 6 months, sure it used to hate anything over 10x

we're comparing and contrasting the shove versus the raise call line.
 
wiz won't be much help with the merits of the raise call line. OP is looking to do that calculation for himself.

Wiz will give you a nice number for the shove line, but if we're manually doing the other line and looking to simplify things by as far as the shorter stacks are concerned then we should enter their calling ranges as 0%. Then once we have our raise call line number (similarly calculated with shorties never calling, as it would be a bitch to do otherwise) we can compare the two fairly.

Obv the shorties will be playing sometimes, quite a lot of the time even, but it's ok to assume the line we choose won't affect their ranges, and so any positive affect will affect both lines the same.

badly worded that, but I can't edit it the now

to clarify, the 38% figure I'm assuming was OP's result for his prize pool equity once he'd won just the blinds, rather than a wiz figure for prize pool equity from the shove.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii epic Gatso fail!

Of course he can assiign a range to what he thinks the SB would reshove with.

for gatso, ICM can still be relevant with stacks of over 10 bigs, it's just that other options may be more profitable.

Wiz will tell you a shove is likely to be bad with pkt 4's Utg at 15/30 and that's perfectly valid analysis should we be considering such a thing for some reason. The 10 big blind thing just recognizes that other tactics are available rather than just push and fold, and that they should be considered.

Similarly in this hand wiz's analysis of a shove will be perfectly valid. It just won't be able to analyze the raise call line in the same way so unless we do a whole tonne of math manually on the raise call line, a direct comparisom would be difficult. (hence above recommendation to use wiz and put all but big stacks calling ranges as zero)

skolsuper's idea is good too, probably better because then we can all have some lunch. Only problem with it is doesn't take into account the possibility of other stack peeling and leading, or taking similar lines that don't involve either shoving or folding.
 

lol. you sure have understood a word in this thread

on reflection, skol's way is defo best way to tackle this problem, sb peeling will happen rarely so fk it.

Not at home just now either, does someone want to run it? I'd be very surprised if AKo isn't a raise call here but am interested in what wouldn't be.

I know, not sure I've said otherwise. just that I thought I remembered wiz not liking it but as I say it's been a while since I used it

probs just thinking of situations at early levels

on a seperate issue, if we are going to raise call here with premiums then do we need to be 2.5x ing rather than 3x ing.

With the whole range balancing thing. We don't want to telegraph our hand so do we need to to raise here with some raise fold hands too (versus sb reraise we fold, obv we call bb reraise)

That doesn't seem to be a problem in OPs case. He's either hidden his hand strength well or is up against a reg with leaks. It's more the saving 100 chips when we don't have AKo.

Spots where we always 3x when we want a call and always shove when we don't will land us in trouble eventually.

BRAGGGGGG

If you're playing this guy often, and you shoved AK here and it went to showdown, you are going to be getting 3bet a helluva lot when you open raise.

Understood most of it.
Dont want to understand anymore.
Find it pretty boring.

Youve failed again since i last looked though :)

I tend to vary my raises quite a lot.  Though I do that far more in multis. 

I think the hand before was 525 or 550.  There was some method in my madness here.  The BB was so fishy I thought he was a likely caller of 500, so upped it a bit as I was likely to shove any flop.  That way he pays more to fish and if he hits and calls I am less far out with my odds on trying to hit the turn and river with my 6 outs.  I also figured 600 may discourage SB from shoving, but that was obviously an epic fail.

Of course that is another way to balance but I would imagine opening to 2.5x is more profitable long term strat.

Ok, have run the Wiz as per skolsuper's good suggestion to evaluate the raise call line simply by adjusting the small blinds call%.

The Wiz hand first of all for the shove. It assumes a 65:35 payout as per the 6-max's on Pokerstars.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/550ak01.jpg)

This graph below tells us all we need to know. We can see raise call is only more profitable if he's shoving over us quite wide. Between 30% and 60%. Even then it's pretty close.

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/550ak02.jpg)

It's a pretty flat graph though, so it's fair to say that either move is as good as each other.

Given there's fek all difference in EV from the ICM, I'd look to other factors, and decision would largely be based on how good SB is. (good reg = raise call, random, fish or nitty reg = shove because of greater chip utility)






Out of interest some more graphs with the same hand with different payout structures

Winner take all

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/550ak04.jpg)

Standard sitngo 50:30:20

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/550ak05.jpg)

Full Tilt 45 man

(http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/tigmong/550ak03.jpg)

I might have got those last two mixed up, they're pretty much the same shape though.


So interesting results, with all those shorties around, it appears that the open shove is definately the line to take in a standard sitngo and a 45 man, it's not even close.

In game I probably do shove in the 45 man comp (half because 5th is such a ridic tiliting position to finish in a 38/25/16/10/6/5 payout structure) but I am surprised at how black and white things are in that it definately looks like the correct move.

Note : This is only because of the short stacks, dynamic is radically different if they're not there; it becomes black and white that raise call is the line.

I'm interested to know how many of these $550 stts our hero actually plays.

If it's not many then is all the SNGwiz stuff really of any use?

SNGwiz numbers are great for the long term game but if we only play 20 games a week isn't it largely irrelevant.

SNGwiz tells us our profitability over a range of hands but this profitability is based on a long term forcast of facing the same situation many times over. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, overall if we have the range corrcet we know that eventually if we keep playing we will win.

If this is an isolated hand I don't see how opponent's range is anywhere near as significant against our specific holding which is pretty much the nuts.

We've got a monster, we either raise to induce or just shove.

Obviously if our hero plays thousands of these then SNGwiz tells it as it is so we should always go with what it says.

It is the default edge that sngwiz has for various situations. For example sometimes it has -edge allowed when you are pushing utg with a 4bb or 5bb stack as taking a -ev spot is correct due to the effect of the blinds hitting you next hand.

In this situation it has a high edge as we are near chip leader and will get a lot of +ev spots down the line. Therefore taking very marginal spots is not necessarily a good thing.

Fuddie duddy!

What I meant was it tells us our profitability of shoving our specific hand over our opponents range of hands. We have to give wiz a range for oppo so that it can tell us what other hands we can profitably shove with.

How can we assign our opponent a range if we have nothing on him? Also what's the point if we aren't going to play him again?

This is why I say that we need to know how often our hero plays these games. If he's a reg then ICM is very relevant but if it's a one off it really doesn't matter and I think we should consider the hand very differently. It's basically the same as any other AK hand. Raise and look to get it in or shove if we don't want to risk playing a flop with A high.

 rotflmfao WP sir!!

I 100% accept that ICM is brilliant and I've used it myself to study p/f situations.

Do you disagree that it's only of relevance as a long term tool though?

Surely we need to play at least  5 million squillion billion hands before we know we've got it right?

What's the best thing to do in the long term will almost always also be the best thing to do in the short term in so far as maximising our equity goes. In fact there is no long and short term, there are only individual decisions to be made.

ICM can be misapplied, overapplied, over relied on, seen as my first, my last, my everything at the expense of some good common sense. More on that somewhere else.

When applied properly though, it's useful even if you just play one sitngo every 5 million billion squillion years.

Amen

In fact, if by short termism you mean reducing variance, ICM could be seen as being even more important.

Obv in this hand the raise call line will be of higher variance than the shove line. We see with the ICM evaluation that each desicion is pretty identical as far as their EVs go, so choosing the best short term "low variance" line would be a no brainer.

If we opt to make another desicion heavily factoring a short term considerations such as reducing variance, ICM will help you see how much you are giving up by making a "second best" desicion and you can go from there to evaluate whether you think that's acceptable or not.

Some so called "low variance" desicions will give up so much that they not only give up EV, but also reduce our chances of cashing in the tournament thereby increasing our variance! (dem blinds gobble gobble dem blinds) An example would be passing up a big edge for a possible double up.

I'm interested to know how many of these $550 stts our hero actually plays.

Not many, they barely ever start on betfair.  I don't even play that many STTs anymore.  But this thread has confirmed what I thought originally.  ie I probably played it bad, ad he played it well.  Well when I say originally I meant at the start of the thread.  Originally in the hand was like Wtf and wasn't nearly as complimentary about his play.

And I probably play upwards of 10 tournies(mainly multis) each time I sit down, and any one of them could end up with a situation like this, and I'll have a better idea what to do next time.  And maybe next time it will be late in a GUKPT or similar, and it may be even more important to get it right.