blonde poker forum

Been finding myself in the following sort of situation quite a bit recently and think i'm playing badly

basic situation, i'm mid position, have 9-14 BBs left (close to average as i tend to play turbo games), and get dealt a hand 55-99 where it gets folded to me

i'm finding myself saying "its been folded to you, half the table is gone, just got to get thru 2-4 + blinds and i'm increasing my stack by XX%"

so i obviously jam, and find myself running into hands that are 2 x overs (or the more comical 3 callers all holding AX and the case A is the door card), lose the flip, get mardy with poker, and wish i played higher where "they respect a raise"

but back to the question:

medium pairs, late in MTT, mid table position, what do you do?

Mick

r/f, r/c or jam. Depends on oppo. If they peel lots, jam. If they're nitty mcnitterson - r/f, if they're overly aggro - r/c.

with 15+ BB i can see a r/f

with 20+BB i can see a r/c

but with <14BB surely thats not possible or am i missing something?


(edit as i had r/f and r/c wrong way round)

Happy to raise fold out of 15 bb prob the lowest.
Really player dependent tbh, however with no info pretty much gonna snap with 55+ if we're openin from mp or later.

Happy to raise/fold out of 15bb, but absolutely not with mid-sized pairs, really bad  hands to do it with. 14-16bb say from HJ+1 i'd jam 55+ happily. UTG+2 you can jam say 88+ and just fold the rest. Obviously you can adjust based on how wide people are calling, but I wouldnt just min-open 55 from HJ+1 out of 16bb in the kind of games these sound like, you're just going to get peeled in a few spots and rarely win the hand.

Note: It's very late/early, that may or may not have made any sense.

I agree this is a difficult spot. Given we have on 14BB in some spots I don't like the Raise/fold at all, we are just going to have to put too muc in the pot and I would say that we are burning equity by raise/folding. With a hand like 99 I don't mind the min raise/call option. I think you will get a lot of smaller pairs jam on you as well as hands we are flipping with and the odd Ax that we are looking really good against. With 55 or 66 I think I like just shoving it in better, especially if there are antes to collect (which actually makes a massive difference). We might get hands like 89s to fold that might have tried to jam on us if we min raised due to percieved fold equity.

A lot depends on your opponenbts as well, if I have like 77 or 88 against an opponent I know will 3-bet shove light I will be more than happy to min and get it in against their range.

I have heard it is always profitable to shove pairs from the button or cut off if you are adding more than 15% to your stack by doing so, but I suppose this is sort of stating the obvious.