blonde poker forum

This is probably a straightforward one, but always good to get the feedback.

Seven of about 53 remain in a £30 Saturday night comp at a local cardroom. Five paid (prizes £900-£100). No savers.

Blinds are 2,500/5,000/400. Average is about 85k. I have 125k and am second in chips. Chip leader has 140k. There's a guy on about 40k and the rest are about average.

I am in the big blind. Fold, fold, chip leader folds, fold. Button (has played a couple of hands but has taken chips without contest so far) has 115ish makes it 12k to go.

Small blind has limp-folded twice already in this final table. I am not concerned when he flats from 70k.

I look down at  2d 2c

Seems to me I have a few options:

a) Fold - it's not a strong hand, I can pick a better spot

b) Call - it's 7k more and I can either flop a deuce or get out of dodge

c) Raise to 30k and fold to a shove - any less is likely to get a call from the initial raiser or the station behind. We get the chance to rep a big hand and, given the tourney situation, we might get credit and make bigger hands fold

d) Jam - Similar logic but takes away all the calling options from 66-33 AJ-Ax, etc. We pick up 12k+12k+5k+2.8k=31.8k quite often.

I'm certain there's a "correct" answer, here. Which one is it?

I'd call for 7k more not trusting the small blind to fold enough, he presumably has some sort of hand to call oop and ramping up the variance with deuces doesn't seem like much fun.

I should just add I've not played with either of these two chaps before the final table.

If anyone wants to proffer ranges of hands I should do each of the options with, that would be extremely interesting to me.


And just straight "no set no bet", yes?

call and mine a set

Looks like a reasonable  spot to ship it in and abuse the bubble.

But maybe calling is better.

B better than A. C would be horrific.

Shove slightly better than call imo, both miles better than fold and miles better than C.

jam if sb is decently donk-like

3b and fold to a shove achieves nothing whatsoever

I did shove. I really couldn't make my mind up between shoving and calling (to the point that I was chastising myself internally before acting about why I didn't know what to do). I decided pressuring the opposition in the tournament situation was the better option and so I pressed the throttle.

The raiser dwelled, tossed and turned before deciding to call. SB folded.

I lost to  8c 8s and was out shortly afterwards in seventh. Having got to the final as chip leader and having then waited 45 minutes for a taxi to get home at 4am, I was left wondering whether I made a big mistake.

Seems I didn't, although calling might have been slightly better.

Thanks for the feedback, chaps.

If he's tank calling 88, you can be sure you're printing $ by shoving, assuming he isn't open joke tight (just think how often he folds if 88 is a tank call). Assess the amount he's opening the btn with (usually a high percentage, some people 100%), then use that to decide whether to call or shove (assuming sb is a weak player and never strong which you said is the case).