Sunday 500. TT awkward spot vs Strong opening range.

[action man]

What does villain being a "bad reg" mean? He plays too loose? Too tight? Raises too loose and shoves too tight?

If we raise utg 9-handed and everyone else only plays JJ+ AK (3.5% range), they will find one of those hands between them upwards of 25% of the time, before taking into account any card-removal effects. Obviously most people can't be trusted to fold TT and there are plenty of eggs around who still peel all sorts, making a steal from utg off 20bbs an absolutely terrible idea imo. Certainly I'd say including 55-77 and maybe even 88 is burning money, but for this particular villain or the population of Sunday 500 players they might all be making loose opens and it's a good spot to be 3b bluffing people, I don't know.

Wrt the 4bet, it's not that hard to come up with a range, you can only shove the hands you open and obviously we're going broke with premiums so there's not that big a range of things it can be. What would you be shoving with if you opened utg and got 3bet by the cutoff, in a vacuum?

i can't answer this question because the range would vary quite a lot from player to player. Id jam as wide as 77+ QK+ vs some players in some spots and as tight as JJ+ AK in others

[SuuPRlim]

TT seems like the nut-low hand to 3b/fold in a spot where it seems pretty unlikely we'll be peeled. Surely we're way better picking a hand with ANY sort of blocker to his percieved 4b/jam range KJ seems like a way way more ideal hand than TT.

[mondatoo]

making a steal from utg off 20bbs an absolutely terrible idea imo.

You think this is bad in general ? I think it's a decent spot to do so if we have a nitty image with hands like 98ss Axs Q10os etc, obv stacks/villains dependant.

[youthnkzR]

I agree that gameflop would be pretty important.

I feel like alot of you have jumped on the 3b/call wagon without actually considering his 4b jam range.

I think his opening range is gona be like 88+ ATs+ AQo+ KQs (hes opened UTG off 20bigs, gota be pretty strong right, player dependant obv this might be a little tighter/wider than some but looks like a fair range)

I think his 4b jamming range is gona be TT+ AK, stove how well TT does vs that range.

I personally think 3b/c is the worst option. I understand that some people don't think we should ever 3b/f value hands, I used to think the same but there are definitely situations you can do it now. This being one of them, when you actually think about his ranges and how we do against them. I think if your contemplating 3b/calling 88-99 here your just mental. Im not happy about 3b/calling JJ but I prob just about do it.

please tell me your baiting with this range. also saying 3b call is a losing play, are you serious?

depending on our image, this is such an easy 3 bet to 16255 / putting the rest of our betting disks in if he decides he wants us to.

[skolsuper]

I agree that gameflop would be pretty important.

I feel like alot of you have jumped on the 3b/call wagon without actually considering his 4b jam range.

I think his opening range is gona be like 88+ ATs+ AQo+ KQs (hes opened UTG off 20bigs, gota be pretty strong right, player dependant obv this might be a little tighter/wider than some but looks like a fair range)

I think his 4b jamming range is gona be TT+ AK, stove how well TT does vs that range.

I personally think 3b/c is the worst option. I understand that some people don't think we should ever 3b/f value hands, I used to think the same but there are definitely situations you can do it now. This being one of them, when you actually think about his ranges and how we do against them. I think if your contemplating 3b/calling 88-99 here your just mental. Im not happy about 3b/calling JJ but I prob just about do it.

please tell me your baiting with this range. also saying 3b call is a losing play, are you serious?

depending on our image, this is such an easy 3 bet to 16255 / putting the rest of our betting disks in if he decides he wants us to.

Why?

TT seems like the nut-low hand to 3b/fold in a spot where it seems pretty unlikely we'll be peeled. Surely we're way better picking a hand with ANY sort of blocker to his percieved 4b/jam range KJ seems like a way way more ideal hand than TT.

Agree, any argument to 3b/f TT is an equally good argument to 3b/f 72o. Doesn't make it wrong though.

[youthnkzR]

I agree that gameflop would be pretty important.

I feel like alot of you have jumped on the 3b/call wagon without actually considering his 4b jam range.

I think his opening range is gona be like 88+ ATs+ AQo+ KQs (hes opened UTG off 20bigs, gota be pretty strong right, player dependant obv this might be a little tighter/wider than some but looks like a fair range)

I think his 4b jamming range is gona be TT+ AK, stove how well TT does vs that range.

I personally think 3b/c is the worst option. I understand that some people don't think we should ever 3b/f value hands, I used to think the same but there are definitely situations you can do it now. This being one of them, when you actually think about his ranges and how we do against them. I think if your contemplating 3b/calling 88-99 here your just mental. Im not happy about 3b/calling JJ but I prob just about do it.

please tell me your baiting with this range. also saying 3b call is a losing play, are you serious?

depending on our image, this is such an easy 3 bet to 16255 / putting the rest of our betting disks in if he decides he wants us to.

Why?

The range suggested is like the top part of his range lol

[Doobs]

if you can't 3bet call this profitably then you simply arent 3betting enough. last i'll say on the thread.

So you think villain's 4b shove range is..?

It really depends on game flow,  but it would be impossible to come up with a realistic range that was less favourable to our argument than the TT+ and AK that you presented.  I'm not sure I 100% understand what this means, but I can assure you I'm not just arguing for the sake of it, trigg has played 3700 tournaments on stars this year and I would quite like to know what he thinks the average reg's opening and shoving ranges here are, but if he doesn't want to talk about it I can't make him

Some players would be happy to 4 bet shove with 88+ and AQ+, but I think Trigg is saying if you 3 bet people enough they can spew off with all kinds of stuff.  22 and 98s wouldn't be impossible with enough history or enough 3 bets in this game, or if they think you are the type who 3 bet folds too much.  89s and certainly 22 won't be in the villain's opening range to shove with. Villain is opening UTG off 20bbs, i.e. he's putting in 10% of his stack with 8 people left to act, this is not a spot where opening light is a good idea. I agree with fett that something like 13,500 might induce villain to shove 80-100% of his opening range, meaning we get it in 50-52% equity with the dead money from the blinds and antes and maybe a little fold equity. This however would make it a bad spot to bluff in a vacuum (although the occasional bluff might be part of an overall strategy, again I don't think you need to be that balanced in mtts) so this would make trigg's "not 3betting enough" idea even worse as all extra 3bets would be bad bluffs.

By contrast you see some others folding AK and JJ. I agree this is a possibility.

I don't recognise the opponent here FWIW.

The reality is that 88 is a less likely shove than TT and JJ and AK are less likely folds,  and 3 bet calling can be profitable for Trigg, but unprofitable for someone else, but simple ranges don't capture this.

Probably should construct something beyond stove to allow for this, but would struggle to do so on my phone.  Does the thing pleno was spamming go beyond stove here.  

Happy to 3 bet call here, but don't think alternatives are that terrible either.

Have annotated your post as I had 2 separate points I wanted to reply to. 3rd and more general point, mainly aimed at George and Trigg, is that yeah 3b/f with TT seems terrible and goes completely against our autopilot rules, but you shouldn't be on autopilot when analysing hands after a session and actually breaking down the numbers it looks to me like it is better than 3b/c, happy to be proved wrong btw just nobody is suggesting real numbers to do that. Ideally the aim is to tweak our autopilot and maybe eventually play these spots a little better. I hear a lot of people complain that nits somehow get the lot despite not ever doing anything special, and I think this sort of thing is where the difference lies, possibly the fact that stato is prepared to think a little deeper in spots like this is why he's up over $100k on stars this year.

3 bet fold is only better than 3 bet call because of the range you have chosen.  Assuming he always calls with TT+ and always folds 99 down is as favourable as you can assume.  I assume you have to include AK in any reasonable range, so that is a given.

But if we add just 99 and suited AQ, then 3 bet calling now becomes much better than 3 bet folding, and the difference is more pronounced than in the TT+/AK scenario.

I think this is just a general weakness in people picking ranges and just stoving them.  The reality isn't that he always calls JJ and always lays down 99, what happens in practice is that you would get a distribution.  The distribution depends on the opponents, but also on the number of tables they have/history/their tiltedness/your 3 best today and sometime they just have enough of your pereceived aggression. 

I have no idea on the real numbers, and never will, but guess if JJ/AK shove 85% of the time, then it is reasonable to assume 99 and AQ suited shove 50% of the time, AJ suited 20% of the time and so on.  Whilst people rarely shove 22-55 and suited connectors, it is absolutely clear to me that they do it some of the time.  I have done this kind of thing myself, faced it myself and have seen plenty of posts/tourney reports when similar has happened.  Maybe this just happens 5% of the time they have this kind of hand, but it definitely does.

I was just messing around with a spreadsheet, and put in these figures for shoving percentages:

55   66   77   88   99   TT   JJ   QQ   KK   AA
5%   10%   20%   30%   50%   70%   85%   95%   100%   100%

Aks   Ako   Aqs   Aqo   Ajs   Ajo   Ats   Ato   A9s    KQs
90%   85%   50%   30%   20%   10%   10%   5%   5%   15%

I have assumed everything else is either open folded or raise folded.  I think I could probably add a bit more for general spew/balancing with suited connectors etc, but don't think I need to.  I didn't doctor these numbers after looking at the results, it was more a long the lines of if a group of poker pros shoved JJ 85% of the time, how often would they shove AK, 88 etc.  [Hmm hope that table is clear enough!]
                     
TT is 43.4% vs that range, and it is an easy call once you 3 bet (It works out a bit lower than  AQ+, AQs+, 99+ on stove so feels in the right territory too).  You can take out 66 down and AT down without changing the result much, so it isn't that sensitive either.  I'd struggle to get down to 35% without producing a distribution that looked odd.

The thing you refer to as autopilot can be a different thing for different people.  The autopilot of someone with tons of experience and a mathematical background, isn't the same autopilot as someone who just picked up the game and doesn't want to fold two tens.

I would just add that the reason stato is 100k up this year isn't really because he spends time studying this, it is because he binked $58k on Sunday.  If I was a gambling man, I'd have a punt that sucking out with TT about 50 out on Sunday helped too!  I am not saying he is terrible btw, he is obviously very good.  I think his ROI on stars was around 50% before Sunday over a lot of tournaments.  That puts him right amongst the very best.
 

[stato_1]

Lol yes Sunday might have had something to do with it. I folded here though, so no suckout. There were fkn loads of em later on tho

[the rage]

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the various opposing views, i think that it's been a really informative and helpful thread. When some of the experienced tournament players beg to differ in spots like these it just shows what a difficult game poker is.
 Anyway, results speak much louder than words. So, a massive Well Played from me to Stato.

[SuuPRlim]

TT seems like the nut-low hand to 3b/fold in a spot where it seems pretty unlikely we'll be peeled. Surely we're way better picking a hand with ANY sort of blocker to his percieved 4b/jam range KJ seems like a way way more ideal hand than TT.

Agree, any argument to 3b/f TT is an equally good argument to 3b/f 72o. Doesn't make it wrong though.

so in a spot where its close (as in ATC dont have a profitable 3b/fold, a situation which arises when there is a decent gulf between the combos he is opening and the combos he is peeling assuming minimal if any percieved range that peels? Im assuming this wiuld have to be the case here for 3b/fold to be better than any other option??)

How do you decide between 3b/call and fold in game? Is there a 'stnd' 4bet jam range for players here?

The reason i think 3b/f TT is really shaky here is that folding to his 4b jam has the potential to be a huge mistake, if for e.g. he is jamming 99 and we fol. this seems like it would be way less of a problem with other hands. or is it just a case of we shouldnt worry about the equity ofhands in our 3b fold range because...we're folding them???

[skolsuper]

3 bet fold is only better than 3 bet call because of the range you have chosen.  Assuming he always calls with TT+ and always folds 99 down is as favourable as you can assume.  I assume you have to include AK in any reasonable range, so that is a given.

But if we add just 99 and suited AQ, then 3 bet calling now becomes much better than 3 bet folding, and the difference is more pronounced than in the TT+/AK scenario.

I think this is just a general weakness in people picking ranges and just stoving them.  The reality isn't that he always calls JJ and always lays down 99, what happens in practice is that you would get a distribution.  The distribution depends on the opponents, but also on the number of tables they have/history/their tiltedness/your 3 best today and sometime they just have enough of your pereceived aggression.  

I have no idea on the real numbers, and never will, but guess if JJ/AK shove 85% of the time, then it is reasonable to assume 99 and AQ suited shove 50% of the time, AJ suited 20% of the time and so on.  Whilst people rarely shove 22-55 and suited connectors, it is absolutely clear to me that they do it some of the time.  I have done this kind of thing myself, faced it myself and have seen plenty of posts/tourney reports when similar has happened.  Maybe this just happens 5% of the time they have this kind of hand, but it definitely does.

I was just messing around with a spreadsheet, and put in these figures for shoving percentages:

55   66   77   88   99   TT   JJ   QQ   KK   AA
5%   10%   20%   30%   50%   70%   85%   95%   100%   100%

Aks   Ako   Aqs   Aqo   Ajs   Ajo   Ats   Ato   A9s    KQs
90%   85%   50%   30%   20%   10%   10%   5%   5%   15%

I have assumed everything else is either open folded or raise folded.  I think I could probably add a bit more for general spew/balancing with suited connectors etc, but don't think I need to.  I didn't doctor these numbers after looking at the results, it was more a long the lines of if a group of poker pros shoved JJ 85% of the time, how often would they shove AK, 88 etc.  [Hmm hope that table is clear enough!]
                     
TT is 43.4% vs that range, and it is an easy call once you 3 bet (It works out a bit lower than  AQ+, AQs+, 99+ on stove so feels in the right territory too).  You can take out 66 down and AT down without changing the result much, so it isn't that sensitive either.  I'd struggle to get down to 35% without producing a distribution that looked odd.

The thing you refer to as autopilot can be a different thing for different people.  The autopilot of someone with tons of experience and a mathematical background, isn't the same autopilot as someone who just picked up the game and doesn't want to fold two tens.

I would just add that the reason stato is 100k up this year isn't really because he spends time studying this, it is because he binked $58k on Sunday.  If I was a gambling man, I'd have a punt that sucking out with TT about 50 out on Sunday helped too!  I am not saying he is terrible btw, he is obviously very good.  I think his ROI on stars was around 50% before Sunday over a lot of tournaments.  That puts him right amongst the very best.
 

Very good post, finally someone putting a bit of effort into justifying a 3b/call. Only thing I would disagree on would be the exact numbers, AKs and QQ are 100%, and 55 I think is rarely opened and then v rarely shoved when it is opened, so would expect to see this way less than 5% of the time in total. On the whole though I agree that the more precise you are with someone's ranges, the higher the cost of being wrong and therefore the more often you have to be right. Maybe I'm wrong and the people whom a fold would be correct against aren't numerous enough to pay for the lost value from people whom a 3b/call would be correct against, tbh I hope I am because if people are still shoving 77 here because of "dynamic" then poker is still hilar easy.

[skolsuper]

TT seems like the nut-low hand to 3b/fold in a spot where it seems pretty unlikely we'll be peeled. Surely we're way better picking a hand with ANY sort of blocker to his percieved 4b/jam range KJ seems like a way way more ideal hand than TT.

Agree, any argument to 3b/f TT is an equally good argument to 3b/f 72o. Doesn't make it wrong though.

so in a spot where its close (as in ATC dont have a profitable 3b/fold, a situation which arises when there is a decent gulf between the combos he is opening and the combos he is peeling assuming minimal if any percieved range that peels? Im assuming this wiuld have to be the case here for 3b/fold to be better than any other option??)

How do you decide between 3b/call and fold in game? Is there a 'stnd' 4bet jam range for players here?

The reason i think 3b/f TT is really shaky here is that folding to his 4b jam has the potential to be a huge mistake, if for e.g. he is jamming 99 and we fol. this seems like it would be way less of a problem with other hands. or is it just a case of we shouldnt worry about the equity ofhands in our 3b fold range because...we're folding them???

I'm sorry I don't understand the question.

[hatthehole]

3 bet calling.  i very much doubt any1 is only piling TT+ AK+ this late on a sunday. we need 37.5% v his jamming range to call.   if hes jaming TT+ AK+ 100% and AQ 62% of the time or more we have 37.6% equity.

[dreenie]

if you can't 3bet call this profitably then you simply arent 3betting enough. last i'll say on the thread.

So you think villain's 4b shove range is..?

It really depends on game flow,  but it would be impossible to come up with a realistic range that was less favourable to our argument than the TT+ and AK that you presented.  I'm not sure I 100% understand what this means, but I can assure you I'm not just arguing for the sake of it, trigg has played 3700 tournaments on stars this year and I would quite like to know what he thinks the average reg's opening and shoving ranges here are, but if he doesn't want to talk about it I can't make him

Some players would be happy to 4 bet shove with 88+ and AQ+, but I think Trigg is saying if you 3 bet people enough they can spew off with all kinds of stuff.  22 and 98s wouldn't be impossible with enough history or enough 3 bets in this game, or if they think you are the type who 3 bet folds too much.  89s and certainly 22 won't be in the villain's opening range to shove with. Villain is opening UTG off 20bbs, i.e. he's putting in 10% of his stack with 8 people left to act, this is not a spot where opening light is a good idea. I agree with fett that something like 13,500 might induce villain to shove 80-100% of his opening range, meaning we get it in 50-52% equity with the dead money from the blinds and antes and maybe a little fold equity. This however would make it a bad spot to bluff in a vacuum (although the occasional bluff might be part of an overall strategy, again I don't think you need to be that balanced in mtts) so this would make trigg's "not 3betting enough" idea even worse as all extra 3bets would be bad bluffs.

By contrast you see some others folding AK and JJ. I agree this is a possibility.

I don't recognise the opponent here FWIW.

The reality is that 88 is a less likely shove than TT and JJ and AK are less likely folds,  and 3 bet calling can be profitable for Trigg, but unprofitable for someone else, but simple ranges don't capture this.

Probably should construct something beyond stove to allow for this, but would struggle to do so on my phone.  Does the thing pleno was spamming go beyond stove here.  

Happy to 3 bet call here, but don't think alternatives are that terrible either.

Have annotated your post as I had 2 separate points I wanted to reply to. 3rd and more general point, mainly aimed at George and Trigg, is that yeah 3b/f with TT seems terrible and goes completely against our autopilot rules, but you shouldn't be on autopilot when analysing hands after a session and actually breaking down the numbers it looks to me like it is better than 3b/c, happy to be proved wrong btw just nobody is suggesting real numbers to do that. Ideally the aim is to tweak our autopilot and maybe eventually play these spots a little better. I hear a lot of people complain that nits somehow get the lot despite not ever doing anything special, and I think this sort of thing is where the difference lies, possibly the fact that stato is prepared to think a little deeper in spots like this is why he's up over $100k on stars this year.

3 bet fold is only better than 3 bet call because of the range you have chosen.  Assuming he always calls with TT+ and always folds 99 down is as favourable as you can assume.  I assume you have to include AK in any reasonable range, so that is a given.

But if we add just 99 and suited AQ, then 3 bet calling now becomes much better than 3 bet folding, and the difference is more pronounced than in the TT+/AK scenario.

I think this is just a general weakness in people picking ranges and just stoving them.  The reality isn't that he always calls JJ and always lays down 99, what happens in practice is that you would get a distribution.  The distribution depends on the opponents, but also on the number of tables they have/history/their tiltedness/your 3 best today and sometime they just have enough of your pereceived aggression. 

I have no idea on the real numbers, and never will, but guess if JJ/AK shove 85% of the time, then it is reasonable to assume 99 and AQ suited shove 50% of the time, AJ suited 20% of the time and so on.  Whilst people rarely shove 22-55 and suited connectors, it is absolutely clear to me that they do it some of the time.  I have done this kind of thing myself, faced it myself and have seen plenty of posts/tourney reports when similar has happened.  Maybe this just happens 5% of the time they have this kind of hand, but it definitely does.

I was just messing around with a spreadsheet, and put in these figures for shoving percentages:

55   66   77   88   99   TT   JJ   QQ   KK   AA
5%   10%   20%   30%   50%   70%   85%   95%   100%   100%

Aks   Ako   Aqs   Aqo   Ajs   Ajo   Ats   Ato   A9s    KQs
90%   85%   50%   30%   20%   10%   10%   5%   5%   15%

I have assumed everything else is either open folded or raise folded.  I think I could probably add a bit more for general spew/balancing with suited connectors etc, but don't think I need to.  I didn't doctor these numbers after looking at the results, it was more a long the lines of if a group of poker pros shoved JJ 85% of the time, how often would they shove AK, 88 etc.  [Hmm hope that table is clear enough!]
                     
TT is 43.4% vs that range, and it is an easy call once you 3 bet (It works out a bit lower than  AQ+, AQs+, 99+ on stove so feels in the right territory too).  You can take out 66 down and AT down without changing the result much, so it isn't that sensitive either.  I'd struggle to get down to 35% without producing a distribution that looked odd.

The thing you refer to as autopilot can be a different thing for different people.  The autopilot of someone with tons of experience and a mathematical background, isn't the same autopilot as someone who just picked up the game and doesn't want to fold two tens.

I would just add that the reason stato is 100k up this year isn't really because he spends time studying this, it is because he binked $58k on Sunday.  If I was a gambling man, I'd have a punt that sucking out with TT about 50 out on Sunday helped too!  I am not saying he is terrible btw, he is obviously very good.  I think his ROI on stars was around 50% before Sunday over a lot of tournaments.  That puts him right amongst the very best.
 

^ What a great post, really informative.

[skolsuper]

3 bet calling.  i very much doubt any1 is only piling TT+ AK+ this late on a sunday. we need 37.5% v his jamming range to call.   if hes jaming TT+ AK+ 100% and AQ 62% of the time or more we have 37.6% equity.

OK but in that case we would need villain to be opening a >8% range to make 3b/call better than just folding, ignoring the chances of someone waking up with QQ+ behind. Most people do I guess, but I think this thread exists because stato felt this guy isn't opening that wide.