Calling All-in Bets

When your opponent pushes all in before the flop in a no-limit hold'em game, you have an interesting decision to make between two simple alternatives: call or fold. With more and more players making this offer on a regular basis, how should you decide when to call?



In a ring game, the mathematical answer is easy: You base it on the pot odds. If the all-in bet is much more than the existing pot, you just have to win more than 50 percent of the time. If there's already a meaningful pot, you can adjust downward appropriately. If you're willing to spend some money to reduce your volatility, adjust upward. As long as you don't have a significant proportion of your bankroll on the table, you'll do well in the long run by listening to the pot odds (assuming you really do know what hands your opponent raises with). Of course, the hard part is knowing what your chances are of winning, and that depends on having a finely tuned sense of the posterior distribution of your opponent's possible hands.



In a heads-up tournament situation, since you can't just stand up with your chips at the end of the hand, you need to think beyond your expectation for the current hand and consider your action in terms of its effect on your expectation for the entire event. Because of this, more situational factors come into play. If the blinds are negligible relative to stack sizes, you can afford to wait longer than if the blinds are getting uncomfortable. If you expect to have a substantial advantage over your opponents over the course of the remainder of the tournament, you should be less willing to get your chips in with a small advantage. And, of course, if you have many more chips than your opponent, you should be more willing to pursue hands as a small favorite or even as a dog.



How big is your advantage over your opponent before a given hand, at a given point in a tournament? It depends on several factors: the stack sizes, the size of the blinds, the speed at which the blinds are growing, and your relative levels of skill. One way to think about this situation is as a gradual reduction in the importance of skill (which includes things like tells you may have picked up, tiredness, and, of course, ability to play the game). As the blinds get large relative to the stacks, the importance of skill diminishes. If the blinds are growing quickly, you have only a limited amount of time in which to take advantage of your skill advantage; or, conversely, a limited amount of time to hold out before your more skillful opponent will be pressured into doing something rash.



If you believe your opponent is more skillful than you are (and I know you don't), anytime that you can get your chips in with an advantage benefits you. Knowing nothing about the future cards, and assuming equal stacks, your equity in the disputed tournament money is less than 50 percent. If you are fortunate enough to pick up a hand when your opponent goes all in, and you have good reason to give yourself a 50 percent chance of winning, you should call the all-in bet. Although you could argue that by waiting, you might pick up a hand that gives you an even better chance, you're as likely as not to come out on the wrong side of later hands. Anytime you have a choice between 50 percent equity and something smaller, you should pick the bigger number. The question then becomes just how much equity you need to call. This is really a question of how much more skillful your opponent is. Of course, truly skillful opponents don't tend to make huge overbets when just the blinds are at stake, so if you're counting a good-sized chance of seeing a hand as weak as A-Q or even A-K, you may want to rethink a bit.



As the blinds get large relative to the stack sizes, equity has less to do with levels of skill and more to do with who has the blinds on a given hand. It's still true that you need to balance your equity given a call against your equity given a fold. But large forced bets tilt the balance toward calling, because it's no longer true that when you fold, you'll still be in roughly the same chip position. This is something tournament players appreciate intuitively; there's no point to getting blinded off in a heads-up confrontation.



If you can take money from a superior player by accepting small edges, or even narrowly losing bets, it follows that when you're the superior player, you should be reluctant to offer such bets. When the blinds are small and there's lots of play left, it's important to pass up advantageous plays that are nevertheless less advantageous than simply moving on to the next hand. Give your opponent a chance to make even bigger mistakes in judgment.



Again, most tournament players, whether world champions or single-table sit-and-go junkies, understand these principles intuitively, at least as they interact with stack size. When your own stack starts to get uncomfortably small relative to the blinds, you need to make a move before your stack gets too small to work with. When you have a huge stack and plenty of time, it's fine to pressure a smaller stack, because your expectation will be little changed if you lose. But you don't want to get into confrontations with other big stacks without a substantial edge.



This also highlights one of the perils of hyperaggressive play before the flop, especially when the blinds are small. When there's substantial play left, you're increasing the number of opportunities your opponent will have to decide if calling your bet is warranted. There's no sense playing hyperaggressively when all you stand to win are blinds that are much smaller than your stack. It also makes it easier for your opponent to call with reasonable assurance of an advantage. If you raise every hand, an opponent with A-J can be reasonably sure he's ahead.



None of this offers any guidance about evaluating your probability of winning the hand. It's more to emphasize that once you've distilled your read down to a probability of winning the hand, you still need to decide if that probability is good enough. It's not enough to say, "My hand is a favorite, I call." You need to decide if your hand is enough of a favorite to be preferred over waiting. Similarly, you can't fold just because you figure you're behind. If you're tired, hungry, grumpy, and feeling sick, you might be better off calling your opponent's overbet with K-J even if you're sure he has a small pocket pair.



Within this framework, we can even imagine a realistic heads-up scenario in which you'd fold some very strong hands before the flop. If the blinds will be small relative to the stack sizes for the foreseeable future, and you believe you have a substantial advantage if you just grind it out, getting your chips in with a small advantage would be foolish. Depending on how badly you dominate your opponent – perhaps you have picked up a reliable tell that makes your advantage truly large – and how long you can afford to wait it out, it may be worthwhile putting aside advantages you estimate to be as large as 70-30 in favor of a less glamorous "slowly but surely" approach.

Daniel Kimberg is the author of Serious Poker and maintains a web site for serious poker players at http://www.seriouspoker.com/. You can contact him at [email protected].