Winning Poker Tournaments III – Hand No. 41

This is hand No. 41 from the best-selling Winning Poker Tournaments Volume III by “PearlJammer”, “Rizen”, “Apestyles”, and myself.

Seat 6 Hero (BTN): 183,288
Seat 1 SB: 222,204
Seat 2 BB: 133,426
Seat 3 UTG: 348,720
Seat 4 MP: 25,060
Seat 5 CO: 125,302
2,500-5,000 Blinds, (600 Ante)
Setup: You are at the final table of a $100 one rebuy/one add-on tournament. The big blind (BB) is an accomplished online player. Play has been very aggressive. First place pays $12,000 and sixth place pays $2,100.
Preflop 4 4 (11,100): The action folds to you.

What do you do?

PearlJammer

With a pair on the button and more than 20 BBs, this should be an automatic raise of whatever my standard amount has been. I raise to 11,750.

Rizen

Pocket fours is an above-average hand on the button, but can be very tricky to play postflop against aggressive players with these stack sizes. I am in position with an above-average hand, though, and enough chips to maneuver post-flop. I raise to 12,050.
Apestyles

With this large ante, a raise doesn’t have to work very often as a pure steal. In fact, my raise has to work less than 50 percent of the time if I raise the minimum. I raise either whatever size I’ve been raising the entire level, or I raise slightly larger to discourage calls preflop since my hand doesn’t play well postflop. If Seat 1 or 2 reraises, I will consider four-betting all in as a semibluff depending on their three-bet frequency and bet sizing.

Action: You raise to 12,095. The SB folds, and the BB calls.
Flop K 9 2 (30,290): Your opponent bets 20,000.

What do you do?

PearlJammer

The big blind has taken a rather unorthodox line. If I have seen him show down good hands after taking similar lines in the past, I have an easy fold. If I have seen him take this line and give up when called in the past, then I could flat call, looking to take the pot away on the turn.

I could also put in a small raise, but I don’t much like raising in this spot with these effective stack sizes and this dry of a board because a good opponent should know that my value-raising range is extremely thin. No matter what line I choose, I am really just playing a guessing game of whether I think he will give up the pot or not. With no good scare cards for me to represent on later streets, and a hand with very little chance of improvement, I would lean towards folding to avoid having to risk a large percentage of my stack to play a guessing game. I fold.

Rizen

This weak lead from good players is often either a poor made hand, like 9-8, or a very strong hand, like 2-2. How do I make a determination about whether he is strong or weak? In this particular situation, he would likely reraise me preflop with most of the hands that are strong on this board, like A-K, K-K, and 9-9. This leaves a small combination of hands, mainly K-9 and 2-2, with which he might call, then weak lead as a trap. Given this, his hand range is weighted a lot more towards medium-strength hands than strong hands, so I should raise to take the pot away. A small raise should apply enough pressure to make him fold the medium strength hands.

Apestyles

One way a strong opponent can attempt to negate a positional disadvantage is to sometimes lead or check-raise on the flop to put his opponents in tough spots.

I don’t particularly like 4-4 on a K-9-2 board, nonetheless, I suspect my opponent isn’t balanced in this spot. Specifically, with this bet sizing he doesn’t have very many strong hands in his range. If he had a hand like K-Q, why wouldn’t he check to me since I will nearly always make a c-bet on this board? There are also very few combinations of strong hands he can have, especially since virtually anyone would reraise preflop with A-K, K-K and 9-9 against a button raise.

Some players do slow play aces or kings preflop in the BB versus a button open, but the main reason for slow playing these hands with shallow stacks is to trap a c-bet out of your opponent. Checking with those hands is my dominant action by far, and there isn’t a dynamic to suggest my opponent would be trying to induce action. I believe the villain’s most likely hand is either a pure bluff or a hand like Q-J or J-10.

Unfortunately, 4-4 is only a 58 percent favorite against J-10 on this board, and almost every hand has two overcards to my pair, giving it between 26 and 31 percent equity against my hand, depending on backdoor outs. If my choice is between folding or calling, I would fold since my hand is never very far ahead, and I’ll end up folding a lot of turns, even though my opponent is probably bluffing.

Rather than folding, I prefer raising to around 48,000-to-53,000, with the intention of folding to an all-in bet. I feel fairly comfortable raise/folding 4-4 because I have so little equity against the hands with which he would move all in. The only problem with raise-folding is it would be a tragedy if my opponent goes all in with J-10, Q-10, and Q-J and I then fold.

I don’t like min-raising because I think my opponent may (stubbornly) call with his gutshot draws or be induced to go all-in, and I don’t like making a larger raise because I don’t believe it will give me any extra fold equity. Moving all-in also risks too many chips. If I raise just a little larger than a minimum raise, my opponent would have to have a lot of courage to go all in for only 70,000 more. He can’t really expect me to fold since I am getting such good odds.

The problem with raising is that I am not representing any real hands. If my opponent was really good, he would realize that I would just call with all of my strong hands on this board, and then he might go all-in over the top of my raise as a re-bluff. But I rarely give my opponents credit for being capable of that kind of gutsy play, especially when I know little about their playing style.

I raise to 48,000.

Matthew

Sometimes when good players make unorthodox plays, I simply assume they are strong and are trying to trap me with reverse psychology. Sometimes plays are exactly what they look like, in this case, a possible stab at the pot with a medium-strength hand or a bluff. As the pros observe, it’s possible he is trapping with a strong hand, but the number of likely strong hands is quite small. There are many more medium-strength and semibluff hands with which he might bet out.

In this hand, both Apestyles and Rizen decide to raise as they feel there is a decent chance that they can get their opponent to fold. Of course, as PearlJammer points out, we are dealing with a scenario where we have little hand history against this opponent, so you can only make your best guess based on your experience in similar types of situations.

In the actual hand, Rizen raised to 55,595, and the BB folded. ♠

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