Winning Poker Tournaments III – Hand #39

Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time Volume III by Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Jon “Apestyles” Van Fleet, and yours truly, analyzes 50 online poker hands. This article looks at hand #39.

Seat 1 Rizen (SB): 93,755
Seat 2 BB: 141,941
Seat 3 UTG: 305,250
Seat 4 MP: 227,181
Seat 5 CO: 210,994
Seat 6 BTN: 546,058
Blinds: 3,000/6,000 ante 750

Setup: There are two tables remaining in a $55 buy-in nightly tournament with a $50,000 guarantee. There are 11 players left, with 11th taking $500 and first place getting just over $10,000. You are 10th in chips. Seat 5 has been limping fairly regularly and shown down hands like J-10 and 4-4, about what you would expect. You haven’t been very active, except for the occasional all-in blind steal in late position.

Preflop (13,500) J 8: Seat 5 limps for 6,000.
What do you do?

PearlJammer

Seat 5’s limp creates a very interesting, unusual situation since there are few players still limping at this stage of a tournament. With more chips, I would be happy to limp from the small blind for the discounted price and see a cheap flop, even though I am out of position. This option is still viable with 15.5 big blinds; however, shoving all in, looking to increase my stack by more than 20 percent without a showdown, seems like a better option.

If the action folded to me, shoving all in with J-8 offsuit would be a marginal play, but probably the preferred play. The added limp should make it more difficult for the big blind to call my shove, thus my fold equity versus the big blind increases. Because Seat 5 has been showing down marginal hands with which he would probably not call a shove, his limp should mean I will actually get called much less often than in a straight blind-vs.-blind situation, even though I have to get by two opponents. This oddly increases blind-vs.-blind fold equity and the shove being for almost half of Seat 5’s stack makes this a solid opportunity to take a calculated risk to build my stack. I shove all in.

Rizen

I don’t have a premium hand by any stretch of the imagination. With a stack size of 15 big blinds at a six-handed table, my greatest asset is the fact that I can bring my chip stack down like a hammer in an effort to accumulate chips. I still have a large enough stack that no one can really afford to double me up (especially since many of my opponents know who I am and will be reluctant to double me up, as they would prefer to keep me short-stacked and desperate), so I can create a lot of high fold-equity situations to accumulate chips. In this particular hand, the action folds to Seat 5, who limps for 6,000. Given that he’s limped frequently, has shown down mediocre hands, and I have a tight image, now is a good opportunity to go after those 19,500 chips in the pot. If successful, this move will increase my stack over 20 percent. I push all in for 90,005 chips.

Apestyles

To find out if shoving is profitable, I must weigh two factors: first, how often I expect to win 19,500 chips (which is about 20 percent of my stack) uncontested; second, how often I win or lose when called. Rather than get into the exact mathematics just now, I believe it would be beneficial to look at the cutoff seat’s open limping range and estimate with what hands he’s calling my shove.

As stated in the setup, the cutoff’s range is weighted towards middle strength-to-weak hands such as pairs, Broadway hands, suited connectors, and low-suited aces. I don’t think I can absolutely eliminate strong-but-vulnerable hands like 9-9 – J-J and big aces like A-Q, but these hands are much less likely since almost all players raise with these hands. Generally, a player who limps this often is limping with the absolute top of his range as well; even the worst players understand the value of trapping and balancing plays in this spot. Therefore, hands like A-A, K-K, and Q-Q are still a possibility.
My guess is that he will only call 25 to 30 percent of the time, at most, if he’s limping with only his middle strength hands and speculative hands, along with Q-Q or better. It’s difficult to put someone who is open limping a lot at a six-handed table at this stage in a tournament on anything close to an exact range, because he is obviously following a fundamentally unsound tournament strategy.

The big blind should be calling with a far narrower range than he usually would blind versus blind since he now has to worry about the cutoff. If I were first in, I would guess the big blind might be calling with as much as 25 to 35 percent of hands. In this situation with the cutoff still in play, I would expect a calling range of closer to 10 to 15 percent of hands; approximately 6-6+, A-7 suited+, K-Q suited, A-9 offsuit+, and K-Q offsuit.

Trying to do an exact chip-equity equation for going all in from the small blind would be tedious and inexact since I am unclear as to what Seat 5’s true combined limping and calling range is. Also, if I were to do a calculation, I would have to do a separate one for the times that Seat 2 calls, when Seat 5 calls, and also the rare instance when they both call. I would rather make an educated guess and say that I will be called by either the big blind or the cutoff around one third of the time and have an average of around 31 to 33 percent equity when called.

Therefore:

67 percent of the time I win 18,500 = 12,395
22 percent of the time I lose 90,005 = -19,801
11 percent of the time I win 106,505 = 11,716
If all of those (admittedly very rough) assumptions are true, I win 4,310 on average—about two thirds of a big blind.

My first reaction when looking at this hand was that I nearly always complete the small blind and thought shoving was a bit of a chip-spew. After looking more deeply into the problem, I now believe that shoving is probably a positive expected value (EV) move. Although it is positive EV, it still is a marginal situation, whereas completing the small blind is clearly a low-risk, high-reward situation. So the question really becomes which of the two options has better EV? This close to making the final table, I would rather pass on unclear and marginal spots such as this one, especially when I can win the pot post-flop fairly often.

I complete the small blind.

Matthew

A major factor in whether to push is your assumptions about your opponents’ calling range. In this hand, it is interesting that a limp actually causes the big blind’s calling range to be much tighter since he now has the added worry of the cutoff possibly having limped with a big hand. In some ways, the limper works to the small blind’s advantage by offering a better reward, while also decreasing the big blind’s calling range.

You can see in the analysis that your assumptions can drastically change your strategy. In this hand, Rizen and PearlJammer assume a tighter calling range and determine that pushing is clearly profitable. Contrast this to Apestyles, who assumes a looser calling range, which ends up making shoving a marginal play.

Observation is such a critically important skill for a poker player. Every piece of information you gain from observing your opponents will help you narrow down their ranges and enable you to make better decisions.

Rizen pushed all in, and everyone folded.

Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time Volume III is available in both print and e-book format. ♠

Matthew is the owner of Dimat Enterprises, “Publishing Today’s Best Poker Books.” The latest Dimat release, The Math of Hold’em, is now available in bookstores everywhere.