Archive pick: Big pocket pair facing limp re-raise

What we said then…
The limp re-raise is a play that you generally fear in direct proportion to the position of the raiser - the earlier it comes from, the more you generally fear it. Another factor that influences how much credit you give the lrr is how strong your raise looks - the more your raise looks like a credible hand, the scarier the lrr is. Finally, you consider the chip position of the raiser. The more important the initial pot is to their stack, the less likely they are to get tricky with a big hand.

This lrr comes from a relatively late position. Additionally, your raise range from the BB can be interpreted as fairly broad by your opponent since it looks a bit like a dead money pickup. Your opponent’s chip position is secure enough that they might be fooling around with a premium hand here, but with the first two factors suggesting a wide lrr range I think you can expect JJ to do pretty well against villain’s holdings.

This quiz is taken from our archives and was originally posted on 1-31-08. To view the original quiz, comments and answer, click here

It’s early in the tournament and you have to build your table image. Limp-reraise from 5th position looks like a re-steal…shove and put pressure on him…

The lrr really bugs me for some reason. Its a good play when it works, so I guess here you can shove and hope he doesnt have one of the 3 hands you really dont want to see.

Flipping this early against AK and losing this early though will really suck so theres a strong argument for folding too.

Calling a having a 10 high flop hit would be ideal, but not likely so I think this is the worst choice.

Too early for coin flips and with 2580 left, no worries. What hands could we call that we have dominated besides medium pocket pairs?
We’re a coin flip to AK and way behind premium pockets. I don’t like Jacks so much in this situation. All that said, my opinion is colored by the fact that a $150 online buyin is a higher game for me than some others responding and I acknowledge that my answer might be different if the buyin range was within my comfort zone and online bankroll.

I also want to mention that we are out of position and likely to see a flop with at least one overcard. I don’t want to be put to this test when I still have over 40 big blinds.
Look forward to $150 buy in players telling me if I am out of line.

So what actually happened??

i woukd reraise all in every time here,my raise looks like a steal and its too early in a mtt for someone to be slowpalying A`s or K`s in late position.

Early in these Stars tourneys you see a lot of donk play and it’s a good time to try and build a stack with quality hands like this one. I think the villains range could include any pocket pair, AK, or AQs.

However this is a $150 tourney and that tends to screen out a lot of the riff-raff. If this were the noon EST $20,000 guarantee ($20+2) or the daily fifty grand ($50+5) it would be an automatic shove.

The only play I can’t see is calling, as a helpful flop is asking for too much.

I guess even though this is an archive pick, they still don’t want to tell us what happened!!

From the decision point of view it really doesn’t matter what happened :).

I would fold to UTG limp-raise here, but given that this is coming from a late position I will shove. 7 out of 10 flops have a face card in them and the only ones I’d like to see are those two with J-s in them, so calling is really not a good idea here. Yes, AA, KK and QQ will call us and then our tournament probably ends here, but I really don’t believe people slowplaying their big pairs this early in the tournament from the late position - playing KK/QQ like that, having blinds limp and seeing an ace fall on flop would feel really dumb.

I am putting villain on TT-66, AQ-ATs, and against that range we have an excellent equity even when we factor in some probability of being up against those few hands we really don’t want to see.