Blind battle in late stages of a MTT

DailyHandQuiz

Game type: No limit tournament 50+5, Full Tilt Poker
Stage of tourney: ITM
Your image: Tight
Opponent’s image: Aggressive, winning player
Your hand: A♦8♥

The setup: You’re down to just a few tables in the fifty fifty on Full Tilt when the following hand comes up. You’re in the small blind and the table folds to you.

You’ve been playing pretty tight, passing on a couple of chances to open from middle-late position. Your opponent has been aggressive and is a steady winner in MTTs. The rest of your table seems fairly tough.

You open from the SB for 3x and the BB shoves over top. You haven’t been involved in any BvB situations with him yet. What’s your play?

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13 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

samo

I trusted the dynamics of the images based on prior history and voted call. Hero is tight and I’ll assume passive, perhaps prompting the v to make this move. Hero raised knowing agg v may make 3-bet. Need to follow through here with an A in your hand getting ~3-2 vs a wide range.

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Morat

We’re both shortstacked. In Hero’s place a thinking player would raise about 70-80% of the starting hands. Based on that an aggressive player’s reshove range is about A2+, K9+, QT+, JT, any pair. (Maybe some of the better hands would try to flat to win at least a cbet more). Our image being tight doesn’t matter much, unless we are nitty. We’re not stealing light, we’re actually about 50% to win against that range, but we get about 2,5 : 1 odds. Call.

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Morat Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 3:00 am

Oooooops, odds are 3:2 as samo said, sorry.

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Pirate21 Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 9:23 am

I would add most suited connectors to V’s range

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Loki

You call because when you raise with a medium A from the SB you should expect to get your whole stack in HU. Raise-fold? Preposterous. Take the 3:2 and run it.

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Nelson

I really don’t like going to war here with this hand, but I agree that with the stack sizes it would be pretty stupid to raise and then fold. If we thought that we may fold then we should have either passed on playing this hand or just called and tried to see a flop. Although with an aggressive, winning player in the big blind I doubt he’d let us see a flop for cheap.

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Pirate21

A-8 off is roughly a 60/40 favorite to win HU vs 2 random cards. Looks like our 3:2 odds are about right to call.
Added bonus… 60% chance of doubling up is too good to pass on.
Go ahead and call.

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Pete Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 10:55 am

lol. Maths fail

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Muck_Miser

I would insta-call because once I 3x bet against an aggressive opponent I am not assuming they will fold. My goal was assuming he’d call or raise with an inferior hand. I would take the 60% chance and run with it. By raising pre-flop already committed me to shoving. It wouldn’t make me feel good he shoved, but don’t see how you can get away from this hand.

Big Range for this player, but More than likely, I would think low poket-pair or QK would most-likely be my impression…..

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Pete

What is with this 60% equity thing? He’s not going to shove here every time! He only needs to shove about 20% to give you enough equity to call though, which is fairly likely.

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Pirate21 Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 1:36 pm

Agreed, he’s not shoving ATC (though some would against a tight opp) – didn’t mean to imply that. But I think we can agree he’s shoving pretty light with an expectation that we’ll fold. I also don’t expect he’s shoving the top of his range so that weighs in our favor.

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Loki Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 8:34 pm

Good point. ::thumbs up::

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crwfrd

should not be raise/folding an ace blind v blind vs an aggressive opponent that will resteal with a wide range. especially 3x (4200 is not 3x lol). I don’t see why villain wouldn’t jam the top of his range here tho – if he is reshoving really wide here then he should expect a call more often when he does have the goods

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