Weak king, tough field, small stack

DailyHandQuiz

Game type: PokerStars 1k freezeout
Stage of tourney: Midstages
Your image: Aggressive
Opponent’s image: Solid players
Your hand: K♣8♦

The setup: You’re sitting on a dwindling stack as the Stars Super Tuesday moves into the middle stages.

This hand you’re dealt K8o and the table folds to you. With three players still to act, what’s your play?

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5 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

general johnson jameson

Fold.

M is over 10, and 9 handed rotations. We are a long way from being desperate, and still to act are 1 person who is nearing desperation, and 2 people who can significantly knock us out with no real threat to their chip stacks. What are we hoping for with this hand? 3 folds? The only people who will call our raise most likely have us beat, and any re-raise we can’t play against. If we raise, it is just begging the short button to make a play and shove, with 2 more much bigger stacks easily open to call or isolate. I don’t like shoving here either, that is senseless since we are over 10M and would be shoving king high into 3 high risk players, just as limping here is outrageous. A simple 3xBB raise is gonna cost us almost 20% of our stack. If they are going to fold they will fold to a decent raise, but I already said why a raise is pointless. If we had a better hand I’d fool around here. But K8 just isn’t cutting it. Sure we have position on 2, but this hand gives us no back up plan. If we get 3 bet we have to fold. If we wiff flop and they donk bet what are we doing? calling with k8? If button shoves all in are we prepared to basically call all-in with a K8? If we see a flop, we don’t have enough chips to really induce a fold if they have any outs at all. Like I said, what are we hoping for with this hand? 3 folds. And it’s going to be very difficult to get that against solid players who are 1 desperate button and 2 huge stack blinds.

The math basically governs this one: assuming they will fold to a 3x just as much as a shove, we are investing 600 to win 300, which we only need to win one time out of every 3 to break even. but the likely hood of getting a short stack button, and 2 players who are 2x and 3x your stack all to fold is exceptionally small. Thus I think this roughly has -EV all over it. Let’s fold here and pick some better spots against solid players, no need to get stupid right now.

[Reply]

general johnson jameson

oops. What i meant in math is that we need to win the pot 2 times out of 3 just to break even. So 3 out of 4 sees our first profit. The odds of getting 3 very high risk people to fold 9 times is going to be almost impossible. So math and -ev says we gotta fold here. If someone wants to try and do the shove math go ahead i just assumed the only goal here was 3 folds and not an accidental double up.

[Reply]

samo

Not listed as an option, but I’d quickly fold. Hero has 17 bbs left, an agg image, 3 players left to act including the short-stack. All for a $300 pot.

[Reply]

yap

Yes, I don’t get it either, why there is no fold option? Anyway, from the list given: raise-fold.

G will shove us if he has the goods, we have to fold to that. SB, BB may play back at us (they know we are aggressive and they dominate in chips)or they might have the cards, either case we will have to fold. All in all we are risking 600 (assuming 3 BB raise) to win 300 while unless they are absolute nits there isn’t a double chance to take the pot PF. If they call our raise we are in trouble: We are easily outkickered, easily becoming pot committed.

It should be a fold.

[Reply]

Pirate21

I agree. Fold & move on.

[Reply]