Daily Hand Quiz

I would fold this. We’ve got a pretty good stack, and I don’t want to risk nearly half of it with K9. FWIW I think this is fold-or-shove, because any raise is begging for a RRAI. However shoving looks pretty transparent and will likely get snapped off by any ace or pair and probably better kings as well, so it is not worth risking 360k to win 62.5k in my opinion. There will be better spots (certainly less transparent ones) than this to apply pressure.

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don Reply:
October 15th, 2010 at 3:27 am

To be clear, you’d quantify “begging for a RRAI” as resulting in the RRAI actually happening 51% of the time. Otherwise, that factor alone is not enough to make this a raise/fold decision.
A contrary factor is that the blinds may feel “suction” from a pot sized raise and not want to risk ending their tourney just b/c you mighta been begging them to RRAI.

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don Reply:
October 15th, 2010 at 9:11 am

I mean fold/shove decision

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Plenty of players in the SB/BB with those stack sizes will autoship any decent hand over a button raise, so without a read that they’re tight I don’t like raise/fold. We have too many chips to get it all-in with here with K9, so I don’t like the other two options either.

Just fold it

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Absent any read one way or the other I’m going to raise in position and try to pick up blinds and antes for cheap until the blinds prove they are capable of coming over the top.

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T Reply:
October 15th, 2010 at 5:02 am

Me too. We can roughly bet what is in the pot. Suppose both players shove 25% here, which is generous I think, our steal is successful over half the time. Hence, raise/fold is +EV.

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I agree with the Raise-Fold group. I think our image as “Quiet lately” plays to our advantage here also, so we’re likely to get a little more credit for the raise.
We have to take opportunities to pick up blinds when they present themselves and this is a prime one. Since I don’t really want to commit half my stack with K9o, I’d fold to a significant raise without a read (and I’d then have to tighten up my stealing range as well).

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I’d go with raise or fold. I wouldn’t want to push all in because getting called would probably mean we were crushed or flipping at best. It would be a big mistake for either one of the blinds to just call our raise and then end up folding given their stack sizes. So if we raise it puts them in a really tough spot. They pretty much have to fold or be willing to get it all in. If we bet about the pot size (60K) and get raised all in we can still fold and have about 700K, which is still plenty to do something with.

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I’m with the folders. I think that a move (i.e. raise) itself screams over Hero’s quiet image.

Raising small may not be enough to get the blinds out. While short, they are not quite in the desperate zone. Additionally, there is potential c-bet risk on a flop that Hero will miss 2/3 of the time.

Raising large places a sizable % of stack at risk, which may commit us due to stack-size differentials. K9o obviously does not have strong showdown value.

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This looks like a pretty easy shove to me. K9o doesn’t need to be a super-premium hand; all it has to do is get us first-in ahead of tight opponents . . . or be a solid favorite against any two cards, if our opponents are in kamikaze mode. This hand passes both tests.

Given the blinds’ modest but not gasping stcks, it feels like we have a lot of folding equity here. The blinds can last at least a couple more orbits doing nothing. There’s already one shorter stack at our table in worse shape, and maybe more at others. They know that. The most likely scenario is that they only risk their tournament life by calling our all-in if they feel they are favorites to win. Now we’re talking about them calling with at most a top 20% hand and maybe just a top 10%.

In that case, it’s fold/fold two-thirds of the time, probably more. If we do get called, we’re a coinflip against small pairs and slightly ahead of supposedly better hands like JTs. (Are the blinds really calling with JTs???))

We’re a 40% proposition against any non-overlapping Ax — whether that is AQ or A2. We’re only hopeless against an unexpected AA or KK, and if that frightens us, we should never open anything.

And if the blinds are crazy loose, restless, etc. and want to call with ATC, we make money the old-fashioned way, by beating Q6o, etc. Even if they get lucky, we’re still alive.

With the antes already creating pots that are 2 1/2 BB before action starts, chips are moving into aggressors’ hands too fast for us to “wait for a better moment.”

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