Jacks with two raises in front pre, NL MTT

DailyHandQuiz

Game type: WCOOP Main Event, $5200 buyin, PokerStars
Stage of tourney: Mid stages
Your image: Aggressive
Your hand: J♣J♦

The setup: You’re in the middle stages of the main event of the WCOOP on PokerStars. The bubble is on the horizon, but still a good distance away. You’ve built a nice stack with aggressive play and have shown down quality most of the times you’ve gone to the river. This hand you get dealt jacks in the BB.

UTG+1 opens for a little under 3x. He’s been opening fairly frequently from EP. Three players fold and then a shorter stack makes it a bit under 15k to go. The shorter stack got to the table a few orbits ago and has been relatively quiet.

It folds to you in the BB. What’s your play?

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7 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

Anonymous

4B to 36K, fold to the bigger stack shove, call the shorty shove

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Tripps

Seems odd that the voting right now favors folding. The reason you build your stack is to get in to this very situation. Flips with short stacks is the best of it IMO. Of course, we don’t want to dance with the other big stack, so calling is out. I like the raise to isolate here.

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Nelson

I like the 4 bet here. I’d make it around 35 or 40K to go, which would basically pot commit the opening raiser if he wanted to go to war, and would almost certainly pot commit the reraiser, which is fine with me. Like the first poster said, I think I’d have to fold to a shove here from the opening raiser. Jacks are scary enough going against one person who could take about 1/3 of our stack. I don’t think I’d want to risk almost 2/3 of my stack against two players.

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VeniceStu

I’m shoving my stack, original raiser folds, 38k stack races, next hand please. were not hurt, chance to keep building stack, turn the music up & open up a beer.

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Waste_of_Paint Reply:
December 16th, 2010 at 11:24 am

Isn’t shoving a little reckless? Yes, by 4-betting to 35k we give the original raiser the chance to push us off our hand, but he’s gotta know there is a decent chance that the shorty will call so I doubt he’d come over the top without a seriously strong hand. We can find out if the dangerous stack has QQ-AA here without risking two thirds of ours.

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Major Dude

We’ve got nothing invested in this pot right now, and we’d love to isolate the original EP raiser, who we think opened with a hand that we can crush.

But I’m surprised no one so far has spent more time thinking about the short-stack re-raiser. Why is he in this hand? He’s in because he thinks he can crush the opening raiser, too. He hasn’t got out of line yet.

I vote fold, on the belief that the short stack is entering the pot with a very strong hand. I’m putting his range no wider than AQ+/TT+, and more likely AQs+/QQ+. The pot odds are borderline right against the wider range, but not by much. We’re definitely behind against the tighter range.

More broadly, I disagree with Tripps that the right way to play a big stack is to get in lots of flips with small stacks. The real payoff comes from taking down uncontested pots with well-timed aggression. And that means squeezing the middle stacks with turn and river bets on murky hands, where they’re dead if they call and lose. I’d rather let this one go by and wait for a chance to pick a middle stack’s pocket.

[Reply]

_CityBorn_ Reply:
December 16th, 2010 at 5:16 pm

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