UTG Play in the money, NL MTT

Game type: No limit hold’em tournament
Your image: You’re known to be fairly aggressive, but you’ve been hobbled the last few orbits
Stage of tourney: In the money
Avg stack: 1.1 million
Misc notes:
Your hand: ??

The setup: You’ve made it deep in a major online tournament, and now only 64 players remain. After the next player gets eliminated, there’s a money jump of $700 (the buy in was $200).

You have a half average stack and you’ve been quiet for an orbit. The orbit before you picked up the blinds once, and the orbit before that you lost a big race with 99 to drop about 2 million chips.

The blinds hit you next hand. How often are you pushing UTG here?

How would your answer change if you were on the bubble?

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9 COMMENTS (Jump to comment form)

Top 10 and possibly tighter even. There’s a shorter stack at our table, there’s probably more at the other tables. Let’s fold into the money jump, sure, open up a bit in LP but at this point I probably fold AJ and 99 UTG.

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b1aze

I dont think we are in dire-straits here so theres no reason to spazz off 10+bb utg. Im going to be playing shove/fold until i double up but no reason to go even 10% of hands here UTG here. I do realize that we still have almost all of our fold equity with the biggest stack at the table being just over 3x our stack, so its not like we have a 8x stack willing to snap us off with almost any2 here.

I may jam AJ here and would definately jam 99 here. Much wider than that and im probably folding it.

[Reply]

Pirate21 Reply:
March 17th, 2011 at 7:46 am

Agree with this.

Too many bigger stacks behind us to get frisky with a mediocre hand (also, I’m not generally a fan of attacking the biggest stack’s blinds without a reason).
If folded to in LP, this would be a different story, but UTG I’m folding most hands.

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Major Dude

I’m pushing top 25% here.

We’ve still got enough chips to inflict a lot of pain on any caller except maybe the BB — if someone takes us on and loses. Our opponents can tie themselves up in knots trying to guess our range. But even with our image, they’ve got to consider the risk that we are pushing with a killer hand.

That makes me think that we won’t get a call from anyone except AK/QQ+ for sure, and maybe AQ+/TT+ if someone is feeling more daring. If so, we only get called if someone has a top 5% hand. That means our chances of seeing fold/fold/fold and getting away with a blind steal are about 70%. (.95 to the 7th.) The extra chips would be quite nice. If we get called, we’re behind but not hopelessly so.

For all the responders who say: “we’ve still got time,” didn’t we do a quiz last week where Hero was down to an M of 2 . . . and everyone said: “Big mistake letting your stack get that small. You should have been pushing earlier.”

This is the pushing-earlier stage.

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Pirate21 Reply:
March 17th, 2011 at 11:43 am

“This is the pushing-earlier stage.”

Agree, this is the right stage for that. I just don’t like it in EP because having to get through the entire rest of the table.
If I’m D E or F, it cuts in half the number of players we have to get through and thus increases the odds that we get away with it.
I’d be shoving any spot where the table folds to us in the hijack, cutoff or button and at least a top 50% starting hand.

[Reply]

T Reply:
March 17th, 2011 at 1:16 pm

But the difference is that we are already ITM here, and can likely fold into a big pay increase.

The other difference is that our stack was really tiny compared to the rest of the table.
This time we appear to be on an overall short-stacked table, with only one player sporting an above average stack. I think we’ll get our opportunity to open from middle or late position yet.

I would give it one orbit of playing nothing but the absolute tits, so that a) the shortie here or someone at one of the other seven tables can bust and b) since we’ve been aggressive so far, people may deduce that we’ve tightened up drastically and read more strength behind our next (EP) open.

[Reply]

_CityBorn_

Top 10. Im not spewing my tourney off here, just to get the blinds, my chipstack is ok enough to threaten bigger stacks, even after the blinds.

[Reply]

beermebrett

we lost 80% of our stack to a V that’s no longer at our table… but our image of aggressiveness helps us i believe because average chip stack at our table is only double ours. They’ll need a AJs, 99′s+ to call our 528k shove.
But it costs 90k an orbit to sit back and wait, so if we could figure this out in real time, we should agree to a shove/fold mode top 25% of hands even in EP!! Since we’re in the $ we need to stay frosty on those placement values, in essence every next higher position becomes a bubble! We have validated our capabilities to get in the money, now it’s time to play!! We need to regenerate with some heads up (pun) intelligent, aggressive, loose play until we can attain the luxury of playing tight again.
It might only take one winning hand to switch gears to a tighter mode!

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KataLyzT

its not just blinds we pick up but antes as well…pot is 20% of our stack and we want to win the tourney not fold our way for just an extra pay increase.

shove top 25% and hope for the best. at least when u do get premium, u might get action since u’ve been so active.

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