$5.50 NLHE STT: stt bubble hand-- week 1 winner!

$5.50 NLHESTT: stt bubble hand-- week 1 winner!

Congratulations Zync for winning the first week of the contest! PM me and let me know what your username is, and I can send you the promised funds.

Here's a spot where we're up against a kinda fishy villain who makes a large raise on the bubble. We're the shortest stack, but still have a good # of bb's.

full tilt poker $5 + $0.50 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t60/t120 Blinds - 4 players - View hand 978178
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

Hero (BTN): t1330 11.08 BBs
SB: t5488 45.73 BBs
BB: t4800 40 BBs
CO: t1882 15.68 BBs

Pre Flop: (t180) Hero is BTN with 9 :diamond: 9 :club:
CO raises to t420, Hero ???

folding

nice pick! My initial reaction is gotta get it in here. closer look however says we have no fold equity and raise screams hand. This may be a fold. My one problem is that we are already the shortest stack with the margin widening and for now our position as far as table dynamics go is horrendous.

any specific reads on this villain other than fishy?

Yeah this is probably going to be a fold regardless, since we're shoving into two bigger stacks still. And we also gain a lot from the cut off getting it in with the other bigger stacks. However as ride pointed out, folding it now puts us in some probable tough spots later on, and if he gets away with a steal we are now in last place by quite a margin, and will need to make a move soon.

I mean in a vacuum these spots are tough to assess. If he's been raising this amount and folding to a shove I'm for it but generally I don't expect even a bad player is going to raise-fold in this spot; he can have something dumb like QJo/AT and have a ton of equity.

Zync said that villain has been the most active person on the table, running a 49/10. That's not a lot more specific, but it might help a little.

Yes, the villain was very active and aggressive. He was betting each flop out of position. His stats of 49/10 was from the start of the game till the bubble.

I re-raise him all-in preflop earlier in the game with same range of hand but every time, he was just limping. Those steals were all successful but I didn't felt good about this one. Also, I was not that bad in shape with the low blinds at the bubble.

I was sure that a shove here would have been called. The best I would have hope is a lower pair than me. I hate making a race on the bubble so, I fold.

Thanks for picking my hand at the first STT bubble hand!

How blinds are playing? if Villain is the more active means blinds are very tight?.

Blinds have 40bbs each one, but if they are playing tight and not calling often could shove here. Pot already have 6bb in and we are the shorstack, if we have any intention to win we need to double up fast.

But also will depend on how see the player before. I mean 49/10 means guy is usually limping, raising only 1/5, we could be behind in here.

Tough spot, we can´t wait much more, but blinds are still in 120, then will come 160, so easy will have 2 more rounds with 1000 chips or more, i think will fold but not discard that 20% of times will shove.
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Edit, was posting before read Zync post.

Betting every flop out of position don´t tell us much in here aside that he was a bad player.

But agree that blinds are still not that high, and you confirm that he usually just limp, so probably we are behind in here.

So Fold.

some good thoughts in here, lemme try to ask a couple of questions to spark some more discussion:

1) how would our behavior change if his bet sizing was smaller?
2) do we make a different move if we had 15bb's or more?
3) at what blind level does this become a push?
4) what would we do if we were SB or BB instead of BTN?

cjatud2012 said:

some good thoughts in here, lemme try to ask a couple of questions to spark some more discussion:

1) how would our behavior change if his bet sizing was smaller?
I'd say it's highly dependant on whether the guy raise/folds a lot, and what bet sizing he has used up until this point, without those reads we can't really make a generaly judgement on his betting patterns.
2) do we make a different move if we had 15bb's or more?
It depends on how our stack compares to that of the remaining players.
3) at what blind level does this become a push?
It has nothing to do with blind levels, again, it's how our stack compares to that of others at the table.
4) what would we do if we were SB or BB instead of BTN?Well we can open up our range a lot more, as we don't have to shove into many players, which eliminates the possibility of someone waking up with AA/KK. Does it make this one a shove? Well, probably not, but it's a lot closer.

Click to expand...

When we think of bubble and ITM situations we're never saying "Oh, i have 10BB's blind on blind, i can shove really wide here" It's more like "Oh, the stacks are 3000, 3000, 4000, and i have 1000, i'm the distict shortstack here, i don't have as much equity compared to the other players, and i need to open up and make a move soon."

An easy way to think about bubble spots is to put yourself into "groups" of chip stacks.

Example.

30BB 15BB 5BB 5BB-15BB stack is comfortable, we're in second place, which means we have to be pretty risk averse for the most part, but can still bully the two smaller stacks

40BB 30BB 30BB 15BB - 15BB stack isn't comfortable, we're in second place and need to make a move soon.

So, we can think of it like this. We want to get ourselves into the next group of chip stacks, so in the below example, we want to be put on par with the two guys at 30BB stacks.