$2 NLHE 6-max: Calling a 4bet all in with AQo

we were in blind vs blind, the vilain had the stack broken and make a 4bet shove,is ok to call with AQo?
https://www.cardschat.com/replayer/324tlGrQ6

For the player to apply a 4bet and pushing all the chips, he would probably have a high pair. Luckily in this hand, you still found a queen on the flop.

Follows the game!

It really depends on the game features that the sb has. If the villain is an very aggressive and very wide-range player, AQo is an acceptable range to call that final increase preflop. This scenario applies to a confrontation of only 2 active players, of which the villain we face is the effective stack with approximately one fifth of our stack.
Anyway, the villain's 4bet is too deep. More than 5 times the size of your 3bet. That proportion means a strong value in most of the time, so we are almost always very close to a decision to fold behind 4bet.
In a standard game line, AQo is a range that must be removed to a 4bet out of position in preflop. Otherwise, we are accepting a flip situation, where the final result will depend a lot on the variance that the distributions have at that time.
Regards.

gustav197poker said:

It really depends on the game features that the sb has. If the villain is an very aggressive and very wide-range player, AQo is an acceptable range to call that final increase preflop. This scenario applies to a confrontation of only 2 active players, of which the villain we face is the effective stack with approximately one fifth of our stack.
Anyway, the villain's 4bet is too deep. More than 5 times the size of your 3bet. That proportion means a strong value in most of the time, so we are almost always very close to a decision to fold behind 4bet.
In a standard game line, AQo is a range that must be removed to a 4bet out of position in preflop. Otherwise, we are accepting a flip situation, where the final result will depend a lot on the variance that the distributions have at that time.
Regards.

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Interesting.

I've found it profitable to call off against those stack sizes at micros. I'm not sure if the play changes at other stakes. You're 40% vs JJ+, AK, and you are actually getting that ($0.76 : $1.12), so this is at least break even.

I think this has to be a call after we 3bet pre - which I love btw. Just so hard for us to fold here - as stated we are up against pairs alot, which we aren't doing to bad against usually - AK is the only Ax hand to have us beat and I think AJs should be 4b jamming here BvB. Just not sure if we can tighten our opponent up enough at these stakes where we fold. We block combos of AA, Ax, QQ and Qx hands. This is definitely not my field of expertise in this spot, but I think - myself - I have to call off in this spot after I 3bet. If my opponent had about $1.10+ in their stack and they 4b jammed I could find a fold - but their stack is right on the line for me and I would probably call in game.

We have to know opps playing style. And considering pot odds it's good in most cases/

teh_colonel_saigon said:

Interesting.

I've found it profitable to call off against those stack sizes at micros. I'm not sure if the play changes at other stakes. You're 40% vs JJ+, AK, and you are actually getting that ($0.76 : $1.12), so this is at least break even.

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I would re-run that calculation. AQo vs JJ+, AK is less than 30%. If we had AK then we would be close to 40% and could call profitably. All the extra times we are dominated by AK make a difference here.

I think it's a fold vs a standard V for this reason. If V is very aggro or has shown down spaz before then we can call. But when we are ranging V as many are here with JJ+, AK and have less than 30% equity facing a 5x four bet shove our odds are super bad. The call represents 67% of the $1.12 pot at our final decision point. Our equity is 29% vs this range. We will be losing tons of money long term if V is this tight. This hand we found V at the bottom of his range and were lucky to be in a coin flip situation where we hit.

freddydr87 said:

we were in blind vs blind, the vilain had the stack broken and make a 4bet shove,is ok to call with AQo?
https://www.cardschat.com/replayer/324tlGrQ6

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Hi there freddydr87, thank you for sharing your hands.

Now I used CardsChat odds calculator for this specific situation:


Poker Odds Calculator from https://www.cardschat.com
Texas Hold'em:
Player 1( ): 42.48% lose 57.11% tie 0.41% EV 0.42
Player 2( ): 57.11% lose 42.48% tie 0.41% EV 0.57

Well, I am not in love with the absolute equity % (AQ x JJ), because we are never sure of V's range, I would only fold a situation like that against a NIT. Tight players are very rare to have a broken stack, passive more than aggressives.
Against any player with 80 BB stack effective I would fold. But this player had less than 50 BB Effective Stack, and after we 3bet, in a situation of SB x BB (even with the polarized 4bet) we must go.
For the times it show AK, AA and KK good for her/him. But as we can observe, JJ is present in a 4bet/shove range of a recreational.
Do we really love flipping at cash tables? I guess not, but there are some exceptions that it is very hard to leave.

Regards;

Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa

c0rnBr34d said:

I would re-run that calculation. AQo vs JJ+, AK is less than 30%. If we had AK then we would be close to 40% and could call profitably. All the extra times we are dominated by AK make a difference here.

I think it's a fold vs a standard V for this reason. If V is very aggro or has shown down spaz before then we can call. But when we are ranging V as many are here with JJ+, AK and have less than 30% equity facing a 5x four bet shove our odds are super bad. The call represents 67% of the $1.12 pot at our final decision point. Our equity is 29% vs this range. We will be losing tons of money long term if V is this tight. This hand we found V at the bottom of his range and were lucky to be in a coin flip situation where we hit.

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Villain has less that 50bb so I can't give him a JJ+,AK range. He's going to show up with several smaller pairs and likely worse Aces (especially if sooooted). I feel like once we 3bet, calling the shove is mandatory here.

Aballinamion said:

Hi there freddydr87, thank you for sharing your hands.

Now I used CardsChat odds calculator for this specific situation:


Poker Odds Calculator from www.cardschat.com
Texas Hold'em:
Player 1( ): 42.48% lose 57.11% tie 0.41% EV 0.42
Player 2( ): 57.11% lose 42.48% tie 0.41% EV 0.57

Well, I am not in love with the absolute equity % (AQ x JJ), because we are never sure of V's range, I would only fold a situation like that against a NIT. Tight players are very rare to have a broken stack, passive more than aggressives.
Against any player with 80 BB stack effective I would fold. But this player had less than 50 BB Effective Stack, and after we 3bet, in a situation of SB x BB (even with the polarized 4bet) we must go.
For the times it show AK, AA and KK good for her/him. But as we can observe, JJ is present in a 4bet/shove range of a recreational.
Do we really love flipping at cash tables? I guess not, but there are some exceptions that it is very hard to leave.

Regards;

Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa

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If we can see V's hand is exactly JJ then I agree. I think most of the time V has JJ+, AK here though. Even though he starts the hand short stacked he is giving us bad odds against that range to call .76 with only 1.12 in the pot already. To further emphasize lets count available combos and see how often we are in much worse shape. Available combos:
AA x 3
KK x 6
QQ x 3
AK x 12
Total combos that have us smashed: 24
Total combos that we have odds to call against = JJ x 6

Most of the time we are way behind and occasionally we are only slightly behind. I think it's good to have a 3 bet / fold range. Otherwise we shouldn't be 3 betting as wide. I realize V is short stacked to begin the hand but the odds are the odds and unless we can range V much wider this looks like a losing spot to me.

I agree with you, it's a fold if that's his range. Just don't think that's his range/

WVHillbilly said:

Villain has less that 50bb so I can't give him a JJ+,AK range. He's going to show up with several smaller pairs and likely worse Aces (especially if sooooted). I feel like once we 3bet, calling the shove is mandatory here.

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WVHillbilly said:

I agree with you, it's a fold if that's his range. Just don't think that's his range/

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Fair enough, there are no stats or notes to go on and I mentioned if we think V is wider we can call in my first post but in general I don't think it's fair to assume just because V is short that they are 4 bet jamming lots of Ax and small pairs. I would want more than just a stack depth to help with ranging.

c0rnBr34d said:

Fair enough, there are no stats or notes to go on and I mentioned if we think V is wider we can call in my first post but in general I don't think it's fair to assume just because V is short that they are 4 bet jamming lots of Ax and small pairs. I would want more than just a stack depth to help with ranging.

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I'll use it as an indicator in the absence of actual reads. Most people playing 2nl with less than 100bb are just bad. I think villain needs a ~5% range here for calling to be profitable.

In a vacuum I'm calling this all day every day at this stake.....

now if I'm playing a super weak tight, or loose passive player. I can see giving it up..... cause against these types of players it doesnt matter the pot odds, the risk to your stack, or even thier possition. You are only making a profitable call against the bottom of thier range. In this case this is the best you could hope for against these types of players....

In a vacuum, or against better players, I can see some making this move on this stack against a larger stack with 77+, ATs, AJs, maybe even polerized hands that hold good equity against the top of your 3Bet range like T9s, 98s, and 87s....

I've only got about 5k hands of 2NL but in my experience the most common player mistakes were that they were too loose passive. 3 bet frequencies were anemic at 6% or less almost always, not uncommon to see 100+ hands with zero 3 bets. The 7%+ percent crowd actually stood out. So from that tiny sample the 4 betting ranges I ran into did not have much AJ- or TT-. They were fairly nutted unless the player had stats to indicate otherwise. I didn't correlate stack depth to range characteristics with any type of rigor but there were tons of players who didn't top off. The guys who were punting were punting regardless of stack depth.

If we range V as you did above with 77+, ATs+, and some polarized suited wheel Aces and middle suited connectors I agree it's a snap call.

Hot Topic

c0rnBr34d said:

If we can see V's hand is exactly JJ then I agree. I think most of the time V has JJ+, AK here though. Even though he starts the hand short stacked he is giving us bad odds against that range to call .76 with only 1.12 in the pot already. To further emphasize lets count available combos and see how often we are in much worse shape. Available combos:
AA x 3
KK x 6
QQ x 3
AK x 12
Total combos that have us smashed: 24
Total combos that we have odds to call against = JJ x 6

Most of the time we are way behind and occasionally we are only slightly behind. I think it's good to have a 3 bet / fold range. Otherwise we shouldn't be 3 betting as wide. I realize V is short stacked to begin the hand but the odds are the odds and unless we can range V much wider this looks like a losing spot to me.

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Hey c0rnBr34d what's up? Happy to see you here!



It is very good what you said and makes me think that the villain is not short stack enough for us to call. Good observation. What I believe you are saying is that we must have to fold this spot more often than get involved(70% fold and 30% call?). That's okay too. We are not only calling 100% times a 4bet preflop shove with dominated hands such as AQ, AJ for instance.
We must balance our plays and sometimes fold a spot like that and sometimes call. I believe this is one of the times that we call here, with all due respect to your analysis.
It is true that considering absolute equity %, according to your great combo analysis, we have 24 combos that are crushing AQ and only 6 combos of JJ that we are flipping, not winning, because JJ is slightly better than AK and AQ preflop.
I read all the comments and it also makes sense that a recreational, with a broken stack, in a specific range situation of BB x SB 4bet ranges it will have many combos of pocket pairs, many combos of suited connectors, many combos of broadways dominated by AQ.
What this hand proves is that even recreational players should and will have strong hands in their preflop ranges, sometimes.
But most of times recreational players will find it is good to 4bet shove some A7s, A7s, pocket 7's, and a huge 4bet range, which make us believe it is profitable even counting the times we will be dominated for AA, KK and AK. If we count the ammount of huge nonsense combos in a 4bet range of a broken stack recreational players SB x BB, we will be simply crushing its range.

Some personal thought

One thing that has nothing to do with the hand, or to our great community friends comments, ideas and analysis is that, is very rare here in the forum somebody to post a hand where they flatted, from any position with the top of the range: AK, AQ, AA, KK, QQ, preflop.
Almost 100% of times here I hear that we gotta be 3betting AK, 4betting QQ, and if we only do it, even at the micro stakes we are unbalancing our ranges a little. (of course that AA and KK we don't need to balance at all at the micros, if we 3bet/4bet/5bet AA and KK a 100% of times it is very correct)
We can flat AQ here in position in relation to the SB, which sometimes will open 100% range, which turns AQ into a powerful value hand, to see a flop and try to outplay the player postflop, in position.
And, if the situation gets too much scary against unbalanced aggressive players, who never measure their sizings postflop, we can easily fold. What I am trying to say is that if we catch Top Pair Top Kicker against a player like this one postflop, this player will never leave its Pocket J's, T's, 9's, 8's etc. (because it is a recreational and because of the low SPR)
To 3bet AQ from BB versus SB we gotta be sure that the player doesn't fold too much for 3bet preflop. Otherwise we are turning a value hand into a bluff. If we in the BB 3bet AQ, AK, AA and KK 100% times against SB's steal range we might lose some value in the future.
SB might open 100% range versus BB for steal. But it will continue barely with 20% after a 3bet (which is a pretty wide range). And SB will 4bet the BB 3bet steal also wide, something between 5% , 8% and 10% depending how % 3bet steal BB has versus SB.
Thanks everyone for the ideas and comments, awesome.

Regards;

Carlos 'Aballinamion' Barbosa

@Aballinamion - To be fair I think we are all guessing a bit when it comes to ranging an unknown short stack in the SB. I tend to agree with the range that teh_colonel_saigon posted so I repeated it. It could be wider as other suggested or even tighter and it can easily change how you answer this question. Some bad players are too loose or too aggressive while other bad players are too weak or too tight. It's hard for me to tell what kind of bad player we have based on only a short stack. I guess that's the point of most of my posts. Just sucks to always say "it depends". Off to go play some now, wish me luck. Nice discussion all.

Without more knowledge or the villain,it's a close decision either way. So no huge mistake in calling or folding. Embrace the variance and call or play it safe and fold. I'm always calling because I hate short stacks on my right and either way he's unlikely to be short after the hand.

Vs 100 BB stack readless I would fold. vs this its somewhere ~0 EV.

Against a half stacker and blind vs. blind this is a mandatory call without a very solid read. If you are using a HUD, and the Villain is a huge nit, who have only been 3-betting 2% over the last 500 hands, you can find a fold. But against the typical random 2NL half stacker you should beat him into the pot. JJ is very near the top of his range. He will also show up with A5 offsuit, pocket 2`s and all sorts of other random crap.