$3.50 NLHE MTT: $$3.50 NLHE MTT: Interesting bubble spot

45 player SNG on stars. 8 left, pays 7. Shorty shoves and KJs is worth calling imo. Big stack bully is behind me and unless he has complete garbage he's getting involved (probably in with ATC).

Decided to just call the original shove and call the expected overshove from the big stack.

Small stack needs to win outright or he's out, maybe I win or maybe just end up catching something better than the big stack.

How would you play it?

Fold or jam it in, but i do not believe hero have enough fold equity vs bully. imo

Hero limp on SB is terrible. imo

After posting antes/blinds hero's stack was about 9BB (about 5200 chips) so basically it's a shove or fold. And since it's a bubble, the hand is mediocre and big-stack bully is on the left I'd just fold.

KJs has about 8% advantage over 50% range and about 16% advantage over 70% range - if you call the big blind effectively you are flipping so calling the big blind doesn't look like an option to me.

I'd probably fold to the big blind's shove since if you lose to the big blind and the short stack survives then you bubble whereas if you fold you are still alive and the short stack is still shorter than you.

I plugged everything into ICMizer. From a Nash perspective, your initial call is fine, but you should be folding to the bigger stack's jam. It's pretty relevant that you're on the bubble, and while I suppose you can factor in the utility of a min cash and decide you don't care much about the bubble, from a purely EV perspective it's just a fold.

Scourrge said:

I plugged everything into ICMizer. From a Nash perspective, your initial call is fine, but you should be folding to the bigger stack's jam. It's pretty relevant that you're on the bubble, and while I suppose you can factor in the utility of a min cash and decide you don't care much about the bubble, from a purely EV perspective it's just a fold.

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Hi Scourrge ,

Based on ICMizer a 3bet shove from our Hero here with KJs is it profitable;since we have on the BB the big stack? KJs blocks some hands but is it ok here to risk our tournament life?

Nice spot for discussion kcanuck

akmost said:

Hi Scourrge ,

Based on ICMizer a 3bet shove from our Hero here with KJs is it profitable;since we have on the BB the big stack? KJs blocks some hands but is it ok here to risk our tournament life?

Nice spot for discussion kcanuck

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Actually ICMizer has KJs as fine for the initial CALL (not for iso-jamming), which I found interesting. I am admittedly fairly new to using ICMizer so I want to play with it some more, but I believe it prefers the call because our call vs jam doesn't appear to change BB's continuing range much, and when he jams over our call we can still get away from some of our weaker holdings.

Scourrge said:

Actually ICMizer has KJs as fine for the initial CALL (not for iso-jamming), which I found interesting. I am admittedly fairly new to using ICMizer so I want to play with it some more, but I believe it prefers the call because our call vs jam doesn't appear to change BB's continuing range much, and when he jams over our call we can still get away from some of our weaker holdings.

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Thank you very much Scourrge for your answer

Thanks for the replies guys. I thought this thread had died a quick death and just saw the last few replies now.

Yes, bubbling would suck but not the end of the world if it happened. I guess I overestimated the strength of KJs vs big stack bully's almost ATC range.

I'm trying to incorporate more calling into my game as I was way too aggressive previously. Problem is, I'm now calling way too often. I'll figure it out eventually

We should be folding a massive part of our range imo.
KJs comes as a no brainer > after BB shoves
Our calling range should probably be JJ+ or something like that I think. This is just an assumption but it should be very nitty


tbh I'd even fold pre. BB is 600 there is no point in calling it cause the BB is gonna call anyway and it's hard to manage post flop with that stack size oop

If the BB is passive enough you can just shove pre