Freeroll this morning

I was playing a freeroll this morning on PokerBros. top 4 get 25, and 5th gets 15. 700 entrants down to the final 14. I have about 330000, SB 20000, BB 40000. I am about 8th or 9th in chips. 7 handed, I get AK in the SB. Button doubles it to 40000. He had about 300000. I thought about smooth calling and seeing a flop and then folding if I dont hit, but i felt like he could be doing that with a bunch of hands, and if I jam AK i am only bad against AA or KK, and 7 handed very unlikely. I decided to Jam hoping he would fold and have about 400000 and move into the top 5. Turns out to be a bad play. He had Aces.

Did I make a mistake here, or was it just an unfortunate spot?

Easy jam with AK and 8.25 BBs. You have a top 5 hand, are short handed, and the pot is almost 42% (more with if there are antes) of your current stack. Going for the pot is your best play here. You have some fold equity with a shove to pick up the pot uncontested, but if you're called you have good equity against an open/call range. Even against a fairly tight range of 23%, AK is winning ~60% of the time.

Another thing to consider is there are still 9 players to bust before the money and you're in 8th position, so you need to build a stack in order to put yourself into a position to cash. Folding premium hands or calling/folding on missed flops is not how you do so. You can't be afraid of going bust with big hands, if it happens, it happens. That's just how it goes. Calling and folding if you miss the flop is a terrible play because a) you have a strong hand that needs to played for max value (especially as a short stack) and b) you're ahead of so many hands in BB's range that you want them to commit their chips. If you can get BB to commit their remaining 5 BBs preflop as a 60% favorite, that's great. What you don't want are a) allow BB to force you out of the pot as a short stack and b) you allow BB to fold their hand post flop and you lose 5 BBs in value. Besides, with 8.25 BBs and AK, calling shouldn't even be crossing your mind. It should be "how can I get all the chips in the middle"?

Don't get caught up in results as long as you're making the correct decisions.

KobeisBack said:

I was playing a freeroll this morning on PokerBros. top 4 get 25, and 5th gets 15. 700 entrants down to the final 14. I have about 330000, SB 20000, BB 40000. I am about 8th or 9th in chips. 7 handed, I get AK in the SB. Button doubles it to 40000. He had about 300000. I thought about smooth calling and seeing a flop and then folding if I dont hit, but i felt like he could be doing that with a bunch of hands, and if I jam AK i am only bad against AA or KK, and 7 handed very unlikely. I decided to Jam hoping he would fold and have about 400000 and move into the top 5. Turns out to be a bad play. He had Aces.

Did I make a mistake here, or was it just an unfortunate spot?

Click to expand...

Absolutely agree here ^ I think jamming AK makes a lot of sense given your stack size. You correctly thought of the hands that would beat you and it’s a limited range. It just happened that your opponent had aces.

It happens to anyone ever if you don't have confidence in your hand it is better not to go and wait for another hand since sometimes most players do that to steal the flop

Definitely the right call to jam it. Given your stack size... this was a no brainer. Just chalk it up to variance