I'm curious to know what other people's "epiphany" in poker was and how they came to find it.
For me, it was shoving against the blinds or blind on blind when short stacked. I was reviewing some hands with a friend and I had A8o in the SB with 18bb and the BB has 11bb. It's folded round to me and I folded. My friend says this is a really easy shove and explains that:
- We're only 11bb effective, not 18bb
- BB folds waaay to many hands here
- We're ahead of plenty of his calling range and in reasonable shape against almost all of his range except AA and better Aces
- Even when we're behind we're still going to win a reasonable % of the time
I immediately put it into practice and the results were phenomenal. Those mid-run cashes are suddenly regularly becoming final tables, just last week, I played 12 tournaments, cashed 6 and FT'd 3, including a 2nd and a 3rd.
I've stopped bleeding out when getting to the latter stages of tournaments and going out with a whimper, now I'm making really deep runs, often with a much bigger stack and with such a simple and easily implementable change.
I look forward to hearing your enlightened moments.
I cant really think of any similar moment for myself, which is worth sharing. But its good to hear, you discovered and plugged this leak. And if you open folded A8o blind vs. blind, that was for sure a massive one, because that is just waaaaaay to tight. We dont always have to open jam, even with 11BB effective, but we need to at least enter the pot with a lot of hands to fight for those blinds and antes. We cant just give our opponent a walk with 90% of hands, when stacks are short enough to at least open shove, if no other line is profitable.
Just to illustrate, how much to tight this is, even in chip EV mode, which mean, that we completely ignore ICM, the Nash equilibirum blind vs. blind for 11BB effective with a total ante of 0,8BB is SB open jamming 67% of hands and BB calling 48%. If we add ICM-pressue, then the BB calling range will become narrower, when they are the effective stack, and this allow the SB jamming range to become even wider, because then obviously SB pick it up uncontested more often, and this decrease the importance of having a strong hand when called. But if we just stick with the 67%, which is the tightest, we should ever play in this situation, then it even include hands as bad as 43s and J7o.
But I think, I know, why you and maybe many other play to tight in this situation. And the reason is, it feel "stupid", when we open jam some kind of bad hand like the ones above, or even a hand like A8o, and then we get snapped off by AQ and lose a big chunk of our stack. It even happens, that someone send throwables at me in situations like these, presumably to tell me, that I got, what I deserved.
But if I check the spots in ICMizer afterwards, then more often than not I was just playing good solid poker and happened to run into the top of BBs range. So we need to get rid of that feeling, that its a mistake to open jam a hand, which is not in the upper 5%, if we then get called by better and lose. Its baked into the math, and with a hand like A8, you are not even behind when called, if your opponent defends correctly. Its more of a coinflip situation, where your overall
equity against his calling range is very close to 50%.
