$1.75 NLHE STT Turbo: Bubble and ITM review, please :)

[MuscleMan76]

Ok, here's a history of a STT I played the other day, starting at the bubble and going to heads-up play.
I'm was happy with every move I made, but that doesn't mean that they were all correct.

I know that there's a lot of smart people here, so hopefully some of you can find the time to take a look at this.

It's always said that you have to review all hands, not just the losing ones. Also, we all can learn from peer review, so check out the link:

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/multihands.php/id/37041

 

[cjatud2012]

J5 - fold
QJs - should be a fold, you have to be pretty risk averse because of the shorty, and you still have 10bb's without antes. I think this is definitely a fold.
53o - obvious fold
J6o - yeah, gotta fold once that guy limps in front of you, if he folds to you it's pretty close imo, but ehhh I probably still fold.
72s - fold
74s - fold
98o - fold
J2s - good fold, at first I thought it might have been close, but the BB here is just never going to call narrow enough to make this a shove.
87o - fold, sucks but it's a fold
Q9s - fold
Q8o - fold
44 - shove
54o - fold
T7o - fold
ATo - ugh, this mega sucks but it's a fold. He's probably not pushing that wide, but even if he's pushing 100% this is the bottom of your range. You just have to be so risk averse with the way the stacks are. So if you fold here you still have 6bb's to work with, that is more than enough. Sick spot.
J3o - okay so now we've doubled up and we're even with the guy on our left. The player UTG has about 6bb's left and is about to hit the blinds, and the BB here is the huge stack. Obviously with J3o we fold this, but we're still pushing with an incredible tight range here. The reason for that is we're risking our entire equity to take down a pot that isn't going to help us finish ITM at all. It makes virtually no difference. And if we lose, obviously we're out. If somehow we were to win, we're now even-stacked with the BB, which is good, but not good enough to take an enormous risk here. So even if you know he's pretty tight (which you pretty much can never assume, since this is a $1.75 and he's got a huge stack), you can only push like 88+ and AJ in the best case scenario.
32s - fold, if it's folded to you this hand is obviously never a shove.
88 - whaaaa? Raising here kinda sucks imo. If you ever get 3-bet by the BTN or the BB, obviously you can never call, and even if you take it down, you only win t300, which as mentioned before doesn't really help us all that much. The only good thing that could happen here is if the SB does shove on top of us, we obviously get a pretty nice boost if we can knock him out, and while losing to him does suck (it'll happen 40-45% of the time), having ~t1700 chips left isn't that awful, even if we are in a virtual tie for last now. Shoving here is just as bad, we're risking everything to win a pot that doesn't help you at all. So folding is really our only option here. Anyway sick result.
T9o - there's probably nothing wrong with folding here, but I like a raise to t450-t500 here or a limp-n-go, depending on your read of the BB. At this point, now that we're in the money, we need to start setting ourselves to play heads-up, so we need to go into accumulate mode again, and I don't think raise/folding here is nearly as bad as it was in the previous hand with 88.
K8o - again this could probably go either way... Unless both of your villains are morons, which turned out to be the case here

I'm not gonna do the heads-up right now, maybe later, but here is some food for thought

 

[MuscleMan76]

Thanks CJ.
This is why i posted this, even though I thought everything was ok (though i got lucky a lot). I didn't realized I was putting myself in a lot of awful spots like this.

The 88 hand i knew that I had to fold to any 3bet by the two larger stacks, but I thought I could get them to fold, possibly looking really strong with the UTG raise.

But, thanks a lot for your input man. Heads-up was long as hell, so I don't blame you for not looking at it.

 

[WiZZiM]

QJs- Ask yourself these questions.

What do we actually gain here from making this shove, in terms of "equity"?
Does this change our "equity position" at all?
Do you think the SB will get involved with the BB here if we just fold?

ATo- Completely disagree with CJ that this is a fold. We're in a pretty bad stack dynamic right now. The huge CL seems to be giving walks to the other shortstacker, and we are not getting walks from the medium stack. He shoved on us twice now, and theres no way i'm folding a hand like this, even on the bubble. Basically, I feel like we need to make a call down like this soon, and i don't think we are ever going to find a better situation. With him being "tight", it's actually better for us, meaning that there will probably be a lot more Ax hands we dominate in his range as opposed to random cards. In any case, this is an easy snap call!

Oh, and we don't actually have to be risk averse, it's quite the opposite with the way the stacks are setup, we actually should be taking on more risks as we simply will not find better spots later in the tournament.

Hand#16

An alternate route to just folding vs this CL is to limp and go him. He seems like he is the type of player who is just passively sitting back waiting for the bubble to burst, so why not try and pick up some chips off the guy. Also, it won't severely harm our situation right now. we limp 100 and then bet out 200, leaving us with plenty behind if it doesn't work.

88- I think opening here is fine. Everyone seems tight enough. Though i'm likely opening for a smaller amount, as the only player we can call is the other shortstacker.

Hand #24
No way we can call this 3bet. We have a nice hand, we have position, but when we call here the pot is roughly 2k and we only have 3k behind. SInce we miss most flops we're basically donating this guy 600 chips a huge % of the time. This is either a shove or fold, usually 3betting ranges are going to be tight, so I don't expect to be ahead of much here, and we are dominated by a lot of hands in his range or mostly AX pairs and broadway.

Hand#28
Shoving in 15BB's here with J9o is more than a bit spewy. It may be close according to the NASH chart, but since our opponant isn't using NASH, there should be a better way to exploit him. With our stack size, I think i'd be opting to limp a lot of buttons and bet near 100% of flops, taking advantage of his passive ways postflop.


So all I can really tell about your heads up game is that you are playing far too tightly. We just need to play more pots in position really, our hand doesn't matter one bit, we just need to exploit our opponants. This guy seems to give us a lot of walks. So we need to capatalise on this by playing lots of pots in position. Since we had 15BB's for most of this HU so far, i'd be opting to limp and stab at flops a high % of time. If that fails, then we can just start shoving more often. We shoved in J9off with 15BB's, then later on folded J7off with around 12 BB's.

Hand#41
This is pretty horrible. The guy hasn't been raising wide at all, and has been giving us a lot of walks. K7s is ahead of none of his range, and dominated by a lot of it. He's never folding here so we are taking on a very negative expected value shove here. We got to this point by tight play, so we should have been chippping up before this point, so we don't feel pressured into making these bad plays.

Hand#42
Q9 is a monster heads up, come in for a raise now and put the pressure on this guy, exploit his tightness and chip up before you blind away!

Hand#46
There is no need to just open shove here, we have an absolute monster and we don't mind inducing this guy to do stupid stuff pre or postflop. I'd come in for a 2x or 2.5x raise here usually hoping he does something dumb and 3bets. By open shoving, we make a lot of worse hands like A2 and such fold, but if we just raise, they may 3bet shove on us.

Hand#52

We need to do WAY more of this when playing HU.

Hand#57

:icon_puke

Why are we re-stealing from a guy who is shown to be quite tight in his raising range, we rarely get him to fold, so we're essentially accepting a showdown with K4off vs a pretty tight range. To avoid making these shoves, shove or raise more from the button!

Hand#59

:icon_puke:icon_puke

Re-read above . His range is comprised of either pairs Ax or broadway hands. We are ahead of none of that.

 

[MuscleMan76]

Ok, thanks Wiz.

So, with the 88 would so say open with a min-raise? Or 2.25xbb?
Wouldn't something smaller that 2.5x look too strong? I guess that could be what I actually want, but wouldn't a steal not really improve the situation anymore?

As far as heads-up goes... Wouldn't me following NASH and my opponents not, lead to more profit? I would think that it would make them make incorrect folds and or calls in certain situations.

 

[WiZZiM]

Ok, thanks Wiz.

So, with the 88 would so say open with a min-raise? Or 2.25xbb?
Wouldn't something smaller that 2.5x look too strong? I guess that could be what I actually want, but wouldn't a steal not really improve the situation anymore?

As far as heads-up goes... Wouldn't me following NASH and my opponents not, lead to more profit? I would think that it would make them make incorrect folds and or calls in certain situations.

If we are using NASH, and we know our opponant has deviated from that (by shoving a tight range), then us calling with that same Nash range is just going to be a losing play. Nash is a defensive unexploitable set of ranges, which is really handy against very good players who are using a similar system. We don't have much of an edge against them, so we may as well just accept that and use NASH so we can't be exploited.

When we're up against players who have obviously deviated from the NASH, like villians shoving too tightly. If we call with that same Nash range we are basically lighting money on fire. So what we really want to achieve is to find an exploitative play against these villians.

 

[cjatud2012]

WiZZ, so the AT we need to call because of the bad stack arrangements, I can concede that, but then why is raising the 88 good? If we are raising 88 there because the players are tight, then why should we be pressured to make a -EV call with the AT?

(I don't know if that made any sense or not, lol, I just feel like putting money into the pot with the 88 is setting us up to get picked on by the big stacks, although they probably don't realize that they can pick on us)

 

[WiZZiM]

Calling with the AT hand is anything but "-EV". Most players do not call down wide enough in a lot of spots, using the rationale "i'd rather be the guy shoving than calling". While that has merit, you have to understand that by not calling wide enough, you are giving up a huge edge in these games.

Put it this way, let's say we have 1000 chips. To double up at 50/100, we need to shove it in like 6-7 times. So we risk our stack on each occasion. Usually when we are called, we are almost always behind due to wide range.

So let's look at the opposite side of things, calling down vs shovers. In this instance we take only the 1 time risk. We call, figuring we are either

A-Ahead of their range.
B-Getting good pot odds.
C-Lack of future situations.

So we call the once, and if we win, we immediately pick up 1000 chips, and it immediately boosts our equity. While we are guaranteed a showdown, out of the 5-7 times we shove we are also probably guaranteed a showdown at some point also.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[cjatud2012]

Very good points, yeah I think I'm fine with the AT. I think when I looked at it the first time I messed up something in SNGWiz, but yeah. I'm just still a little hung up on the 88 thing.

 

[WiZZiM]

I don't hate folding it. But it seems like we can pick up some value. We can call the other shorty easily, even if we call his shove and lose, we have around 1.6k which is more than enough FE.

The bigger stack doesn't seem to be doing a lot, so we can't really count on him to do his job. And we hate letting the other shortstacker shove wide onto the risk averse middle stack who seems super tight. So with all of that, i think opening is fine.

 

[cjatud2012]

okay fair enough, ty sir