$1 NLHE MTT Deep Stacked: Donk move or Playing to win?

[x2486]

Villian Stats (VPIP/PFR/AF): 30/28/38

The situation is, I'm in the Daily Dollar (First time I've ever played it) and I'm currently around 568 out of 724. I'm already into the second payout tier ($2.50) and the next one is at 710 players for another $0.50. Table has been pretty passive overall except for the big stack, and my stats are 21/13/24

Full Tilt - Daily Dollar (#212249337) - Blinds: 600/1,200 +150 Ante, No Limit Hold'em (9 players)
Full Tilt Hand Converter Tool from CardsChat.com
SB: t24,168
BB Villian: t60,453
UTG Hero: t19,545
MP: t6,175
MP+1: t3,442
MP+2: t5,097
LP: t2,880
CO: t8,845
BTN: t9,170
Pre-flop: (t1,800) Hero is UTG and dealt K♠ J♣
Hero raises t3,600, 7 folds, Villian raises t8,800

I've been at the table with Villian for 40 hands and he's stolen my big blind three times, but has not had a showdown with anyone. Tournament leader is at about $180,000, average stack is $42,000, top prize is $1,599. Do I take a gamble here, or wait and try to play against the smaller stacks?

 

[PattyR]

if its me im waiting for a better hand here than KJ...even if hes been stealing....i dont like flipping with at least A high...just my opinion though

 

[Falloooooon]

I have to agree that KJ is not what I'm looking to go to battle with in this spot. Mentally, I also hate having to just fold there and feel like I just spewed 20% of my stack for nothing, but that's how it goes sometimes. And if you get a couple opportunities to steal against those smaller stacks behind you, you can get it back pretty quickly.

 

[cjatud2012]

Well there is about t2500 in the pot pre-flop (the hand converter has some issues with the antes so the t2800 it displays is incorrect), so that means you have to figure out what your # of adjusted bb's is. So you multiply the pot by 2/3, which gives you an adjusted bb of ~t1700. So that means you have about 12bb's in your stack.

Raise/folding with this stack size is a horrible horrible horrible idea. So really your only two options here are to open shove or just fold. From UTG with a pretty weak hand like KJ this is would be an easy fold.

But since you've raised and now have been 3-bet, you have a new decision to make. It's very hard to imagine that the villain is going to fold to your 4-bet, so you have to consider his bet as an all-in bet, imo. Which means You're calling ~t16000 to win a pot of ~t22000, which means you need around 42% equity to make the call/4-bet. This part is going to depend on what range you put your opponent on - here's how you look against a 6.5% 3-bet range, which is fairly wide:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 35.617% 35.18% 00.43% 44580101 550785.50 { KsJs }
Hand 1: 64.383% 63.95% 00.43% 81028824 550785.50 { 88+, ATs+, KQs, AQo+ }

So this is probably a fold, which sucks because you've put in ~15% of your stack already. That's not something you ever want to do.

 

[x2486]

Thanks for the responses so far.

So the clear consensus is to fold here, but I was wondering if there was some kind of ICM calculation that would be useful here. I understand the basics, but haven't really studied it yet, and everything I can find so far only applies to bubble play and final tables.

In this situation, I'm already getting a payout of $2.50. I can fold and be assured of an additional $0.50 at the next tier, but I'd have to get pretty lucky to get much more. If I double up here, my stack is right about at the average for the tournament, and I have a pretty good chance of making it to $5.00 or better. Obviously it's difficult to put accurate odds on the various outcomes, but if I assume that I get an extra $0.50 if I fold, $0.00 if I call and lose, and $2.50 if I call and win*, it seems to me that I'm getting the equivalent of 5:1 pot odds in favor of calling, and I'd be +EV against everything except pocket Aces.

Is this reasonable, or am I missing something?

*(to make things easier, I'll assume that the chances of going out before the $5.00 level are offset by the chances of making it even deeper into the money)

 

[cjatud2012]

I'm not sure I completely understand where you're trying to go with those calculations, but there pretty much are zero ICM considerations here - you're pretty much looking only at cEV. Your goal should be to make final table, which is probably obvious but yeah.

 

[x2486]

I'm not sure I completely understand where you're trying to go with those calculations, but there pretty much are zero ICM considerations here - you're pretty much looking only at cEV. Your goal should be to make final table, which is probably obvious but yeah.

I don't know myself if my first attempt at the math was valid, but here's another crack at it that I think is pretty much in line with the ICM:

After Villian's re-raise, my stack is t15,945, so if I fold, I'll have .0547% equity in the unclaimed funds which works out to $4.02.

If I shove, get called, and win, my stack will be t41,040 which gives me .1408% equity or $10.35. (these values are on top of the $2.50 that I've already earned)

So from those values, it seems that I only need to win about 39% of the time (or less since there is a slight chance that Villian could fold) for this to be +$EV. Maybe KJ isn't good enough for that, but Villian could be playing a fairly wide range here.

 

[cjatud2012]

Oh okay I think I get it what it is you're doing now - if I do understand then I'm not sure if you're actually calculating your equity correctly. Are you looking at the percentage of total chips you have? How are you then converting that to a dollar amount?

I may be mistaken but typically ICM requires that we have more hand equity than cEV tells us, not less. Here, from what I calculated before (which assumed he was putting us all-in), we needed about 42% equity, and now you've determined that you only need 39% equity. So it just seems backwards to me. Lemme think about this some more - I agree that we should be taking risks because we want to reach final table, but I don't think this tells us why, if that makes sense.

edit: okay, I think I see what you've done - you multiplied the percentage of chips you had by the amount of money left to be paid out? That may or may not be a good model, I'm really not sure. I know for STT's the calculation is wayyyy more complicated than that, but this far away from the big pay jumps the number may converge.

 

[x2486]

...you multiplied the percentage of chips you had by the amount of money left to be paid out? That may or may not be a good model, I'm really not sure.

Yes, that's what I did. At this point, over 300 people have already been paid, and everyone remaining gets at least $2.50, so it seemed to me that any calculation should only be concerned with the undecided money.

I know for STT's the calculation is wayyyy more complicated than that, but this far away from the big pay jumps the number may converge.

I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but I don't know if that invalidates the results. Both the chip distribution and the payout structure are pretty linear in this section, so the numbers could be off, but the relationship between them should still be the same... or maybe I'm completely off base here. :hmmmm:

All of the calculators I've seen only handle 10 places, but for large MTT's the distribution of chips makes a nice log curve with about 7% of the field remaining, so it may be possible to get useful results just from knowing the top stack size and the number of players left. I'll have to think a bit more about this.

Spoiler

In any case, if you haven't guessed, I shoved, Villian shows . Jack on the flop :icon_thum, blank turn, Queen on the river finished me off.

Obviously I couldn't do this much calculating during the hand, but my thinking with the preflop raise was that I could fold if I saw shoves by multiple opponents, but call if i was heads-up. I probably would have folded if just the SB shoved since he was tighter and would have almost nothing left if he lost. BB was looser and had less to worry about from a loss, so I thought his range was fairly wide.

 

[HomeBrewer]

Pretty sure you just need to find a way to dump a VERY marginal hand like KJo preflop, especially from UTG. You will avoid all of these sticky situations.

 

[cjatud2012]

Hah, whoops, didn't even realize it was offsuit. That makes it even closer to a fold obv.