$225 NL HE MTT: Calling shove in BB

[golangpher]

Game

Hold'em

Game Format

No Limit

Table Format

MTT

Buy-in

225

Currency

$

Hi there!

Would like anyone’s opinion on how I played this hand.

I’m in the big blind with 12BB with pocket 9s. Blinds are 4k/2k with 4k ante. It folds around to BTN who’s the second in chips, and Villain jams for roughly 35BB.

From my experience Villain wouldn’t shove a pocket pair Ts+, so I put her on a drawing hand:AK-AT

I end up calling, villain shows AKo and ends up flopping an ace to knock me out.

Was this the right move here?

 

[golangpher]

one more factor: top 8 gets paid, there were 13 ppl left at this moment.

 

[pentazepam]

Snap call - unless you are against a total ultra-passive nit. Only five hands dominate you. And if the villain plays according to a GTO-Chart they often show with the lower pairs (22-66) and only mini-raise with the stronger ones. At least around 15BB. And on the button, they should shove VERY wide when close to 10BB.

You're at worst a flip against (normal players) if they don't have TT-AA. And sometimes you totally dominate their lower pairs or when they just have one overcard (often an ace or a king).

 

[golangpher]

Thanks @pentazepam for the reply!

Any thoughts on the bubble factor? I had the same thinking as you, but I’m not as familiar with factoring in bubble and ICM.

Afaik, I was the second shortest stack at my table. There was another table of 7 ppl of unknown stack depths.

In retrospect I’m wondering if its ever better to just try to survive until I’m ITM.

 

[fundiver199]

Any thoughts on the bubble factor? I had the same thinking as you, but I’m not as familiar with factoring in bubble and ICM.

Assuming he was jamming for something reasonable like 14BB (he was not the effective stack - either you or SB was), then you are calling down to 44 or 55 at equilibrium. Folding 99 would be a significant mistake, so dont worry about the fact, you lost. If he made a long ball jam for 25 bigs or something, then we can typically not assume, he does this with his entire range, and we take a more exploitative approach and assign him a range manually. Then 99 is most likely still a call, but it could be the bottom of our calling range.

 

[pentazepam]

Thanks @pentazepam for the reply!

Any thoughts on the bubble factor? I had the same thinking as you, but I’m not as familiar with factoring in bubble and ICM.

Afaik, I was the second shortest stack at my table. There was another table of 7 ppl of unknown stack depths.

In retrospect I’m wondering if its ever better to just try to survive until I’m ITM.

In general, you should only consider surviving by overfolding if the money means a lot to you and you are very close to or on the bubble - or if it's a satellite mtt of course. I think you are in such bad shape and place that it would be hard to survive just by letting other people battle it out. And as you pointed out yourself indirectly there are only a few better hands you can wait for.

You should in general play for the win or at least the top three places in most MTTs since that makes up so much of the prize money.

Here is an article: https://upswingpoker.com/money-bubble-strategy/

And on this forum, we have Chris 'Fox' Wallace who wrote the book Short Stack Ninja and you can ask him questions here: https://www.cardschat.com/forum/general-poker-13/chris-fox-wallace-poker-pro-coach-495108/

 

[fundiver199]

In general, you should only consider surviving by overfolding if the money means a lot to you and you are very close to or on the bubble - or if it's a satellite mtt of course. I think you are in such bad shape and place that it would be hard to survive just by letting other people battle it out. And as you pointed out yourself indirectly there are only a few better hands you can wait for.

You should in general play for the win or at least the top three places in most MTTs since that makes up so much of the prize money.

Here is an article: https://upswingpoker.com/money-bubble-strategy/

And on this forum, we have Chris 'Fox' Wallace who wrote the book Short Stack Ninja and you can ask him questions here: https://www.cardschat.com/forum/general-poker-13/chris-fox-wallace-poker-pro-coach-495108/

Agree. In this situation Hero was the second shortest stack at his table, and 5 out of 13 players needed to bust, before he would be in the money. That count as being a short stack, and as a short stack we are not much affected by ICM. We are selected to bust next already, so we should play fairly close to chip EV. Which mean playing the same way, we would early in an MTT or in a cash game. We need to be a little bit tigther calling off a jam from players, that cover us, but not all that much.

In this particular situation even if Hero knew, he was against two overcards, it would still be a call due to pot odds. Its often called a "coin flip", but 99 is something like 55% to beat two overcards, and Hero only had to put in 11BB more to win a pot of 25,5BB. So in chip EV he only needed 43% equity, and depending on suits he had something like 55%. Thats a massive edge, which even the best players in the world can not afford to miss out on. The alternative to taking on such spots is to get completely blinded away, and more often than not this will also result in Hero not cashing.

 

[300HPGOD]

SB chip stack makes a difference here. If their stack is something like 20 BBs or more then the jam would be way tighter than if the SB stack is roughly what yours is since then, Button is really playing a 12 BB stack and then there are a lot of hands that could/would jam. I do tend to agree with you that I would discount AA, KK and QQ a little as villain would not want folds with those holdings but 12 BB effective stacks can still jam those. Where we are in the tournament makes a difference as well as if this is the stone cold bubble then you could fold assuming there are shorties although the stone cold bubble would/should make button jam wider so 99 is probably more of a call chip EV on the stone cold bubble then off it. In the end, I think we can discount AA-QQ a bit and we most likely are getting into a flip and with 12 BBs I dont see a problem with getting into a flip. There will also be some times villain has 88-55 here as well so I think this is a fairly easy call in your spot. For that reason (the 88-55) I think my cutoff here would 7's to call (6's would probably be right on the edge in my mind). With 6's on down there are less pocket pairs we are ahead of and more hands like A7 that we are flipping with where 99 would be way ahead of that hand.

 

[ADRI7HO]

What was the right decision depends on what your goal was, to reach ITM and thus be in the money, or to win the tournament, because for this you need to build a stack and for that you cannot miss such coinflip hands.
However, if the ITM is very close and only a few people really need to drop out, I might fold.
It is a difficult question, call is a good decision and fold is also a good decision, it just depends on the goal which one I would choose in this case.