$5.5 NL HE MTT: A5o on BN hunting for BB bounty

[Andyreas]

Game

Hold'em

Game Format

No Limit

Table Format

MTT

Buy-in

5.5

Game Options

1. Bounty

Currency

$

Hey forum,

I'd like to get some feedback on this hand/situation:

Game is a PKO MTT with a buy-in of $5.50. We just entered ITM with 19 players left (20 places paid).

I'm ranging 10/19 chip wise and payout is pretty flat to 10th position and then the payouts start to rise.

BB is sitting out and forced auto all-in with a bounty of 5$, so the direct payout would be $2.50.

It folds to me on BN with A5o and having 22.7 BBs left. SB has double my stack and has been playing many hands recently.

What should hero do?

There are other players at the table which I have covered but all bounties are within the same range.

I decided to jam to not have SB call with complete junk and get lucky and to not 3-bet jam on me making me fold. Was the potential win worth the risk?

As you might imagine SB ended up calling with A8o busting me. Interestingly BB even won the hand with T6s. 😅

I'm just wondering if I played it right and what do you say about my thinking?

 

[Nafor]

Think of it this way. If you had won that hand would you be asking this question?
Knowing with how wide range the SB had been playing might have made some difference but going against only two players with A5o doesn't sound that wrong to me.

 

[puzzlefish]

Can we call this type of runout the rat trap?

I think the bigger consideration here is ICM and whether this measly $2.50 bounty is worth the risk of running into SB waking up with a hand that they would also be calling or jamming with. We are 10th after all and probably still a lot more poker to be played all the way to the final table, where the bounties and prizes get juicy.

 

[fundiver199]

The bounty essentially acts like an extra ante. So to decide our strategy we need to convert it to chips or big blinds. If it was only worth 1BB, then it dont warrant a huge adjustment in strategy, but maybe we can raise a bit bigger like 3BB or 3,5BB to not give SB a cheap look at the flop. If the bounty was worth 5BB, then there was enough in the pot already to justify jamming with a good risk/reward. In the beginning of the MTT, a 2,5$ bounty would be worth half a starting stack. So 2.500 chips if you started with 5.000 chips.

At this stage some of the price money and bounty money had already been distributed, so chips are worth less. If 30% was distributed, then a 2,5$ bounty was worth 2.500 / 0,7 = 3.600 chips assuming a 5.000 chip starting stack. In real time we cant do a 100% accurate calculation, but it is important to at least have some idea, if it was like 1BB or 5BB. And the way to find that out is to know the blinds and the starting stack. If the starting stack was 5.000, and the blinds now 1.000/500, the bounty was worth around 3,6BB.

 

[Andyreas]

Think of it this way. If you had won that hand would you be asking this question?

Of course hard to tell but potentially not. Sometimes I'm certain to have taken the right decision but ended up being unlucky which doesn't make me post here either. Rarely but sometimes also the exact opposite situation.

And then there's all sorts of grey and this was one of them for me. 🤓

We are 10th after all and probably still a lot more poker to be played all the way to the final table, where the bounties and prizes get juicy.

Fair point!

Can we call this type of runout the rat trap?

Haha yeah maybe we could. 🤪

In real time we cant do a 100% accurate calculation, but it is important to at least have some idea, if it was like 1BB or 5BB. And the way to find that out is to know the blinds and the starting stack.

Thank you! I'll try to keep that in mind next time! Guess I won't do quick enough to do that though. 😅

Guess in my case the bounty was worth indeed only around 1 BB, which then makes my move -EV. 🤔

 

[puzzlefish]

In the end, the cheese was not worth the risk of getting smashed by the kill bar.