I'll attempt to give you guys a little more info about what the best course of action is postflop. I just wrote out a half hour post in another thread, it's now 1.30 AM and i'm planning to go to bed. So with limited time, i'll use a nifty little program called "ICM Explorer". It's really handy software to get used to. I'll post screen shots as well.
So as for shoving or raising pre-flop. A shove is designed so we cannot make any more mistakes in the hand, and it has to be a +EV play. But is it the most profitable play? Let's try to find out.
Inducing
So I've used the "steal or induce feature" on ICM tools to get this information.
Equity before hand: 0.2814
Equity of a steal: 0.299
Failed steal, win: 0.3951
Failed steal, lose: 0.1207
Ties are worth 61.83% of a win.
Equity vs. marginal resteals needed to induce action: 65%
I'm not totally sure of how this works it out, so I'm going to attempt to find out.
But it's saying we need 65% equity to make inducing good against this player. This is of course a little bit better vs the shorter stack, and we have to fold it vs a bigger stacks shove everytime. So stealing i'm guessing we need at least that 65% equity vs our opponants range of hands. So i'm going to assign him a range of this
equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 61.605% 61.36% 00.24% 132384122 528373.00 { JcJs }
Hand 1: 38.395% 38.15% 00.24% 82309436 528373.00 { QQ+, TT-55, A7s+, KQs, ATo+ }
I don't really know if this is decent, if it's too tight or too loose. I've tried to find the loosest range i think is possible here, and with the dynamic of him losing to us earlier this seems ok, though realistically he should be very risk averse in this situation, it's rarely the case he is good enough to be aware of that fact. So against that range we are only 61%, which is good, but is it good enough to induce action? I don't really think so.
As for raise sizing, i think when we do raise pre-flop, it should be with the intention of having the shorter stacks shove with worse, and making it cheaper when the BB shoves over as we cannot call in that situation, ever, as we are the most risk averse player at the table. So i think 3x isn't a bad option, but i feel 7-800 would do the same job. Reads would change this, like if the BB will flat a lot from the BB, which would lead to us just shoving in the first place as our likely best option. Raising to 900-1000 makes it less likely that the shorter stacks will shove over, as they will likely feel that we are not going to fold.
So if we are planning to call the two shorter stacks, let's just work out if it's good for the biggest of the short stacks, we're obviously priced in to the other stack.
So again using our handy ICM Explorer tool i'm given this information for a raise size of 750.
Fold: 3125 chips, 0.2491, SD: $15.61
Win: 7185 chips, 0.3951
Lose: 1015 chips, 0.1207
Tie: 4100 chips, 0.2903
Equity needed: 46.81%
Chip odds: 34.2%
Risk premium: 12.61%
Chips gained by marginal call: 778.14.
Ties count as 61.83% of a win.
SD of marginal call: $17.52.
And this for a raise size of 900.
Fold: 2975 chips, 0.2421, SD: $15.65
Win: 7185 chips, 0.3951
Lose: 1015 chips, 0.1207
Tie: 4100 chips, 0.2903
Equity needed: 44.27%
Chip odds: 31.77%
Risk premium: 12.5%
Chips gained by marginal call: 771.54.
Ties count as 61.83% of a win.
SD of marginal call: $17.55.
So raising to 900 gives us slightly better
pot odds, but that isn't the whole story. Raising a bigger amount, i'd say leads villian to shove a tighter range, so it kinds of goes against what we want to achieve with a raise preflop.
So we need 44-46% to make this call. We easily have this after we make the raise, so calling is obviously fine, especially thanks to pot odds.
Shoving
We have got a decent stack here, we're comfortably in second place, but we're the most risk averse player at the table, and if we do shove, it's through the chip leader who's closing the action. Our stack is one that can hurt him significantly, so he should technically be fairly risk averse in this spot too. Since we have no real reads we're going to have to come up with a range of hands he might call a shove with.
QQ+, TT-99, AQs+, AQo+
Something like that is what i'd say he's calling with, however i could easily be totally off here, and it's quite possibly a little wider than that. Either way, i don't think a standard player is going to be calling us wide here too often.
So, i'll do a quick Table of equities when we shove and get folds, shove and get called by each of the players, and what happens when we win/lose vs those players, to try and get an idea of how much we are risk vs what we gain.
Ok so below is the chart i came up with. We can also use it to model the times above where we make a raise and lose or win vs the other stacks.
My first instinct was to just open shove this hand, as it's by far the easiest way to play it. On further inspection, I'm thinking that opening with the intention of calling a shove from the two short stacks really is our best option here. Raising to around 7-800 here would be my choice, it allows the BB to fold without feeling committed to calling, and we can easily call either of the two shorter stacks. Basically, we can avoid the losing part of the equation in the Chart by just open raising and folding to his re-shove. With more reads it could change my course of action to shoving instead of raising, like if the BB is a reg and might "own" us by just shoving over with a wide range, then i'd opt to just shove it in. Also if he tends to flat call out of the blinds it might make me lean toward a shove pre-flop.
Feel free to point out any errors in my logic above, I'm sure to make a few mistakes, but that's why we are all here (hopefully).
In case your unsure of what the table means.
SvBBW - Shove vs BB and we win.
SVBBL - Shove vs BB and lose.
The rest should be self explanitory. Let the discussion develop guys!
