Live Tournament: AK o vs. KK/AA

[rsimms]

I was playing live not long ago in my usual game, I had AKo somewhere in mid position, I raised an unraised pot with limpers, ~ 4 x BB, folds to the BB who went over the top 2.5 x my raise. Tournament is past buy-ins, middle stages where blinds were becoming significant, but not yet near the bubble.

I looked over the raiser, an extremely tight player, similar stack sizes and he appeared genuine in his strength, so I put him on AA/KK (afterwards he said KK, I believe him). I tanked for a bit and then laid it down. I'm not sure if this is the correct move or not. The call would have made me pot committed and I figured I would be a significant dog.


Any thoughts? I was thinking about lowering my initial pre-flop raises in the future but in this game there are a lot of loose callers and draw chasers.

 

[Alex Houngan]

I once in live tournament played 3bet with AK, BB raised , i call and saw flop 462.
opposer all-in, i call AK<63.

 

[canabero]

you need to give the most important info: the blinds you have. stack managing is the most important thing in tournaments. hands like AK can be played agresive only if your stack is low or if your stack quite strong in comparison with villian, so in this situation you can pay without high risks.

 

[x2526pav]

If there is a stock of chips, then you can aggressively play

 

[rsimms]

you need to give the most important info: the blinds you have. stack managing is the most important thing in tournaments. Hands like AK can be played agresive only if your stack is low or if your stack quite strong in comparison with villian, so in this situation you can pay without high risks.

KK guy had me covered. My bet was ~4 bb, his bet was ~10bb and would have left me with around the same as his bet, a little bit more maybe so I had a little more than 20 bb.

 

[Ryan Laplante]

Raise smaller preflop (to like 2.5bb tops!).

Trusting your read in spots like these can be tough, id certainly have not folded!

 

[rsimms]

Raise smaller preflop (to like 2.5bb tops!).

Trusting your read in spots like these can be tough, id certainly have not folded!

That's the adjustment to my game that I am making, adjusting my raise size to 2.5ish bb once I get past the early stages of a tournament. The standard raise you read in a lot of online articles and Pokerschool go with the 4 bb raise + 1 bb per limper, but I play with a lot of habitual high blind limpers with lots of family pots, so the I think the 2.5 bb raise will be nice enough to get the limpers to fold but not high enough so that if I get another read like that I can walk away without losing too much of my stack.

I know it may very well be weak, but this player is one of the tightest at the table, you'd have to see him. He has a lot of ticks and tells I try to read and when he raised, I looked him over and he looked very genuinely strong.


If you played against a reg. that you had a confident read on AA/KK would you still go in with AK?

 

[Masi2197]

Sometimes it's better to fold than to lose a lot of chips, maybe your position was not very good against a bigger bet, but a risk can be run on occasion

 

[Vadim Gurov]

you need to give the most important info: the blinds you have i call in any hand

 

[GoroAdachi]

if calling would have made you pot committed, you should have open shoved and hoped he would have folded maybe JJ or similar. Sometimes tight players use their tightness to push a JJ to KK levels. Just my 2 cents.