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AQo With ICM Becoming a Factor
You are in last level of Day 1B of an $1,110 buy-in tournament. There are three Day 1’s and it looks like there could be around 2,300 entries total. There are about 120 left of over 800 entries today. You just sat down at your new table about an orbit ago. The blinds are at 3,000/5,000/5,000. Your stack is right around average. You are in the big blind and have 175,000 behind after posting the big blind and the big blind ante.
UTG is an older gentleman with about 50,000 and has not played a hand since you sat down. He’s been murmuring to himself, waiting for his spot. On this hand he jams.
UTG+1 has already called two jams since you sat down. One of them was with a reasonable hand but one was a sizable jam he called with A6s. He has about 300,000 and covers all but one at the table. He calls.
All but two of the remaining players cover you by a small amount. The action folds to you.
You look down at AQo. What would you do, and why?
I’ll give the results of the hand and what ICMIZER3 says about it after we have some discussion here.
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3 Replies
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Forgot to mention, the money bubble breaks at about 14%.
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Yuck, but without running this myself, I would fold in real time. In my experience, the murmering wait-for-his-spot guy’s range will be very tight here. Even with AQ, we’re not doing great against it and, maybe more importantly, it will often remove some of our needed live cards. While UTG+1 range may be wide, this is also an ideal spot for them to trap too. They should be flatting here with every premium hoping for someone to squeeze behind. Even if they’ve made some wide calls before, was it in this formation where they were such an early position player? If not, I’d still lean this call toward strength. And even if we can say with relative certainty that they’re flatting way too wide, and are far more likely to have a hand like Ad9d than AA, we still can’t eliminate those premium trap hands. The times they have it, this is a disaster.
I guess fundamentally I absolutely hate a flat ourselves here, even though we close the action. We’re committing nearly a third of our stack in a multiway pot that we can’t proceed with unless we hit it. And even when we do hit, we may still be behind, but can never fold. So this is a jam/squeeze spot for me or a fold. With the potential dead money in the pot, the squeeze is perhaps tempting, but again we don’t see any of it unless we beat the tight range of UTG.
I’m happily folding and picking a better spot.
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That’s what I did.
ICMIZER3 agrees. Our calling range here is very tight. QQ+, AK in equilibrium.
To my astonishment the initial jammer tabled 74s. The caller tabled TT so I patted myself on the back a little bit for my fold. I patted my back a little more after the flop. But the turn was a queen, so patting myself on the back got replaced with rolling my eyes.
I would’ve wound up bagging one of the biggest stacks in the tournament if I had called with AQo. But decisions are correct or incorrect BEFORE we see the cards.
Before Day 2 started the caller approached me and asked what I folded, and I told him. Then he used the word, “astonishment” to describe what he felt when the initial raiser tabled 74s – the same word I had in my head.
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