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Interesting spot with KJs
Came across an interesting spot in a live $80 buy in tournament yesterday. Blind levels 100-300, 20 minute levels. UTG raise to 1000, HJ call, CO call and I look down to KJs on the BTN. I’m the effective stack with 16 bbs(unfortunate cooler hand previously, lol), other stacks are in the 50-75bbs range. I end up folding, mainly due to the UTG raise and they had been playing fairly tight. Ran it through Floptimal and very interesting results when adjusting stack sizes. What would you do in this spot?
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3 Replies
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I’m going to jam here for a few reasons.
First — In the early stages of a low buy-in live tourney, I’m not going to give a UTG open the credit it deserves. I think people play way too many flops in the early stages and everyone has way wider ranges.
Second — We are looking for a spot to get our chips in the middle and this squeeze spot feels perfect for that. For the same reason above, these callers should have pretty wide ranges that are very much capped. Jamming into them should generate a lot of folds. We want to be able to go after that dead money.
Third — If I just call, even though I have position, it’s going to be us to play this off of a short stack. Many times we are going to call, miss the flop and have to fold in a multi-way pot. And playing off of 16 BBs with this approach can lead you to playing a 13 BB stack, then a 9 BB stack, and then out of the tourney. I’m not going to slowly bleed away in the early stages of a tourney. -
Thanks for the feedback Taylor. Very interesting when I ran the scenario through Floptimal. Very different depending on the stack size. At 15bb is a pure fold, at 20bb is a pure jam, at 25bb is mostly a jam with some calls and at 30bb is mostly calls with some jams. At the time I had to really think about it and was caught between the fold or jam. Deciding factor on folding, definitely not scientific, was that the poker room was short on dealers that day and long waiting list to get back in the tournament. If that was not the issue I have no problem jamming in the same spot, especially if I was in the 15-
25 bb size.
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Part of the thing to remember about these charts like Floptimal, GTO Wizard, Range Trainer Pro etc. is that they are mostly assuming equivalent stacks. This can get really weird in multiway spots. So like it is hard for it to compute this at 15bb because you really shouldn’t be getting multiple callers if everyone had 15bb stacks. The best way to analyze this spot yourself is to run it in a program like HRC (Hold Em Resources Calculator) and then adjust ranges as you see fit. I’ll try to run this sometime when I have a chance.
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