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Squeeze Range vs. Oversized Open
Caesar’s Daily $150 tournament with $50 add-on. 20 min blinds.
With the blinds at 500/1000/1000 and about 25k behind we are in the BB facing a 3.5x open from LJ and SB caller. SB covers us. SB has gotten increasingly aggressive as the tournament has progressed. LJ is a limper so this open looks strong.
We look down at 33. Here are the options and their analyses:
– Call. This would be investing 10% of our remaining stack on a speculative hand. This is usually a no-no in tournaments. We want to keep speculative investments down to 5% or less of our stack.
– 3-bet. A properly sized squeeze play here would be for about half our remaining stack. Again a no-no. We want to invest no more than 30% of our stack on 3-bets in tournaments. If a properly sized 3-bet is more than 30% of our stack, we should jam instead.
– Jam. 33 just seemed too weak to jam 25bb against two players who opened and called for 3.5x with stack depths around the table dwindling into the 20’s.
– Fold. This was the only remaining option and is what I did.
Looking at Range Trainer Pro this would’ve been a GTO call against an unexploitably sized open of 2x. Also, a call in the BB against a 2x open would’ve met the <5% threshold for speculative hands. The 100 chips had already been raced off, so the next smallest sized open would be 2.5x. RTP doesn’t have a range for this kind of big 3.5x open at these stack depths.
About half of the players on my table were opening to that 3.5x size. It felt like I could blind away while watching my opponents trade chips with each other with their oversized opens.
What do you think of my analysis of the options here?
What would be our jamming range in this spot?
Should we tighten our ranges as I did when opponents are opening significantly bigger than a GTO bet size?
Besides tightening our own range at the risk of blinding away, how can we exploit these oversized opens with stack depths in the 20’s?
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2 Replies
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Correction, according to Range Trainer Pro this would’ve been an unexploitable raise or jam, not a call, against an unexploitable raise size of 2x.
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The only options here with 33 are fold or shove. So which one do I choose? I’m folding this so fast, the cards might hit escape velocity (and yes, FTR, I’d do the same with 55). One of the easiest players to play against is the limper who suddenly raises. And raises big too. We don’t have the odds to set mine, so eject, eject, eject.
Unless I start to see this player do this more, once I recognize a frequent limper, I am playing incredibly tight against their opens. So I am shoving KK+/AK. I’m likely flatting QQ/JJ and folding the rest. Is this exploitable? Of course it is, but frequent limpers who suddenly wake up and raise are the least likely people to exploit us at the table. They’re playing their cards, not you. If I fold TT and see them show like Qd9d at showdown, then I have to rethink my strategy.
More generally, you asked how do we exploit these oversized opens? Well now 33 comes back into the conversation. We just have to pick the right customer. The constant limper who suddenly opens big is a terrible customer. The frequent and increasingly more aggro SB is a great customer. If SB had opened to 3.5x from LP (instead of flatting the frequent limper), I’m jamming 33 all day. So we can still target these larger opens and accumulate chips through resteals, we just need to pick the right spots to do it.
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