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September 15, 2015
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Played a live $20 $2k guarantee yesterday at a club in my neighborhood. There were 48 players and by this point we were down to 14. Top 7 get paid.
8000/4000/500
i had about 40k left in the small blind, which is 5 bb or 2.5 M. I’m one of the shortest at the table. Probably somewhere around 11/14 overall. The big blind has about 65k. I had a played with him for a couple hours earlier at a different table and he just got moved to my left at this table. He is competent but not a real strong player. A little loose perhaps, but he also claims to have mucked queens earlier to a shove from aces. I was glad to see him show up next to me. My image has been solid TAG throughout, never limping, always showing down real hands. There are 7 players at our table and it folds around to me in the sb and I have K8d and quickly decide to shove. Chances are good I have the best hand here. Unfortunately for me he picked up A6o and eliminated me from my the tournament. Now I want to analyze this situation and see if my shove was a sound play that just happened to be unlucky or I should have looked at a few more hands before shoving.
Against any 2 pf K8s has 58.5% equity, but he’s not calling with any 2.
I used slice to put together an assumed calling range of anything that is tied or ahead of me. Any pair, any ace, k8or better, and throw in QJ as well, which comes out to 27.6% of hands. That entire range has 60.8% equity against my K8s.
SO, he is folding roughly 72% of the time and of the times he calls with this range I will still manage to win 39% of the time. .72 + (.276*.39)= 82% of the time I’m winning this pot. 72% I win the blinds and antes for 15500, 10% I double up plus antes for 43500, and the remaining 18% I’m out of the tournament.
(.72*15500)+(.10*43500)+(.18*-40000)= +8310 ev
Seems like I made the right play, a positive ev play, and 82% of the time I’m still alive and running. Just got unlucky.
Perhaps this is a standard spot but I just wanted to work through this in front of you all and see if I’m thinking about it correctly. Thanks for your input.
Super fun tourney btw, can’t wait to get back and do it again.
February 20, 2015
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Were there rebuys and/or addons? If not, that’s quite an overlay, and I regret not playing while I was there 2 weeks ago 🙂
TPE Pro
August 25, 2012
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K8s is a very comfortable shove here. You’re getting called by worse fairly often – in fact, if your opponent is only calling with 27.6% of hands, they’re calling incredibly tightly. Your logic in calculating the EV of the play is mostly correct (although “winning the pot 82% of the time” is a misleading number, you threw me off including that one – adding the times he folds to the times you get all-in and win doesn’t really serve any purpose), but with short-stacked spots like this it’s dangerous to make too many assumptions about your opponents’ calling ranges, since players can make some pretty unpredictable decisions at short stack depths.
I would recommend getting yourself a copy of HoldemResources Calculator or ICMIZER and doing regular work on push-fold ranges. If you’re not yet at the point where shoving hands like this becomes second nature to you, then I imagine there are some other spots where you would probably be surprised how much EV you’re giving up.
If you’re curious, I ran this scenario through HRC with the stacks and blinds you mentioned, and the Nash equilibrium/GTO/unexploitable shoving range for you in this scenario is 75.9% of hands. That obviously includes a huge number of hands way worse than K8s. Your opponent should be calling 67.7% of hands in this spot – if he does, K8s has an EV of +1.44bb, and if he calls with that 27.6% range, you make +1.27bb. So when he calls tighter, you actually win fewer chips, because he’s no longer calling with all of the hands weaker than K8s which he should be snap-calling here. If he really is only calling 27.6%, you can shove any two here – even 32o makes +0.89bb.
September 15, 2015
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Yeah there were 2 live rebuys and a $10 $5k add. I think the prize pool ended up being $2800 or so. It’s a $1k guarantee Mon-Thurs and $2k Fridays.
September 29, 2012
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That’s a standard shove spot. Although, you should be getting called wider than 28%. BvB the SB should be shoving almost any two cards here. At least almost any two, save for the worst hands. If we set with the top 70% of hands the BB needs 38.5% equity to cal. Using the hand range calculator in Equilab the BB can call with almost 68%:
22+, A2s+, K2s+, Q2s+, J2s+, T2s+, 95s+, 85s+, 75s+, 65s, 54s, A2o+, K2o+, Q2o+, J3o+, T6o+, 97o+, 87o
For what it is worth, if the BB is only calling off 28% of all hands, the SB can shove ATC profitably. Here is the equity calculations for 72o with only top 28% call:
(72% * 15,500) + 28%[(83,500 * 28%) – 40,000] = 6506 cEV.
This is why against most BBs, the SB can shove any two cards. If they are better and will call off properly, you can still shove about 65% – 70% of all hands profitably.
September 15, 2015
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Thanks for that Matt. I’ve been wanting to dig into push/fold ranges lately and am quite curious about ICMizer. The new version looks like it has some pretty cool training capabilities. Just a matter of devoting a chunk of my poker study time. I will check out both of those programs.
What I have a hard time understanding in my thinking about shoving those ranges is how/when to employ that strategy. Regardless of what the calc says putting my tournament life on the line with the bottom half of that 75% shoving range seems pretty careless is it not? If I’m really picking spots I suppose I can see it I suppose, but I feel my shove there with K8s is pretty defensible whereas leaving the tournament on an 85o shove feels like a mistake.
Perhaps work with the software will help me understand.
TPE Pro
December 6, 2012
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Why do you care what cards you have when you bust? Do you get a prize for busting with a “respectable” hand? I would argue that the truly careless thing is forfeiting chips because you have some arbitrary notion about what constitutes a “real hand”.
September 15, 2015
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Isn’t it common practice to review your bust out hand and judge your final decision heavily based on how much equity you had? Would you feel better about having 44% than 38%? Using that to assess if you shoved in a good spot doesn’t seem arbitrary to me.
TPE Pro
December 6, 2012
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I don’t mean to discourage the review that you did it here, I think it’s very good and it seems like you learned something from it. I was referring to the last paragraph and in particular “Regardless of what the calc says putting my tournament life on the line with the bottom half of that 75% shoving range seems pretty careless is it not?”
TPE Pro
August 25, 2012
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PDX,
Be very careful not to mix up the definitions of ‘equity’ and ‘EV’. Reviewing your equity when you bust out of a tournament is a useless exercise – there are plenty of spots where the equity of your hand could be 0%, but if your opponent is folding to your bet 90% of the time then you don’t need any equity to make it a very +EV play. You want to be reviewing the EV of your plays, the way you did in this thread, because equity is just one factor that contributes to the EV of a decision, and it does not have any inherent value.
I think what Andrew is pointing out is that if shoving 75% of hands is the most profitable way to play a spot, then there is no part of that 75% range with which it is ‘careless’ to bust out of a tournament. It’s never ‘careless’ to make the most profitable play you can make in a specific situation, so don’t get caught up trying to categorise which hands it’s acceptable to bust out of a tournament with or not.
In answer to your question, having 44% equity rather than 38% wouldn’t make me feel better or worse. The only thing those numbers are useful for is consoling yourself with how unlucky you were after taking a bad beat. It’s using those numbers to figure out the most +EV play in a given situation that matters most, and if you’re making the most +EV play, then there’s no such thing as ‘careless’.
You’ll have to get used to busting out of tournaments with weak hands. There will be times in future where you bust out of a tournament holding 72o, but if it’s the most +EV play, you have no reason to worry. Heck there will be times where you bluff-shove the river and get snapped by quads, but as long as the villain was folding often enough to make the bluff +EV based on your interpretation of their range, it’s all good.
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