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sorry for the wall of text guys, but this site's discussion capabilities are absolutely amazing. you just don't see the friendly educative atmosphere elsewhere.

Last night, a friend was sweating me in a one table turbo mtt and we got into a heated discussion on bubble abuse. Average stack on the bubble in this 10 dollar tourney is 15bb and there are easily 50 people with under 10bb stacks. stalling by shorties has only really lasted a few hands as stacks are pretty shallow everywhere, but it's clear to the table we're approaching the money. the very final hand before bubble broke, a guy playing i think like 30/10 is in the sb with 20bb, an inactive bb with 10bb (he's waiting obvs) and me on the button with 35bb, and blinds go up within one orbit.

there are at least four stacks at my table with under 10bb stacks. i don't have the hh on me at work though ugh. mincash is the biggest jump for a long long time. my plan here is to play 100% of hands because this person isn't a reg. like i'm shoving any two cards except for inducing action. this is highly exploitable but not by someone that doesn't know me, which means i am not worried about that at all. i hadn't done any math because i just felt this was such an easy spot to pressure someone who would immediately be able to realize that clicking the fold button means money and clicking the call button means bustout potential. my friend was way flabbergasted so we pulled up pokerstove to do some math. he argued for what i thought was a really wide calling range, which was 13.5% hands i remember. he had like 55+/A9o+ type stuff and I just don't see a villain on the stone bubble calling with small pairs or medium aces. i tried saying i think they're folding AJ sometimes even. im at work so i can't open pokertracker to actually check this, but i just can't see their calling ranges on the bubble being that wide. it goes against how they're playing already…like theyre playing to make it to the money. it's how the bubble works for anyone who doesn't really know a lot about poker that still plays. i don't see someone folding for 15 minutes on the bubble only to snap off to get knocked out with like 77 there. even assuming his calling range, i remember we came out to like negative 1bb or something close from shoving 92o (what we had at the time) 

32.5x.85= 27.625

40x.23x.15= 1.38 (ttl 29.005) 

so it's about -1bb from just folding. but if we take out 55-77 and A9o-ATo, like it gets way closer. the chips we gain in fold equity as we eliminate hands is proportionate to the chips we lose when we get called. that's probably not how i meant it, but here- as we increase our fold equity, we lower the amount of times we calculate lost chips from being called. an increase in 4% fold equity (removing just a few hands) gives us a decrease of 4% to his calling range, meaning the negative aspects of shoving happen lower amount of times. this kinda stuff may be obvious to you or some, sorry if i'm pandering. anyway, I'm not even necessarily against taking -ev spots if it keeps the pressure on opponents. I feel it has potential to do more on a continuum than a vaccuum can present. clearly if this were simply a math problem, it's negative so folding is better than shoving. however, i think we can eliminate some of that calling range. anyway yea. it was really neat to discuss this. what do you guys think?