I think it’s definitely a fold on the river, and probably a fold on the turn. It might even be a fold preflop with two shorter stacks at the table – it’s really uncomfortable to fold a hand as strong as KQs preflop here, but there are very few good things that can happen to you postflop once you call given the effects of ICM, and some % of the time you’re going to have to fold it to a 3-bet anyway.

On the river, villain is presumably 3-barrelling with all his AQ, overpairs, flushes and sets for value, plus maybe 1 or 2 combos of Q9s, giving us the following approximate breakdown of their value range:

1 combo QQ

3 combos 33

3 combos 99

3 combos 44 (assuming 44 c-bets flop)

13 combos flushes (AcKc, AcJc, AcTc, Ac8c, Ac7c, Ac6c, Ac5c, Ac4c, Ac2c, KcJc, KcTc, JcTc, 8c7c)

3 combos KK

6 combos AA

2 combos AQs

8 combos AQo

2 combos Q9s

Giving us roughly 44 combos of value in their range, all of which is ahead of us. They could take this line with KQ I suppose, but it’s not going to be often enough for us to consider it much of a factor. Likewise they could 2-barrel 77, or fold 8c7c preflop, or fold some other flush combos preflop, but this is fairly accurate for now.

It looks like villain’s betsizing is giving us around 400k to call in order to win around 880k, so we’re getting slightly better than 2 to 1 odds. Theoretically we would need to be good around 31% of the time here in order to profit, but in actual fact since there’s a significant ICM effect here we would probably want this number to be closer to 35-40%.

Let’s be generous to ourselves and say we want to win 35% of the time here. For that to be the case villain has to have around 15-16 combinations of bluffing hands in his range, in conjunction to those hands he shoves for value (if he’s shoving anything worse than KQ for value then that counts here, but he’s almost certainly never doing that). If he shoves all of his AT, AJ and AK combos that include the Ac, then that’s 12 combos. If he shoves all his AK combos that include the Kc, that’s another 4, giving us 16 combos, which is what we need here, so technically if he’s 3-barrelling all those hands every time, we might be okay to call. He might even be opening a few combos of hands like KcJx or KcTx preflop, which gives him more bluffing hands, and he could even 3-barrel some JT combos.

However, the key is his frequency overall – he needs to be bluffing here with those combos with 100% frequency in order for him to have enough combos of bluffs for us to call. If he only bluffs each combo 50% of the time, suddenly he only has 8 bluffing combos, and we make a huge loss with the call. I think this means you’re going to need a very solid read on this player and his frequencies in order to make the call here.

You’re also going to need to think carefully about ICM – it’s true that if you call and are right here then you move up to a big stack, but as with many other spots, losing chips here costs you more than winning chips will gain you. It’s for this reason that I think I’m on board with folding turn – folding at that point preserves a stack that has a reasonably significant ICM value and a certain amount of cEV utility, whereas calling turn and folding river still leaves you in a tough spot where you’re going to have to make a lot of tight folds until the other short stacks bust. You also have to think that a big portion of his turn bluffing range is going to follow up on a lot of rivers, so we can anticipate a tough river decision, and it’s reasonably likely he would check turn with a lot of QJ/QT combos.

I also think my stating you needed 35-40% equity to call on river given ICM might be very generous – it could be closer to 50% given you’re calling off your stack. There’s no easy way to calculate postflop ICM decisions though so I can’t give you exact numbers on that.

Short version is, calling off on river might be good versus a villain who is bluffing a high frequency since he’s likely to have enough bluffs, but if you don’t have a high degree of confidence in this villain’s bluffing frequencies then I prefer folding preflop or turn even though it feels really awkward, because ICM dictates that it’s kind of suicidal to get ourselves into a big pot at this point, so we have to give up some good spots even though we might not want to. Of course, if villain is not actually bluffing this river at all then the call is really, really -EV, so that’s why this is such an awkward spot. At best, it’s slightly profitable, at worst, it’s suicide.

Sen said
Thank you for your input guys. Especially to you Matt, thanks for the detailed analysis.

You pretty much covered all the details, there is only one question left: You basically said calling with KQs might be slightly -$EV. So I wonder what do you consider the threshold to play in this spot (=average stack with two soon-to-bust lowstacks on a FT facing EP open from bigger stack). How about JTs, QJs, 22 – TT and ATs, AJo? These look like similar troublemakers to me on certain boards.

Getting away from AJo, ATs, JQs, JTs, 22 – 66 on most boards vs agression from villain shouldn’t be too difficult. But how about 88 – TT, AJs, AQo? Can you imagine folding these preflop in a spot like this against an EP open from a capable villain that has us covered? If not do you prefere 3bet or flat? My guess is 3bet, give up when facing strong calls or rereraise.

Thanks again for the in-depth response so far!

Given the stacks and positions, I think hands like 22-66 and virtually anything offsuit except AQo/AKo should pretty much be snapfolds here. It’s a very uncomfortable spot to have a flat-calling range and I don’t think it’s 100% necessary to have one at all.

With that in mind, we basically have to begin by deciding what the worst hand is with which we can profitably get it all-in here. I think it’s probably AQs or 99 in this spot. There’s some merit behind simply not having a 3-bet/fold or 3-bet/call range in this spot, and simply shoving for ~25bb with everything we’re happy getting all-in (except maybe our QQ+ if we think we can exploit the OR that way), since it ends up being a really bad spot for us if we’re the one calling it off with mediocre equity, but if we have a bunch of fold equity on our side then it ends up being a lot better. Of course, if villain’s range for calling it off is the same as their range for 4-bet shoving versus a 3-bet, then we end up simply saving chips by 3-bet/folding certain hands, so the tradeoff might be worth it. There’s no concrete answer without running the spot through HoldemResources Calculator or ICMIZER.

If it’s a weak table then you can probably get away with flatting KQs/AJs/88 here, maybe even 77 or QJs/JTs if everyone behind is super tight. Otherwise, I’d be inclined to simplify things by either shoving or folding. Given that we are 6-handed, I think we might be okay shoving 88 or AJs too now that I think about it. Maybe even KQs, tough to say. Bottom line is that we have to be flatting extremely tight, though, and not flatting anything at all is probably fine. It would be a significant mistake to think about VPIPing here with 22 or something similar, and ATs/AJo are not far behind. 3-bet/folding here is likely to be better than flatting with almost any hand you could pick, and since we can’t 3-bet/call much here, we can’t 3-bet/fold much either without being super unbalanced.