It would be helpful to know all the stack sizes and positions at the table, what size your open was, and any reads/payout information you have. Also it is a bit confusing that you say you’re in 8th place of 8 but facing a 16BB shove with 19BB.

Without any additional info, if you are 8 of 8 you’re probably incentivized to gamble a bit. I don’t know if I’d be raising KQs UTG+1, would depend a lot on how I felt the table was playing, but once you do I think this is a call considering that its a PSKO.

The Riceman said  Why esp. in a PSKO does this make for a more solid call than if it were a regular FT?

Two reasons mainly. Villains should be isolating you wider to get your bounty, so KQs fares better against their range. The second reason is a little more ambiguous, but probably more important. At the majority of PSKO final tables, a lot of the bounties will be larger than the payjumps until 4th or 5th place. If we are short we can’t win any bounties, so doubling up gains a lot of value if it puts us in a position to start collecting bounties.

I really like theginger’s thoughts. I’m probably too nitty EP when shortstacked 9-7 handed, and I agree that it’s hard to form much of a strategy around folding 90%+ of hands.

As to raise/folding I will do it as low as 11bb from Hijack through Button against blinds that are passive and/or don’t defend really wide, and probably no lower than 13bb otherwise. Can’t say if that’s optimal, and my ranges still need a little tweaking, but I think it’s pretty effective. I’m still open-shoving a lot of hands at 20bb (and sometimes deeper), as I don’t want to invite looser calls/shoves with a hand like 66 or A7s.

I’m doing some off table work to see if I can build a limping strategy into my shortstack play, but it’ll be a long time before I can convince myself to try it out in game.

EDIT: If shoving 20bbs feels unnatural, it may help to use an app like SnapShove or go to https://www.max-value.com/resources/ and make a free account to get access to the Nash shoving chart. Shoving all of those hands is likely not the best strategy but, at least in terms of chipEV, it is unexploitable. If nothing else, it makes those “I just wasted 20bb” feelings a lot less painful if you know it’s a long-term profitable shove.

The Riceman said
If you’re in solid push/fold territory stack wise, if you are going to r/f, perhaps just straight out fold and save yourself some $equity.

I believe this line of thinking is a bit outdated. Although it makes logical sense to not waste chips raise/folding when you could push to maximize fold equity or fold to retain your stack, it leaves a big gap in your strategy. If you need to risk your stack every time you want to steal, you either catch a lot of decent hands, blind off, or frequently expose yourself to going broke. It sucks to ‘waste’ 2 bb when you are forced to fold a hand that likely has decent equity, but you can more than make up for that with the pots you steal.

Assuming 12.5% antes, there will be >=2.5bb in the middle before any cards are dealt. If you are raising to 2.2bb your steal only needs to work 2.2/(2.2+2.5) = 46.8% of the time to show a profit. This is if you auto-muck postflop any time you are flatted. If you ever win a pot after seeing the flop, you need folds significantly less than 46% of the time.

Another benefit of a raise-fold strategy is that it allows us to induce with our strongest hands. Back in the day, if a reg min-raised early position off 15bb, the other regs knew exactly which 12 combos they were against.

If we shove our entire 10-20bb range, we want villains to have nothing when we are light, and slightly worse than us when we are strong. Due to blockers, the opposite is more likely. By varying our bet size intelligently, we can likely shift the odds a bit in our favor, and also make our opponents’ decisions more difficult.

If you expect players to 3-bet you very wide, I would tighten your open range a bit, shove most of it, and widen your raise-call range. However, I still want to have some raise-folds. In heavy ICM spots I think it’s best to have a very nutted raise-call range, which means we probably can’t raise-fold many hands, and should be shoving most of our opening range. If villains left to act are mostly passive, we want to shove less hands and min-raise more of our range, assuming we are comfortable playing postflop with shallow stacks.

Upon further reflection I think KQs is almost always going to fit best in our shoving range, and this is even more clear in a PSKO.

Helmuth Melcher said
lol thanks… I have been using SnapShove for a year or more, and I invented HoldemResources Calculator (call me Helmuth Melcher!).

Cool, nice to meet you. My name is Greg.  I haven’t used HRC yet as I’ve done most of my work with crEV and ICMizer but I’ve heard great things. Awesome contribution to the poker community, thanks!

The Riceman said
Are the guys who win so much more than me the dudes who pull that Nash trigger as I hesitate, even when it seems so counter-intuitive of me to play that way? 

Maybe Nash was wrong? Everyone assumes he ‘solved’ push-fold NLHE, but has anyone actually tested his theories?

I may be fudging the details, but Nash’s big contribution to game theory was establishing that equilibrium strategies existed in many games, and that they could be solved for mathematically. I’m not sure if he calculated the original ‘Nash’ charts for heads up shoving and calling, contributed to them, or if his name was used simply because it is based on his theories. If I’m not mistaken, those are the only charts that can mathematically be proven to be 100% correct.

As soon as we have more than 2 players it becomes very difficult to categorically prove an equilibrium strategy. I believe the charts we have today are close to exact, but there are still discrepancies between the recommendations of the major solvers, and there are some weird recommendations in most of the solutions. For example, I can’t think of a way to prove that 54s is a good shove from the button at 13bb to 9bb, but not at 8bb to 5bb, but I’ve seen multiple charts with similar recommendations. I know it has to do with high cards replacing low connectors when stacks get shorter, but that seems like fuzzy logic to me. Might be due to removal, having a J or T in our hand may block enough of 8-5bb calling ranges that weak Js and Ts replace 54s, but it still seems a bit off. I’ve also seen weird patterns where the percentage of hands to shove UTG – UTG+2 can drop slightly with 0.5bb less, but become much higher with 1bb less.

I think the guys who win all the money aren’t only the ones comfortable pulling the Nash trigger, but it is definitely one route to success. As much as I can’t stand everything he says, his results are incredible, and Philly Jr. just took 2nd in the LA WPT main a few hours after getting 4-bet bluffed off of QQ preflop with ~25bb to start the hand. I don’t expect we’ll ever see him crushing the Sunday majors or being a favorite in a tough cash game, but he’s got something more than ‘white magic’ powering his results.

Charlie Carrel is someone who comes to mind when I think of ‘new school’ crushers that seem to use a more nuanced shortstack game, but he is far from the only one. The whole concept of shoving charts gained popularity as a way to reduce the edge of more experienced players. It’s grown way beyond that, and I think it is a great baseline approach that can lead to a lot of success, but still far from optimal. Ultimately, I think the players who master the equilibrium well enough to find spots they can profitably diverge from it are the ones who will continue to be cleaning up in MTTs for a long time. 

theristis88 said
Thank you guys all of you have been very helpful about my thoughts.I ll try to improve and become much better.
  

You’re very welcome, and I believe everyone here is also trying to improve and get much better. Poker is extremely nuanced and complicated, and it eventually rewards the people who put in the hard work to get better. Best of luck in your journey, and please don’t hesitate to post more hands and/or questions.