Hey guys,

I have been grinding 45 & 18man quite abit over the last 12months and feel my intuition on bubble and ICM spots is one of the stronger parts of my game compared to the other regs, except in certain multi way spots

I’m going to share a spot which comes up every now and again and I always struggle with it in-game

18man payouts:

1st:40%, 2nd:30%, 3rd:20%, 4th:10%

This hand is from a $7 18man and we are already in the money (4handed)

We are holding AJo in BB

I’m going to start with a mock hand with same stack sizes

I’m also going to pretend Villians are playing perfect nash (I think they will be tighter in these spots for what its worth)

So in this example we have to call extremely tight even with BU shoving wide because of the small stack in the SB

so AJo is an easy fold

Now for the real hand:

BU still shoving wide, SB puts his remaining 5bb in the middle and now we can call with 13%

Obviously we are still at risk of busting to BU

But we can now call because:

Price is better – more dead money?

If he busts both of us I still get 3rd place?

Or because if we win this pot against both Villains we are in a commanding position

Another hypothetical would be if we were still 5handed and on the bubble and there was another small stack. Then this would then become a clear fold again 

My thinking in-game in spots like this is usually I’ll fold and hope BU busts SB

and also a hand like AJo is never smashing it in a 3way all-in (obviously in chip ev terms it does)

I have trouble in-game with spots like this, I guess it just takes time to build that strong intuition