Absolutely nothing different you could have done here with 20bb and QQ.

Think long and hard about whether you would still have posted this thread if you had won the hand, or if villain had folded. I suspect the answer is no. Be very careful about results-oriented thinking.

Frankc said

Thanks for the advice I’ll check it out.   Guess my next question is. Early on in tourneys say 10 20 blinds.  I find myself almost wanting to fold aces or kings.  You can’t open for too much because obviously it screams big hand but of course I want to get value for them.  Any advice on playing these hands with such small blinds ? 3x or even 4 x pee flop usually gets at least 3 calls pre flop with such small blinds.  

 

All advice welcome   

This is a really broad question but I’ll take a stab at it.

The biggest problem affecting you here is thinking too much about specific hands. Each individual hand you play in each spot is merely one of many different hands you could have – your range. You don’t want to be thinking about how to play one individual hand, because if you do that you end up playing each specific hand in its own specific way, and your hand is very often going to be face-up to your opponents.

In addition, you’re looking at the blinds the wrong way. It’s not the ‘small blinds’ that are the issue, it’s the deep stacks. Playing 10/20 with 200 chips is exactly the same as playing 10,000/20,000 with 200,000 chips. The reason you’re getting so many callers is because when stacks are very deep, people are much more inclined to call a preflop raise.

You seem to be approaching it as if getting multiple callers is a problem – in reality, it’s not, because you accomplished your goal of growing the pot. You just need to know how to play the hand postflop. I imagine what’s happening here is your fear of postflop mistakes is leading you to make different preflop decisions to try to avoid those mistakes.

You can cut that line of thinking about folding aces or kings preflop off right where it is. There are certain very specific circumstances where folding KK is acceptable, and in satellites it’s plausible that folding AA can happen, but what’s happening is your fear of losing a big pot (or even of playing a big pot), or your fear of taking a bad beat, or of something else entirely, is driving your thinking.

Loss aversion is a big part of human psychology – we try harder to hold onto what we have than to acquire something new. In poker, it needs to be the opposite way around. Forget about preserving your stack or avoiding big pots. Focus on getting value from your opponents. If you get it all in for 200 big blinds with AA vs QQ and lose, just load up another tournament and move on.