ITH Poker Forum

[Newbatron]

SB and BB have large stacks and are aggro. Your plans for this hand?

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, 4.4 Tournament, 125/250 Blinds 25 Ante (7 handed) - Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

SB (t9337)
BB (t18520)
UTG (t11235)
MP1 (t2405)
MP2 (t7700)
CO (t14272)
Hero (Button) (t4203)

Hero's M: 7.64

Preflop: Hero is Button with ,
4 folds, Hero ?

[nsidestrate]

Since I'm calling a shove, but not happy about it, I think I just open-shove here.

[the_hawk]

I'm assuming this is a 180.

It's shove or fold and neither is horrid. In a 180, 17BB is a somewhat large stack to be open-shoving, even from the button. The structure is slow enough to nit it up for a goodly while with a stack this size.

[chrisjp]

I'm with hawk. Looks like a fold to me. Shove is OK too.

[royze1]

If the blinds are likely to call I'd fold, if they're more likely to fold I'd shove. Mostly I prefer to play your stack as a reshoving stack, but will open shove a bit on the lighter side vs tighter blinds.

[Radford]

I think i'm shoving this all day long. Folding seems too tight for me. I know the blinds have Big stacks, but i'm still pushing.

[poker_Elmo]

Why not raise to 600 or so, and call any one shove (but fold to two shoves)?

If you risk 600, folding on a bad flop still leaves you with almost 15 bbs - not the world.

I think you don't fold out any hands you want to fold except perhaps an A-rag type hand, but you may get reshoves from QJ, QT, etc. hands, or worse if the blinds and their bigger stacks get frisky.

[Radford]

Yes, but a majority of the time the blinds are folding and you increase your stack by 550 chips. Which is more than 20% of your stack. So i personally like a shove.

[poker_Elmo]

Yes, but a majority of the time the blinds are folding and you increase your stack by 550 chips. Which is more than 20% of your stack. So i personally like a shove.

If it was 20%, then I might be in the shove category - here though the increase is only 13% of his stack.

There is some cutoff M where I would go from preferring a shove to preferring a small raise - for me it is probably around an M of 6.5. Rad - what M would you need to go from wanting a shove to just doing a standard raise?

Either way, I don't think you can go too wrong with a shove. Also lets you avoid future decisions too.

[the_hawk]

There is some cutoff M where I would go from preferring a shove to preferring a small raise - for me it is probably around an M of 6.5. Rad - what M would you need to go from wanting a shove to just doing a standard raise?

I know I'm not Rad but ho hum...

For me the cut-off is somewhere around 15BBs (so not far from M=6.5), assuming that the blinds aren't shooting up too quickly (but even then I'm not pulling the trigger much before this). At 20BBs I'm definitely standard-raising, bar some specific circumstances. This hand is right on the edge; I actually prefer a fold but I'm a terrible nit.

Either way, I don't think you can go too wrong with a shove. Also lets you avoid future decisions too.

+1

[PauliF]

shove is good....

I think that sometimes a standard raise and a call is better...
especially if you have reads on either or both blinds being regs or having proved to be agro restealers this tourny... you get much more value from this line coz you are well ahead of a the 3 bet reshove range...

also chances are your standard raise will just get folded anyway and that is good coz you should be starting to standard raise first in from Hijack + at this stage of the tourny anyhows

[leofric]

MIght be a silly question but if we just put in a normal raise and get called do we then run the risk of being bet off the flop if we miss?

I come across a lot of players at the lower levels who would happily call with the BB stack and then bet if they hit the flop. Could we call if an A high all heart flop came down?

[Outlier]

Rizen's analysis of a similar scenario comes to mind here (I think it was BvB, though). It's in one of the WPT books and also appeared in Card Player. This case has 2 opponents instead of one, so it's a little different, but I would bet the analysis goes similarly.

He showed that against an aggro player, the higher +cEV move was just to open shove, whereas against more passive opponents, a standard 3x, fold to a shove was more +cEV.

That makes me lean toward a shove here.

The other big consideration for me was what hawk brought up--this looks like one of those 180mans. My first thought when reading this was--how far are you from ITM? I agree you can definitely afford to fold this here with 17 BB in a 180man, whereas a shove would be more appealing in the mid-stages of a large field tourney.