Handling tough spots with shrinking stacks in MTT play

Chris Grove : January 26th, 2009

To many tournament players, 13-20BB stacks are the poker equivalent of that weird sex chair George Clooney had in Burn After Reading – they’re not a bad thing to have, but inevitably, they’re going to force you into some truly awkward positions. When you have a raise in front, these stacks are easy enough to play – evaluate the raiser’s range, your hand, and figure out whether a three bet is likely to be profitable. However, things get a little stickier when the opening action is left to you.

In this article, we’re going to explore a hand played by a PTP member (jonrubs) in a recent Super Tuesday on PokerStars. The Super Tuesday is a 1k buyin tournament that generally attracts a fairly small and reasonably strong field.

Jon was dealt KQo with 17BBs. The table folded to him in the CO, leaving the following players active in the hand:

Table

Jon basically has the following options:

Fold
Limp
Raise-fold
Raise-call
Shove

Which is best? The answer is a little trickier than it might seem to some. Tricky or no, walking through each option is a great way to illustrate not only the challenges of operating as the opener with the stack size and medium strength hands (especially before the antes kick in), but also the factors you should be considering when you’re facing that challenge. Let’s consider each option from most passive to most aggressive.

Fold
This is the lowest risk option, and there’s something to be said for that. When you’re working with a 13-20BB stack, preserving your stack’s ability to effectively three-bet steal does have merit. Also, the Super Tuesday has a pretty slow structure at this point of the tournament – the next level just adds a 20 ante, and the level following is 150/300/30, and levels increase every twenty minutes. On the other hand, KQo has about 40% equity versus three random hands, and the money in the middle does represent almost 10% of your stack.

Limp
The limp is an interesting option. There are obvious drawbacks: it looks very weak, and the chance of action behind from a wide range of hands is pretty high. Given that you can’t stand a lot of action with KQ, the limp risks you investing money and then throwing away the best hand. On the plus side, it keeps a lot of the range that you dominate in the hand. It also disguises your hand a bit, which is useful in a lot of post-flop scenarios. Finally, against some specific types of opponents, it gives you the option of a limp-reshove

Open Raising
The good thing about open-raising is that you might pick up some chips uncontested, and when you are just called, you have a hand that flops well and you’ll probably play it in position. However, in a higher-stakes tournament with the stacks sizes as they are, I think you’re going to be played back at fairly often preflop, and that’s especially damning given the lack of antes – since you’re risking 500 to win only 300, the play has to be successful fairly often to be profitable.

When you are played back at, you can fold or call. Both suffer from the same basic drawback: putting your opponents on a narrow range in these situations is pretty tough, so making the right decision once you open raise and get played back at is also pretty tough. Let’s explore a couple of possible scenarios to illustrate this point.

1) You open to 500 and the button ships. Now you’re looking at calling 1900 to win 3200, or about 1.7-1. Good price? If your opponent is very tight, not even close. If your opponent is very loose, sure. However, if your opponent exists in that fat middle between the two, it’s hard (if not impossible) to say that calling the raise is good or bad. Taking neutral or ambiguous EV bets when you have a 17BB stack is less than optimal, in my opinion.

2) You open to 500 and get three bet by a bigger stack in the SB or BB. Regardless of the size, the three bet essentially puts you all in, so your price is 2900 for about 7000, or about 2.3-1. Again, that’s a correct price against some ranges, and incorrect against others, but since your raise could mean so many things to your opponent, it’s hard to pin them down on a narrow range.

There’s also another relevant point to be made about both of the above scenarios: in each, you’ve inflated your odds by committing money to the pot in the first place. Think of it this way: let’s say that no matter what you do, the button is only going to get all in with QQ-AA and AK. Against that range, KQ is an 80-20 dog. If you limp and the button shoves, you’re calling 2200 to win 2900, or 1.3-1. Nowhere near enough to call. But wait! If you simply raise to 1800 preflop, now you only have to call 600 to win 2900. That’s like eighty five million to one or whatever. Snap call!

That’s obviously an exaggerated example, but the point remains: when you’re talking about committing effective stacks preflop, your true pot odds are a function of the blinds and antes + effective stacks vs. effective stacks. So, in the case of the button, you’re calling 2400 to win 2700, or just a shade better than even money. The order that the money goes in doesn’t really matter.

So, to summarize: open-raising in this spot is problematic because it probably won’t take down the pot often enough to be profitable, and when you are played back at it’s difficult to accurately range your opponents, putting you in marginal situations. Those spots become even more marginal when you consider that you’re often getting worse odds than you might appear to be getting. Also, even if a decision might be slightly chip ev (cEV) or neutral, that doesn’t take into consideration that you’re risking your tournament on this play.

Shoving
Shoving seems a little reckless – 17BBs chasing 1.5BBs with three players still to act. We can run a few numbers and get a better idea of how bad the play is – if, in fact, it’s actually bad.

What are people calling your open shove with? You have enough chips to force everyone to call pretty narrowly, although the BB is somewhat deep and might call a little wider. Let’s say you get called by TT+, AQs+ and AKo. That’s about 4% of hands, although your KQ is good for some card removal, knocking the number down to 3.5%. So, you get called 10% of the time, and when you do, you’re a 70-30 dog. So, your EV for the hand is:

EV = (.9*300) + (.1*((.7*-3400)+(.3*3700)))
EV = (30)+(-127) = -97

You can obviously change some assumptions to make this worse or better, but I don’t think the play is ever going to be that much worse or what much better. Let’s make everyone a lot looser, say 44+,ATs+,KQs,AJo+. Now you get called about 25% of the time, and you’re a 63-36 dog when called. So…

EV = (.75*300) + (.25*((.63*-3400)+(.36*3700)))
EV = (225) + (-202.5) = +25

So, against tighter opponents, shoving is probably neutral to a little bad, and against looser opponents, shoving is probably neutral to slightly good. Again, it’s important to remember: That evaluation only reflects chip ev, and you simply cannot ignore the fact that when you shove and lose, you don’t just lose chips – you lose your tournament life.

Ok, I Read All Of That. So What Should I Do?
This is a poker article, so the answer is obviously … it depends. Bam.

In this particular situation: Of all of your options, I think open raising is the worst. Of all your decisions, it puts you at the greatest possible risk with the least definable return. Shoving and folding are pretty close in terms of cEV, but shoving obviously risks way more than folding, so I like folding better than shoving. That leaves me with limping, which has little downside preflop but a decent amount of upside postflop. Basically, I like limping the best because it risks little, disguises our hand, and leaves us with the greatest array of options preflop and postflop.

However, it doesn’t take much tweaking of the dynamic to change the ordering. On a very passive table, for instance, open-raising now becomes an excellent option as your opponent’s ranges become far more definable. Shoving doesn’t change much, but limping and folding both become far less attractive options as open raising becomes more attractive. On a hyper-aggressive table, open-raising and calling can become a much more viable option.

So, to review:
–Shoving 17BBs from LP without antes: not going to be profitable.

–The more aggressive your table is, the more conservative you should be with your opens with 13-20BB stacks. The more passive your table is, the more you should favor open-raising. A possible exception occurs when your table is hyper-aggressive and will play back with several hands weaker than KQ (or your particular medium-strength holding), at which point open-raising becomes appealing again.

–Open-raising with 13-20BB stacks without considering what your actual pot odds are if re-raised can put you in spots where you’re likely to over-estimate the price you’re getting to call.

–Burn After Reading references would be more effective article openers if the movie had been better, motivating more people to go and see it.

If you’re curious, in the actual hand jon shoved and was called by the BB with TT. The BB held up and won the pot. The moral of the story: Run better, jon.

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