preflop decision

in the spirit of creatives suggestion, here is a preflop decision a few weeks ago that I thought might be interesting

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t600 (9 handed) converter (http://www.selachian.com/tools/bisonconverter/hhconverter.cgi)

BB (t7920)
UTG (t10910)
Hero (t21680)
MP1 (t17775)
MP2 (t7942)
MP3 (t20500)
CO (t12215)
Button (t20130)
SB (t8190)

Preflop: Hero is UTG+1 with ?, ?.
1 fold, Hero raises to t1800, 2 folds, MP3 calls t1800, 2 folds, SB raises to t8140, 1 fold, Hero ?

This was in an 11r on stars. they play extremely loose prebreak and slightly less loose/bad postbreak.

this was the third or fourth hand in a row I raised preflop, and the hand just previous to this one I check/raised him all-in on the turn so I think his range is a little wider than usual

what's the minimum you need to call here.

I dont think id risk half my stack with a player to act behind without AK, TT or better

I would say as low as AQs here -- push should get you isolated unless MP3 woke up with something real big and your raise hid that.

push all in with AK, AA, KK, or QQ. lay down anything else.

Let me simplify things a bit. Judging by the dynamics of the situation and very subtle delays in timing, I was very certain MP3 was not ready to call an all-in. For one, he would re-raise preflop almost every hand he wanted to get all-in with. For two, I am the only person at the table who covers him and he is a tight player. He is not putting his stack in here without the goods. And if he had the goods he would have popped it back preflop.

okay, so assuming MP3 is likely to fold, sb's M is between 10 and 5, so put him on Ax, middle pair, or two over cards. But you opened out of position with an M of 20+, so put you on AK at least. :)

I dont think id risk half my stack with a player to act behind without AK, TT or better

This sounds about right to me, even if MP3 is going to fold.

equity (%) win (%) tie (%)
Hand 1: 65.2618 % 64.97% 00.30% { 66+, A9s+, KJs+, ATo+, KQo }
Hand 2: 34.7382 % 34.44% 00.30% { 87s }

Do these stack sizes and table dynamics shift our decision one way or the other?

well there's ~12.5k in the pot and we are getting damn near 2-1 for our call, so the mathematics certainly work out for us. I have to say it would be a bold call for this early in the tournament sitting on suited connectors and seeing that you can't be 100% sure that mp3 will actually fold (I think a push by you will bully him out at least 75% of the time tho.) But, you have to be confident in your reads and let the math guide you otherwise you won't win anyway. :)

Ok, so my point in posting this hand was a little abstract, so bear with me here...

I was reading in the MTT forums about gigabet's stack size theory and taking -tEV situations that actually become +$EV. If you read the initial post it doesn't make a bit of goddamn sense, but after reading 17 pages of recapitulation, it begins to make a little sense. Putting that into practice is an entirely different matter.

DrGonzo asked us to consider the following stack size setup:

400
800
800
800
1200

Here we can imagine there is a line at the 800 mark (the line can be roughly estimated to be the median stack size). If we are the 1200 stack, we are 400 chips above the line . Now, as the 1200 stack, are those extra 400 chips doing us any good? In other words, is there any difference between being a 1200 stack and an 800 stack? Well yes, some, in that you can stay alive with 400 chips to spare if you lose, but with 400 chips your chances to win the tournament are still quite slim. Those 400 chips are not doing you very much good right now. However, suppose you take a -tEV situation with the 400 stack and compare 800 chips to 1600 chips: with 1600 you should absolutely run over the table. You can lose a complete all-in and still be at the median stack size. This is powerful. With 800 chips, you are not much worse off than you were at 1200.

This hand was sorta my first attempt at putting this into practice. The line in this setup is not as obvious, though. Say your stacks are as follows:

1000
1000
2000
2000

Where is the line? Is it 1500? Is it worth it for the 2000 stack to engage a 1000 stack in a -tEV situation? Losing that situation would probably put you too far below the line and winning wouldn't put you far enough above the line to really justify going with it. That was sorta my dilemma in this hand, if I lose I have 14000, which is certainly a marked difference between 22000 (much more pronounced than in the 400/800x3/1200 example), but if I win I have 30000 and will absolutely run over the table.

Also, if I have been raising preflop liberally I will often make these sorta spite calls knowing I have the worst of it just so no one thinks they can play back at me.

Considering all of this and also the excellent pot odds + loose hand range of my opponent, I thought I would probably call here with anything I had felt was good enough to open with. In the hand I called with JTs, he had A8o and I flushed up.

A8o was even lower than I expected at the time, knowing that he would have gone that low the JTs is probably a much easier call, but at the time I thought I might be taking slightly the worst of it.

It was experimental to say the least, and the stack size setup was not ideal, but I am going to try to look for these situations more in the future.