Interesting $10+1 hand

[gumpzilla]

Some background. The opponent to my left has established himself as a bona fide maniac. Four times in level one he open pushed, with basically a full starting stack of chips, with such powerhouses as 42, JTs, Q9o, etc. He did this a couple more times and didn't show along the way. For the most part, he either does this or limps or calls somebody else's bet. He minraised a couple of times PF.

Now, the last two hands that the action has gotten to him with no raise he's opened with a more standard 3-4 BB raise. He saw a flop in one instance and instapushed.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t100 (7 handed) converter (http://www.selachian.com/tools/bisonconverter/hhconverter.cgi)

MP2 (t1062)
CO (t810)
gumpzilla (t1675)
SB (t2145)
BB (t2361)
UTG (t4447)
MP1 (t1000)

Preflop: gumpzilla is Button with Q/images/graemlins/club.gif, K/images/graemlins/diamond.gif.
<font color="#666666">4 folds</font>, <font color="#CC3333">gumpzilla raises to t250</font>, SB calls t200, <font color="#666666">1 fold</font>.

Flop: (t600) 7/images/graemlins/diamond.gif, 5/images/graemlins/diamond.gif, 2/images/graemlins/club.gif <font color="#0000FF">(2 players)</font>

SB pushes. I am getting just under 1.5:1.

Thoughts?

[curtains]

I'm really confused...you have nothing and he pushed for 1300 chips. Almost no one is crazy enough for this to become a call in a sit and go.

[Unarmed]

Pretty easy fold.
BTW I'm shocked you're only playing the 10s.
That comment is totally unrelated to this hand. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[gumpzilla]

I played the 20s for a while at Paradise and built up a decently sized roll. I then burned a fair amount of it taking shots at the $30 R&amp;A there and decided to move some of it over to Stars and start multitabling, so I moved over enough to play $10s while I get used to multitabling. I also have been playing SNGs pretty infrequently lately, so I've yet to get up enough to want to move to the $20s there.

[flyby4553]

Even IF your ahead, which I don't think is that likely, I'm not sure if your ahead by enough to make calling profitable here. Your stack is fine right now, you dont need to gamble with it here.

[gumpzilla]

Obviously I could fold this and I wouldn't be missing too much. What if he is pushing any two on the flop, though?

[curtains]

I don't believe he's pushing any 2.... If he is then it's just a math problem, but I don't want to make an assumpion that he really has any 2 cards here.

[gumpzilla]

You are of course right that it becomes a math problem if you assume that he's pushing any two. In that case, it's slightly + chip EV (though less + chip EV than I thought at the time - my holding is about a 53-47 dog to a random hand after the flop and I'm getting basically 3-2) , and debatable on the $ EV front. So it becomes a question of how likely he is to push any two. Given that he'd open pushed 50+ BB stacks from all kinds of positions with terrible holdings, he'd shown a willingness to make these kind of steal plays, and I was pretty confident when he called my PF raise that he was going to push the flop, regardless of what came, particularly since he'd made a similar play two hands ago. So when it came rags and he pushed, I figured this was probably relatively strong evidence to support this assertion and went for it.

He had 42o. Now, on the one hand, this doesn't do anything to suggest that he's pushing with any two; he does have bottom pair, after all. But I have a hard time imagining his rationale for calling my raise with 42 if it wasn't to push any flop, since I don't think he had much evidence that the scenario would play out like it did (flop bottom pair and get paid off by a worse hand - I hadn't exactly been a calling station at this table, obviously).

Anyway, I think it was a reasonable read given the way this guy was playing and what he ended up actually having. That still doesn't mean that this is a hot enough opportunity that I should take it necessarily, but on the other hand he'd really started accumulating chips quickly from steals like this over the past four or five hands and I dislike being in situations where the maniacs get huge stacks which all of a sudden make their play much closer to correct, so I thought it was worth a shot.