2 Final Table Hands from 40k Gaur. Trouble with marginal holdings.

[Crispy]

Last night when we were down to 5, I was having trouble dealing with marginal hands that go reraised. Two of them in particular where kind of frustrating.
Relative stacks
Muse777 - 600,000
Digger - 140,000
Whiteshoes - 300,000
The Machine - 600,000
Hero - 200,000

Hero is CO with K9o. Blinds are 7500/15000. Folds to Hero who makes it 40,000. Digger pushes. Hero has to call 100,000k into a 180k pot. Hero? Should I have pushes to prevent having to make this decision?

Second Hand.
Same stack sizes, except hero now has 160,000k and Digger has 180k. Hero has Q9s in the BB, folds to the Machine in the CO who makes it 80k. Do I fold, stop n go, or push. Im normally pretty good with sit n goes, and I know with any A or K i might have pushed back against a potential blind steal. But what do I do here?

[ansky451]

1st hand, fold, and its fairly standard.

2nd hand, fold. He made it more than 5x, he has a hand better than yours, and he's not folding to the all in... ever.

The first one is an easy fold for me. You made a reasonable steal attempt, and it went horribly bad. Don't compound the problem by making a questionable call that, if you lose, will leave you crippled. Forget the pot odds, leave yourself enough stack to have serious FE and make a note to yourself as to what Digger did for future use. I don't think I push that hand either.

Second hand I fold again. You said you are good at SNGs, so you know that being the pusher far outweighs being the caller. Remember that once you get down below 10BBs or so you can push to steal these huge blinds in the right spots, and all it takes is one double-up to be sitting pretty again.

Choose better spots than these two hands.

first hand - you are putting 1/5 of your stack in on a blind steal, why not min raise? or push? you'd be surpised how often a min raise will work as effectively as a larger raise and your not committing too much of your stack to the pot (i know its only 10k less). other options here are to push steal, but the risks to this are obvious.

second hand - fold unless you have a really solid read on villain, if you push, villain is not folding, he has 80k in and only has to call 80k more.

[bigfishead]

heh...it was exactly this hand that knocked me out in 3rd on stars the other day....K9 pushed against my 5x raise when I had A10. he flopped a K.

I think many of us understand when we are in trouble with crap hands or marginal hands. At the same time, it seems the willingness to gamble with these type hands gives players that dont really value starting hands at this point a whole lot of credit rather stack and agression seems more valuable to winning. But this is always lineup dependent too.

[suckbot]

Seems to me that you underbet the first hand. i've been known to be a little too aggressive, but 40k bet into a $22500 hand.... (No Antes?) If was playing, I'm thinking weak/scared steal. If I had a fairly strong hand, I might re-raise you all-in, especially if you've shown a willingness to lay down after a bet.

definite fold as said above though.

But i also get caught occasionally. Like last night when I pushed with lowest pair on the board into an obvious steal attempt. (that happened to hit) So don't listen to me /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Riverman]

fold both