[Aisthesis]

Another complication I just thought of. What I have been doing here is assuming that all hands lower on the list would fold. BUT, there are some hands lower on the list that are actual favorites over the given hand but lower in ranking: namely the little pairs. This will make things even worse for A9s.

This kind of situation is going to come up with every list one uses, as AK is pretty much always ranked higher than 22 or 33 but is still a small dog to those hands.

I'd be interested to hear how you think one should deal with this: Should one include on the side of callers any hand that is a favorite, however slight, to the hand in question? Or should one include only hands higher in ranking, since those lower on the list may be superior to the particular hand but will be huge dogs to others in the range of possible holdings given the all-in raise?

Somehow, including all favorite hands seems better to me and should give a more conservative estimate of maximum stack-size for the all-in.

It's not clear to me whether this would ultimately favor pairs more or not: For pair hands, it would increase the number of hands that fold against the little pairs (AK will just fold), but the small pairs will suffer enormous losses if anyone else has a bigger pair. Also, as I discovered doing some calculations in response to a recent UPF post, AKs actually is a slight favorite over 22 when neither 2 is the same suit as the AKs (not sure whether this even still holds for 33--probably not, since the margin is so slim already for 22).

I really do think we already have one significant conclusion from all this: In the outlined tourney situation, with any reasonable stack-size, you need a VERY good hand to move in UTG.

Do you see what I'm driving at here? Although inclined to go with the "any favorite" method, I'm somewhat ambivalent about which is really best.