Post to Citanul

[Scuba Chuck]

Sometime in the not too distant past, you wrote the following...

Personally, I've taken to calling often in the situation as follows: I have Ax in the bb, with 5-6 bb. 5 or 6 handed, it's folded to the sb, who pushes, and he has a short stack. I've taken to calling often there. I'm usually right, and ahead. Though I'm trying to figure out lately if that means I was right in the call.

Any results to report?

[citanul]

[ QUOTE ]
Sometime in the not too distant past, you wrote the following...

Personally, I've taken to calling often in the situation as follows: I have Ax in the bb, with 5-6 bb. 5 or 6 handed, it's folded to the sb, who pushes, and he has a short stack. I've taken to calling often there. I'm usually right, and ahead. Though I'm trying to figure out lately if that means I was right in the call.

Any results to report?

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey Scuba,

Sorry for not getting to this post more quickly, I've been taking breaks from both serious posts, and sngs, recently.

Ah, results... Tricky things those. I indeed started making this sort of call more often, and indeed, it was brought on in large part because I'd started be frustrated by my stealing being caught by people who would just basically say "oh whatever, he has crap, and my Ax is way ahead of his crap. So I call." At some point I had to start thinking about what had seemed earlier to be impossible. Could it be, that the people who were always calling off their whole stacks with Ax in "bad" spots were right?

No, of course it wasn't. But, upon thinking about it more, there are bad spots to call off your whole stack or close to it with Ax, and then there are not so bad spots. Now, I've got a lot of hands (really not that many) where I've done this "new" play, but I'm no eastbay, so I don't have either ICM studies, or even really a breakdown of how I did on hands where I made these calls. But.

I feel like I'm ahead (at least in chip EV, if not in cash ev, or even chip count, due to sample size thingies) when I make this play. That is, I feel like I've gotten in with the best of it more often than not. So I guess that what I should do is talk a bit about exactly the situations where I make the play.

So we're talking about a very specific play:

Calling off most of your stack with Ax (possibly even some Kings, but that's not in specific what I'm going to talk about), 5 or 6 handed, when you have a pretty short stack (5-6bb ish). I'm willing to even open up the play from just calling bb v sb, to calling a button or sb push in either the bb or sb.

My thinking on it is this: you're not in good shape here, it's generally (assuming a 10,000 chip structure) blinds of 100/200 150/300 or more, and you've got 1000-1500 chips. Losing one player isn't garaunteeing you a position in the money, and the blinds themselves are about 1/4 of 1/3 of your total stack, sometimes more. Now, you've basically got to know almost anything about your opponent. Knowing that basically, he's capable of pushing with any even semi-wide variety of hands while in position in short stacked is what your looking for. Knowing that he's capable of pushing with any two is even better. Now, while losing a player doesn't make you the money in a lock, taking out a short stack, and putting his chips in yours, enhance your chances greatly, and certainly increase your 1st place equity.

I started thinking more about this play after a poster reminded/pointed out this:

Say it's the first hand of a tournament, and it's folded to the sb, who pushes, and you have QQ. Usually, there's a good argument to be made for just folding here. Now say that the guy shows you his cards, AK. You have an edge against this hand, though it's not huge, so you have to take it. Now, I can't really believe too much that as the number of player decreases at the table, you're supposed ot forgo more edges, so I'm thinking that perhaps situations like calling off short stacks with hands that figure to be ahead on average is probably the way to go [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I wish I could offer a more detailed, empirical answer to how I'm doing and all that, and use some ICM models to boot, but really, I can't.

I'm trying to reconcile this line of thinking with a thought given to me by another poster, which was that when one player makes a "tough call" such as these, close to the money, they are not necessarilly making a +EV move for them, and a -EV move for the other player, they might be making a -EV play for both of them, and handing EV to the other players at the table. I think that this is more likely true when there are more close to even stacks in general, while the play we're talking about now usually involves basically at least 3 stacks larger than yours, and one smaller than yours.

citanul

[Scuba Chuck]

So can I sum up your position on this topic as the following?

In those situations, particularly 6 handed, and sometimes 5 handed, where you are the BB and smaller stacked, and it's folded to the SB who is in similar stack situation, and NEEDS to steal at all costs. Then you'd consider calling with Ax?

[citanul]

Haha, yeah, I guess that I got a *little* long winded in my last reply.

I think that I might consider summing it up just a tiny bit differently though. (Perhaps not implied by my original post.)


In those situations, particularly 6 handed, and sometimes 5 handed, where you are the BB and smaller stacked, and it's folded to the SB who is in similar stack situation, and NEEDS to steal at all costs. I'm considering always calling with Ax.

Slightly different than "Then I'd cosider calling." Well, and if I was summing it up without cribbing your paragraph, I'd probably use sentences, instead of not. But that really isn't important. But yeah, I'm considering opening up my calling standards as my default play. I think that I let people steal too much, and that well, one way of fixing that is to call them with a better hand than they are stealing with.

Hope that this helps some.

citanul

[Scuba Chuck]

lol, I appreciated the long thread. It was insightful. It helped me so you logical process to coming to your conclusion.

For me, it helps to "regurgitate" back to you what I think you said, to be sure I understand.

Thanks.