Coin flip middle of a tourney, do you take it?

Last night in the 7.5k bodog I had a situation come up which has got me a lot recently and wanted to get some takes on it.

I am a very very tight player and it is not untypical for me to go 45 minutes at a time without playing a hand. When i do push I hope that my tight image counts for something, but I dont think a lot of people even notice table image.

Last night the blinds were at 150/300. The average stack was about 5500. i was sitting in seat 7 with with AKo at about 4800.

Utg+1 was sitting on about 3800 in chips. He mini-raises to 600. From his past play I put him on a range of (AK-AQ to 77-JJ).

I do not want to call the 600 because that will get me down to 4800. After his bet he is at 3200 so he does have some fold equity.

Now this is where I have problems. I am about 40% sure he has AK, probably AQ and about 60% he has a mid pair.

I am thinking he does not want to risk all his chips going heads up with me because I know my image is as tight as can be.

What should i do here,
A)save my chips for a better time?
B) call and see a flop? but what if dont hit the flop then i have no idea where i am.
C)Push all in, hope he folds and if not the worst I am is a coin flip. But do I want to take a coin flip at this time?

When is the propert time to make an all in push with a coinflip likely?

what would you do?

I pushed, he thought for a moment then called, flipped over 99 which held up and shortly after I was out when my 77 could not hold off an A8

nice play. only thing i'm not sure of is how you excluded QQ-AA from his range. But your going to have to gamble at some point in the tourney to accumulate chips and as you said you do have some FE. nice play.

[pfkaok]

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I am a very very tight player and it is not untypical for me to go 45 minutes at a time without playing a hand.

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Being tight is good a lot of times, but if you're THAT tight it will be very hard for you to build up a stack and go very deep. it does no good to just try to survive, if you do so without constantly looking to build your stack.

did i know that he didnt have AA-QQ, no, but i pay a lot of attention and makes lots of notes on players during a MTT. I felt I had a good read on him. Sure I could have been wrong, i have been wrong many times before, but i felt I had a good read and I was right.

[GutPunch]

why not call and play a flop with position?

[ThrillFactor]

FWIW, I'd auto-push here 90% of the time. The other 10% would be those times when the min-raise seemed out of place for my opponent, and I'd have to evaluate deeper.

The reason I'm responding however is to pass along a sobering piece of advice that was handed down to me a year ago on this forum. Trying to exclude AA-QQ here from your opponent's range is just wishful thinking. You're trying to ignore possibilities either during or after-the-fact to help justify your play. There is, of course, a big difference between putting your opponent on an accurate range vs. assigning him some holdings that give your hand the best chance of winning.

Unless you have a huge database on this opponent that shows he has NEVER min-raised in EP with AA-QQ, then they must be included.

That being said, against most villians, it's still an easy push.

[ThrillFactor]

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did i know that he didnt have AA-QQ, no, but i pay a lot of attention and makes lots of notes on players during a MTT. I felt I had a good read on him. Sure I could have been wrong, i have been wrong many times before, but i felt I had a good read and I was right.

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See my other post.

There's absolutely no way that you can have enough info on your opponent 2 hrs into an MTT to have this sort of read.

The fact that you were right this time has nothing to do that you made a flawed assumption. MOST of the time he WON'T have AA-QQ. But sometimes he will.

I'm really not trying to come down on you here. Just trying to be helpful and open your eyes to this flawed thinking.

Stop and consider what I'm saying.

Thanks. you are right, he could have had AA-QQ, but at the time I didnt think he did. i made that assesment at the time, i may have just been making that assesment in my head to justify what I was doing, who realy knows.

Thinking now i should have made it about 2k and see what he does, wouldnt have looked so desperate

[ThrillFactor]

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Thinking now i should have made it about 2k and see what he does, wouldnt have looked so desperate

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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Don't even consider reraising 40% of your stack with AK. What happens when you miss the flop (as you will 2/3 of the time) and he bets into you?

Given stack v. blind sizes in this hand, if you're going to raise it needs to be a push. If someone else wants to make an argument for flat-calling and playing a flop, I'll leave that to them. Personally I don't like it.

Folding is out of the question. Calling has a whole slew of disadvantages. And raising mandates a push based on stack size.

Text results appended to pokerstove.txt

1,294,501,824 games 1.204 secs 1,075,167,627 games/sec

Board:
Dead:

equity (%) win (%) / tie (%)

Hand 1: 47.9422 % [ 00.41 00.07 ] { AKo }
Hand 2: 52.0578 % [ 00.45 00.07 ] { AA-77, AKs-AQs, AKo-AQo }


You're behind his range if your guess is accurate, but you have tons of FE against over 1/2 of his range and there's over 20% of your stack in dead money in the pot.

I think this is an extremely easy push. You are even money against his likely hand range and you have tons of fold equity and lots of dead money.