Pivotal hand late in PStars $3 rebuy super satellite

[McMelchior]

It's the PokerStars $3 rebuy super for Sunday's $350,000 guaranteed; 56 seats available and we're down to 94 players.

I have slightly less than an average stack, and the SB is among the top 5; he has several times proved to be capable of making loose preflop calls and absolutely aggressive plays with quite a range of hands.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t4000 (8 handed) converter

saw flop

MP2 (t22864)
Hero (t68412)
Button (t145554)
SB (t228310)
BB (t26962)
UTG (t65296)
UTG+1 (t59760)
MP1 (t41470)

Preflop: Hero is CO with A[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], K[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img].
<font color="#666666">4 folds</font>, <font color="#CC3333">Hero raises to t10000</font>, <font color="#666666">1 fold</font>, SB calls t8000, <font color="#666666">1 fold</font>.

Flop: (t19400) 6[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], 5[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img], T[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] <font color="#0000FF">(2 players)</font>
SB checks, ???

The blinds will go up within 5 minutes, and I'm sooo not happy about the idea of facing t3000/t6000 blinds with a stack of fifty-something thousand in the increasingly aggressive field.

I have two overs and the nut flush draw. There's approximately t26,500 in the pot, and I'm left with t58,000. Given the SB's history I don't think a half pot bet will impress him - he'll be capable of raising me all-in with any pair of even a non-nut flush draw.

Is this a check for a free turn card, or do I push? And - if I check - what do I do if I don't pair of flush, and he bets into me?

Best,

McMelchior (Johan)

[augie00]

I would push on the flop. To make the money you're going to need more chips, and there's 20k in this pot waiting to be taken.

If you check here, you're probably going to have to check-fold on the turn if you don't pair or make the flush. You don't have enough chips to bully him out of the pot on the turn given your description of him.

Sidenote: Why such a small raise? I think you'd be better of just stealing the blinds when your stack is only 16 bets deep, and if the SB is super-loose he's not folding anything reasonable for a 2.5x BB raise.

[adanthar]

Mooooooooooooooooooooooo.

[McMelchior]

Thank you for the replies ... a special thank you to augie, whos answer I even understand [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

My raise was the standard I'd applied over the last couple of levels. I'm generally trying NOT to let the size of my raise vary with my holdings. If I made an extra big raise with the primary intention of taking the blinds down, I would essentially have reduced my strong preflop hand to a back-up in case I got called (if all folds to my raise it wouldn't matter if I had held 32o). At that point I'd been playing a relatively aggresive game (taking down blinds with and without strong hands), and I definitively wanted to give the button and the blinds opportunity to come over the top of me.

As the hand went down, I DID push on the flop; SB called with KcQc for a flopped flush, I missed my 7 outs twice, and busted less than 30 seats short of the money in the 1200+ player strong super.

Which of course always is a discouraging expericence, especially in a long tourney like this, where I several times had survived exclusively due to long-odds suck-outs; it seems to me to have become quite a fad in low buy-in tourneys to LIMP pockets Aces and Kings preflop, even at the early levels, and tabled with a few hyper-aggressive gamblers I manage to get myself trapped time and again when I push strong Aces and high pairs over the top of obvious (and correctly read) late position LAG stealers only to be caught by the EP AA/KK limper. Well, that a different post.

Best,

McMelchior (Johan)