Hold 'Ems

[mr1303]

Tournament poker. £11 entry (£10 + £1 admin fee). No re-buy-ins.

 

76 players, and you're doing quite well (better than expected). However, due to the blinds going up exponentially you are starting to get relatively short stacked, and are down to your last 2600 chips. Blinds are now 600 & 1200, and sadly you are dealt 6 3 off suit as big blind (7 players at your table). All fold round to the small blind, who matches your stack. You glance up at the board, and note that there are 12 players left (top ten get paid).

 

1) Do you fold here or have a flutter (you are losing almost half your stack if you fold)?

 

Assuming you decide to fold, you are next dealt KT of hearts. Again all fold round to you.

 

Before deciding what to do, you notice that there are now only 11 players left. If 1 more player drops out, you will earn some cash (10th prize is only £10, i.e. your money back). Top prize is £250, with a descending scale (exact amounts are no longer listed sadly).

 

Do you a) call the big blind (leaving you with an additional 200)

:) go all in (now for 1400 with a 1200 blind) or

c) fold, and hope to fold around until someone else drops out?

[Lobowolf]

I'd dump the 6-3 and go all-in on the next one.

[Mbodell]

Assuming the sb will play any two cards here then you have 36% equity with 63o. Assuming the sb plays too tight and will only raise with a top 50% type of hand you have 32% equity. You need to have less than 27% equity for a fold to be right here. This assumes calculations based on chip equity, and not prize equity, but the bubble effect should be small since you aren't yet on the official bubble and the 10th place prize is very small. So this is a clear call, folding here is a huge mistake.

 

If you did fold KTs is a great hand headsup against a random hand so off course you should push.

 

The only way some of this might change is if there were a ton of stacks much smaller than you who were all going to be knocked out before your next blind (not realistic) or if the tournament was a flat satellite where all top 10 players got the same prize and there were several shorter stacks. As neither of these are true you should be all in on both situations presented here.

[MickyB]

Impossible to answer without knowing how many chips everyone started with - I'll have a go at answering with that.

 

Edit: Basically, there are two types of "right" thing to do - relating to chip EV and $ EV. You've been given the chip EV answer, but as you've already worked out, it's not as clear as that - to maximise $ EV, you should usually be averse to risking chips for small positive amounts of chip EV.

[luke warm]

how many at your table? i'll assume 5... if i added everything right, you have 2,000 left after posting the sb... if you go all in now the bb is getting 2.7 : 1 to call, which means he'll almost have to do it... it would help to know how much the bb has left also (bubble time makes a difference), but you're going to have to push before the blinds come around again... my thinking is different from most, but i'm looking to win the thing... to do that i have to double up, probably 2 or 3 times... i push