#UnibetBubble #Decision1 

@Emty because he didn't cash in the bet365 fun competition, good luck man!

Good luck everyone! HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND. Nice to be playing another competition with everyone. 

If you like my entry can you like it. ty!:)

You are close to the bubble in the Unibet Open Cannes. 

There are only 3 players to bust out before getting to the money!

1st decision:

The blinds are 500/1000.

A player just sat at the table with a 43 BB stack. In middle position, he limps in.

Everyone else folds to you, in the cut-off.

You have 37 BB in front of you and A♣7♠ in your hands.

What do you do?! to reach the bubble with the most comfortable stack possible.

Ahhh i can smell that fresh sea air coming in through the windows...

"Cannes... home of some of the richest actors you can think of during the summer, and some of Unibet's best during Septmeber. I still can't believe I'm here. It's taken so long but it's been worth the wait. 

The sun, the sights, the..."

I'm woken from my little daze by a guy who shouts 'HI GUYS' just about loud enough so the echos will still be here to remind everyone he was here at next years Open. He pulls the chair out from under the middle of the table somehow almost impossibally managing to hit BOTH players on either side with it before setting it down with a loud thud as the legs hit the casino floor. 

Everyone looks up at him. Even the UTG guy who has been death starring the BB for the last 8 hands ever since he donk jammed the flop on him headsup 8 hands ago...

is broken from his stare. 

The dealer deals I glance down at A♣7♠

Everyone folds to the new guy who is still putting his mp3 player on the table and untangling his arms from his earphones when the dealer politely says "action on you sir". 

"oh sorry boys... " he says, and looks at his chips. 5 seconds later he's picked a 1k chip up and spun it on to the table. 

He's got class! You'd think he was auditioning for a spot as a PKR avatar the way he flung that chip in. 

We've been playing all day and there's just 3 players left to the bubble.

I decide I want to get to this bubble comfortably 

No!No! Not that comfortably!!!! 

We are from the Ranking Hero school of poker.

We are called Hero's for a reason.

Hero's because we don't lay down easy and we always fight for victory!

I'm not going to limp into the money I am going to take every opportunity to make profitable decisions:)

Them masterclasses on twitch have taught me a thing or two about tournament poker

EV we all know what that is right? Expected Valuethe amount of money you are 'expected' to win if you played the hand an infinfite amount of times and your results evened out statistically. Well why do we use EV and not Gut Instinct, or 'I wanna play this hand so i will' theorom, instead? Because we are here to profit and it don't matter what happens in one hand what happens when i do this exact same thing 10, 20, 100, 1000 times that's what matters!!!

Now we're getting near the bubble in fact we are so close to the bubble I can smell the soap, and see that perfect shine beaming back the light... BUT it's not Chip EV to min cash this thing! It's chip EV to win it. 

Because we're near the bubble I adjust my strategy a bit. I think about ICM - for a few seconds I feel like 

Then I remember we are talking about this ICM

and not this ICM...

Anyway... 

ICM says that unlike chip EV I can't make pure EV positive decisions at this stage of the tournament because we are near to the bubble. This is kind of intuitive if you think about it from an extreme example.

Let's say we were far from the money and I am a 

In fact I'm such a balla that I am more than bankrolled for the games I'm playing. So I don't care about bustin' I just want to take every chip advantage i possibally can and over time all those chip advantages will add up and I'll make money. So I have a 3k stack and my opponent has a 3k stack and I am faced with a decision if I should call a jam for my tournament life and i KNOW that I am ahead of his range, (which we can never really truly know) but lets just carry on with our example... and on average I will win 100 chips when we do this. 

Should I call my stack off? YOU BET! I have just won some chips. Happy days!!!

BUT.... 

Let's switch to another situation this time we are one away from the bubble and if i lose my stack I get nothing, and if I cash I get £1000 ! Should I call that same Jam now? What would you do?

Chances are you'd fold. Because you think to yourself I'd rather cash than gain such a small amount of chips. Well you've just intuitively done an ICM decision!!! See it's not as hard as it sounds really. ICM is just a model for putting value on our chips in comparison to how much we stand to win or lose from the tournament prize pool equity instead of the theoretical world of chip EV.

In the long run the 100 chips add up and against a strong opponent far from the money if most other players are as strong as us or better then you couldn't be faulted for taking that 100 chip spot and calling your stack off. But when we're close to the bubble those 100 chips make very little difference to our chances of surviving the bubble, whereas if we lose our whole stack then that makes a HUGE difference to our chances of surviving the bubble - we DONT! Simple as that and we're on the first bus home. 

However lets consider some important facts in this hand

• we are not risking our whole stack if we raise. 

• we have a decent stack at the moment, sure we're not deep but we have all the moves at our disposal, we're not 'short' yet. 

• the more chips we accumulate the more we will win when we double up later in the mtt.

• people tend to tighten up towards bubbles or play more passive. 

and...

• this guy we are up against is likely weak.

Why do we think this guy is weak? 

Well we might think he's limping to trap, but lets think about this a bit deeper for a second. He is in middle position. He knows that we are going to be giving him less credit for having a hand in MP so if he did have a strong hand and raised from MP and we were agggressive we might be inclined to 3bet light, OR let's say we are not aggressive and take a flop - are we likely going to give him credit for a huge hand post flop? Not really... not off the bat anyway. So he's got no real need to limp like this for deception. He's expected to be opening fairly wide from MP anyway!

So why else might he be limping?

We decide he's likely weak and looking to enter a pot with a marginal hand without risking too many of his chips so near to the bubble. 

What do we do?

I pull out my scary silver mask from under the table (yes.. really i carry one for times like this)

I think about what he could have...

I put him on a range something like semi decent SC's

56s+

Suited aces

A2s+ ; 

maybe some raggy aces like A5 - ATish

low pocket pairs

22-55ish

I've got pretty good equity against this range especially with all those worse aces and suited connectors in his range. 

BUT even more important than our pure equity in this hand, is our potential for gaining chips post-flop.

Let's say we raise now to isolate this guy (meaning we want to get him on his own because we figure we are in front of his range of hands, but our hand is not great so we can't take a multiway flop). 

He's got three options call, fold or raise. 

If he raises - we have a simple decision fold. But given our thinking right now, it's super unlikely he'll do this. 

If he folds - great we profit by 2.5bbs which might not be much but we've increased our stack by about 7%.

if he calls (which we expect him to do more often than not) he will usually miss the flop and we take it down with a continuation bet, knowing he is playing fit or fold post flop as we are near to the bubble... or he hits a small piece of the board and we can put pressure on him without risking our tournament life because we have position - and know even if he hits he's likely not going to want to put too many chips into the pot unless he's massive post flop, and he's not ever likely going to be that massive given the hand range we've put him on. 

So I raise to isolate this guy - and punish the limper!!

I make it 2.7k - a little less than my usual 3x+1 ; but i know the blinds are unlikely to try any real 'moves' this close to the bubble out of position, (we dont assume any have shoving stacks because we weren't told they did have in the question and probabally would have been as that'd be signficiant to our decisions). The second reason I make it 2.7k and keep the 3bet on the smallish side is it helps me keep the pot that much smaller so I can cbet a little bit less and still get the post flop fold equity I'm looking for from this guy. 

The button and both blinds folds... Nice:)

Everyone turns to the guy in MP and he reaches for his stack...