Skilful 29 Jun 2015

Here's my entry for decision 6 of UnibetBubble! thanks for reading

6th decision:

This is a new hand.

You are on the bubble now. Just one short of the money!

As usual at this time, most of the players will fold anything, the short stacks try to hold on as long as possible… and it lasts for ages…

Until this one hand where the player on the Button limps in on your big blind. He has 25BB in his stack.

As far as you know, he has qualified via a satellite tournament, and he is a very tight player who hasn’t played a hand for 2 hours.

The woman in the Small Blind folds.

So you are in the Big Blind. You hold 5♣Q♦ and your stack is 25BB. The exact same amount as the villain.

A bit tired, you casually tap the table and dully say, “Check”.

FLOP:

5♠5♥K♥

This is the kind of board that wakes you up immediatly!

His eyes hidden behind his sun glasses, villain pushes all his chips in the middle and says “All In”.

Too right it wakes me up immediately!!

one minute i'm like

The next...

i'm like..

We've got a decision to make now and we are one away from the bubble.

Important factor here is that this player hasn't played a hand in 2 hours!

Why does he want to limp, well if we think this through he is likely limping for one of two reasons

1) to trap us

What could he be limping with on the button to trap us with? Well the button limp is an unusual play and given how tight this guy is he could be doing this with a premium type hand (AA or KK) and perhaps AK.

2) to get to a cheap flop with a hand that needs to improve before he puts too much money in the pot, while there are a fair number of these hands in his range pre-flop, his shove on the flop tightens his range considerably.

I would say we could reasonably put him on hands like

AhQh,, AhJh, QhJh, AhTh, Ah4h, Ah3h , Ah2h, AKo , because the king of hearts is already on the flop we can discount the king of heart combo's from his range.

So looking at this range on balance... EVEN when we know he's a nit, and may well have AA or KK in his hand, his entire range looks something like this...

KK+,AKs,AhQh,ThQh+, AhJh,ThJh,AhTh,Ah4h,Ah3h,Ah2h,AKo

Interestingly enough because the 5 of hearts is already out there the Ah5h combo isn't in his range which makes it even more likely we have him beat here. It's super unlikely this guy is limping A5o at this stage of the tournament, let alone k5o and we should avoid the trap of 'worst case ranging' our villian here. Let's not construct his range to create the range which is worst for us lets make it up as the range that is most likely.

In this case I think our range is reasonable, which thanks to some equilab wizardry, we can use now to work out our equity in the hand.

So we likely have about 76% equity in this hand, sure we dont like getting our chips in even when we're this strong this close to the bubble, but can we reasonably turn this spot down and still call ourself a poker player? I don't think we can! We are getting more than even money here (due to the blinds already out there) and we will win the hand over 3/4 times.

Lets go crazy with this guy's range, as he hasn't played a hand in 2 hours... and say he's only ever doing this with a set of kings, AA or AKo+ - well guess what... we still have a little under 75% equity in the hand here!!