#UnibetBubble #decision6

Imagine: The bubble is about to burst in the Unibet Open Cannes. There is one last player to bust before getting to the money!

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”.

What do you do?

First thing i'll do is ask him why he is acting out of turn. Then start and consider what hands he does this with.

We know that he hasn't played a hand til now for two hours. assuming that we get 30 hands per hour in live play  this makes it 1 hand in 60 that he has played giving him a VPIP of 1.66.  This backs up our really nitty image of him and puts his range pretty much at QQ,KK,AA. We also casually tapped the table preflop sgnalling that we weren't inspired by our hand.

QQ is never shoving  all in on this flop vs a K55 as Krag and 5x are firmly within our range.AA could shove the flop to exploit our Kx handsbut again  5x is in our range and he is drawing with low equity. A "safer" way for him to get value out of our Kx hands would be to make a standard bet with AA knowing that he will fold out all of our air, get called by Kx and 5x either shoves , calls or reraises.

     Instead a nitty qualifier shoves all in  out of turn. This could indicate inexperienced live player getting overexcited by his hand and shoving the nuts without waiting  for us to act. He doesn't appear to be worried that we could have 5x and putting his tournament life on the line. In fact this looks like a move designed to get the maximum value out of a Kx 5x type hand  knowing that if we have air we fold to any bet anyway. This seems soo much like KK that i want to fold .

    There are also ICM type considerations here in that depending on how the pay jumps are structured we could be correct to have folded AA preflop to a shove. The chips that we win will be worth a lot less than the chips that we lose if it means that we get knocked out and get nothing. We have also been told that the short stacks are clinging to the tournament. These  small/mid stacks that we have covered are the guys we should be putting pressure on  with position rather than getting involved in tournament life situations ourselves.

Im folding