Here is the hand:

Imagine you’re in Malta playing the 2015 PokerListings Battle of Malta. Lucky you!

You are close to the bubble.
The blinds are 1,000/2,000/200.

Preflop

Everyone folds to the player in middle position. He’s an aggressive Swedish pro, with 136,250 chips, and he raises to 5,000. Two hands earlier, the villain lost 20% of his stack on a bluff on the river.

You’re on the button with K♥K♦ and a stack of 130,500.

You decide to 3-bet 12,000 chips.

The small blind and the big blind both fold.
Villain calls.

The pot is now 28,800 chips.

Flop

The dealer reveals Q♠K♠7♠.

Villain bets 12,000.

The action is back on you. You now have a 118,500 stack.

You raise his bet to 28,000 chips.

Villain decides to call.

Turn

The turn card is 3♠

Villain checks.

The pot is 84,800. You have a 90,500 stack

On villain’s check on the turn, you bet 24,000 chips.
And, once again, he calls.

River

The river is the 2♥.

The pot is now 132,800.

Villain decides to push all his stack in.

He covers you by 6,000 chips.

What do you do?

Right, I'm sure everyone else is scared to be the first one to post on this because on the face of it, it seems like quite a tough spot, so I'll throw my hat in the ring...

Essentially this all comes down to whether the villian is turning some weaker made hands into bluffs due to our small bet potentially being seen as weakness. However, our small bet on the turn could also be seen as very strong and not wanting to 'lose our customer'. In my opinion, he no longer has any airballs on the river, he wouldn't call even a tiny bet on the turn with say JT (no spade) on a 4 spade board.

His range now consists mostly of value hands/flushes which beat us where he wants us to make a hero call knowing that if he checks we will definitely be checking back. I've pretty much ruled out most worse value hands but it's always a good idea to allow for a couple of combos of these hands (KQ/K7/Q7/77) because no one plays the same hand in the same way 100% of the time. So there is still a small chance he has a few of the above hands which he could jam the river with as a bluff, sensing weakness....

However, he has to be trying to make us fold such an insanely narrow range, basically, KK/QQ because he beats most non flush hands. We also still need to remember that using combinatorics and the fact we have KK makes it very very unlikely he has one of these value hands to turn into a bluff. Whereas there are ALOT of combos of Ax with the ace of spades (all of which probably play it exactly like this on every street), not to mention the potential he's going for thin value with the 2nd nuts with something like Jx with the J of spades

From a purely chip EV point of view, we would be calling around 60,000 to win 190,000 so we are getting roughly 3-1 meaning we need him to be bluffing around 25% of the time to make it a call. In reality though we need to be correct a little more often than that because this is the stone bubble and we are calling all-in. It's all very good to say 'we need to play for the win' and that is very true, that is the way to play tournaments, but at the same time that doesn't mean ICM and making it into the money should be totally disregarded, it's still a consideration that needs to be taken into account. On top of that consideration, I think his range doesn't involve enough bluffs to make it a +EV chip call alone, nevermind a +£EV call.

It's easy to say 'we had a plan, we had a monster pre and on the flop, he's aggressive and we wanted to give him the chance to hang himself so now we have to go with it' but that's not always the case. A poker hand changes on every single street and our plans need to adapt to that, sometimes we have a gameplan for a hand then a horrible runout puts a spanner in the works and we need to know when it's time to change plan.

All these extra bits of info... he's swedish, aggressive, just lost 20% of his stack etc, these are all nice, useful pieces of information to help us make the best decision we can, but they can't just over-ride our other bigger tools like the ability to hand read.

In short, we had what was shaping up to be a great spot for us, things turned a little sour in the middle and now we've been left in a spot where the only option is to fold and focus on spinning up our 30xBB

#HandMalta & ##BOMriver.