Shortstack Preflop Play: 3 Handed Situations
Posted by Daniel Dvoress
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I enjoy this series a lot, altough I don't play cap Im still learning some nice stuff that I can apply to my games. Thanks!
I notice you didn't consider the impact of rake. Don't you think its something we should take in consideration? I guess most of our marginal opening hands when we take in consideration the rake are going to be -EV.
Mostly I didn't consider rake because what I'm doing is more abstract/conceptual so I wanted to solve the pure, rake-free game. Additionally, even without taking rake into consideration these solutions can still be practical (for example, in SNGs). The other reason I didn't take rake into account was because it's unclear what kind of rake I should take into account. For 50/100 neglecting rake isn't a big deal, for 2/4 it would be.
Also, not taking rake into account isn't so bad when you are dealing with the PFR because often you won't be paying rake. An interesting thing would actually happen in a high rake scenario: BB would want to opt for a more shove all-in/fold strategy rather than flatting. So now as the PFR it's not so bad neglecting rake since if the blinds play mostly push-fold your "marginal" opening hands rarely actually pay rake - they either win or get shoved on and lose.
As the flatter, however, we should be more weary of rake considerations. To give a specific example say you are playing 10/20 cap and you are in the BB with A8o and SB opens. You think that shoving and calling are roughly equal EV against this player. So in this spot if you shove you pay on average ~$0.50 (get called 1/3 of the time, rake capped at 3$). But if you flat you are paying on average ~$1.50 in rake. So you need to make $1 more by flatting - which is a lot since for that hand that would be a winrate of 5bb/100 at 10/20.
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All that said, if you are doing something in practice for a particular stake you play, you should definitely go ahead and put the rake into CREV.
Thanks for the video! I would be interested in looking at what a BB flatting range could be facing raises from earlier positions. Do you think the BB can flat very wide as well or does it tighten up a lot?
Miam,
I haven't been ignoring your question, I've just been traveling lately and wanted my answer to have some specifics which would be easier if I had access to CREV, which I haven't. In the meanwhile: depends what you mean by "very wide," but generally yes I believe that the BB should be calling a very wide range in cap. Facing a minraise even 100bb deep from an EP raise I would defend quite wide - getting 3.5 to 1 even against a narrow range is just too good. Then consider that it is necessarily the case that you should defend wider in cap than 100bb deep when all else is equal and you start to see pretty wide defending ranges.
Well I'm an MTT player and almost all regs ranges for calling the big blind are tighter than this, sometimes way tighter, even when the raise come from the BU. Regs will have a Nash-based strategy for jamming, but I don't think I've ever seen a call BB vs BU for 20BB with hands like T6s or J7o which were part of your flatting range in the video. It could be because of ICM issues which are always more or less present... but at the same times there are antes in MTT! Could it be like that in MTTs simply out of tradition? So yeah that's why I'm interested in the question basically. Maybe I should go spy on high stakes cash cap tables lol
How did you came up with the flatting ranges you present in the video? One approach to try to calculate that is to consider the equity of a given hand against your opponents raising range, then multiply that by an "equity realization" factor to take into account that we are oop without initiative and will have trouble getting to showdown, and then compare what you get with your direct pot odds. But I find it difficult to know how much of our equity we can realize with our worse hands. 50%? 80%? I have no idea really :-)
I'm also wondering if you can flat from the BB against a minraise with even shorter stacks like 10BB with hands that are outside of your resteal range. Currently that would be considered a "terrible play" by the MTT community... The only time players flat from the BB with 10BB is to do a "stop-and-go", which in the end is very similar to going all-in preflop.
While MTTs aren't really my main game, when I do play MTTs given equal positions (but antes) I defend the BB wider than I would in cap.
Re: flatting and ICM issues - like you said I think people are not flatting a lot in the BB (or anywhere) in MTTs mostly because of tradition. Everyone likes to throw around the term "ICM issues" but I would bet that <5% of people that have ever said have actually ever sat down to see by how much (what factor) your equity needs to be inceased (or your pot odds need to be increased) from a chip EV situation in order to defend. It's actually not by that much more often than not - once the bubble bursts you are playing almost a chipEV game for a while, and when you are still far from the bubble you are also playing very close to a chipEV game.
I also think that ICM issues are misunderstood in the way that they actually occur. ICM stuff mostly affects the person that is not the aggressor, so people think that once, say, BU opens, the BB considering a call is the one that is most affected by ICM issues. I would disagree with this because that is not taking into account the way the rest of the hand will play out. Foe example, say you are 15bb deep and BU opens and you defend in the BB. Your plan is to c/shove flops with a balanced range against a BU cbet. Who is the one that is affected by ICM issues now? Clearly it's the BU who is facing the shove.
How to come up with flatting ranges - there isn't a single thing that I did but rather a combination of: equity realization %, looking in Flopzilla what hands can flop what how often and how I can play which boards, experience playing weak ranges a lot OOP, etc. Also thing about what boards occur how often when designing what you are flatting. Like, K5o seems pretty raggy, but a board will come K high about 1/6 times. It's also a board that will generally be over cbet. This is really good when you are holding top pair.
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Absolutely I think you can flat with <10bb. Not sure why people have a mental block against this. Why wouldn't you? The shorter stacks are, the better flatting is, because playing OOP becomes less and less undesirable.
The only other thing I wanted to comment on is that you wrote "...with hands that are outside of your resteal range." That seems to imply that you believe that should never flat a hand that you could resteal with. Why do you think this is the case?
Obviously take all this with a grain of salt since MTTs are nowhere close to my primary game I'm just writing what I think.
It's true that ICM affects mostly the person who is not the aggressor, but the aggressor needs a stack that can be threatening for the opponent's tournament life. i.e. if you have 15BB in the BB and the BU has 60BB the ICM pressure is always on you even if you're the one who shoves.
Regarding the flatting with 10BB question, I said with "hands outside of your resteal range" just as a starting point to introduce flatting in our strategy. If I can just flat things without changing anything to my resteal range or without being concern about balancing my flat range, and still make it work, it's pretty easy to add to my current game right away, even if it's maybe not the most optimal strategy.
I bought CardrunnersEV yesterday to do that, and I'm now playing with it. I set up a Bu vs BB situation where Bu minraises the Nash range and BB shoves the Nash range, + BB flats some hands on top of that, and donk-shove flop when he hits a little something, which Bu call with "decent" hands. It changes with how wide players wants to stack on the flop, but yeah it seems to work! I'll be happy to show you my calculations if you are interested.
Sure, paste a screenshot.
Why are we donk-shoving flops when we flop something decent given that people are (likely) cbetting too much?
Yeah it's certainly better to check some hands. I didn't wanted to be too ambitious with the calculation at first.
It's a 9max table with antes and 10BB stacks. So, top line is the Nash resteal range wish I deleted (not necessary in the calculation). Then I set up a script to calculate the equity for varying call % given the actions on the flop. I have a set of different conditions for the BB jam and BU call on the flop. I looked at different kind of flop manually and with these conditions both ranges looked ok to me. BB jam with pairs, flush draws, straight draws, good gutshots. Bu calls with pairs, flush draw, straight draws, good overcards, and some gutshots like QJ on A98 w a backdoor draw (which maybe I should remove?). Here is the range I got! The equity kinda reach a plateau from there up to 100%, so possibly one can call even more.
Suitedness seems very important... maybe I play too much flush draws on the flop?
Bu calling QJbdfd on A98r: I think mostly you would see a call there from a thinking player. You don't have any Ax in your range, so when he calls he presumably always has ~10 outs even when you have a pair. When you add draws to your range (some of which he has very dominated), it seems like it becomes a snap.
Suitedness *is* very important. It's hard to quantify how much it is important, but think of it this way - you flop a flush draw 10% of the time and ALWAYS have a profitable get-it-in given these stacks when you do. That's a huge "freeroll" when you are comparing a suited hand to its non-suited counterpart. And this doesn't even factor in the additional 4% equity you get when you get in some gutshot but also have a BDFD to go along with it.
very good video!!
Since I'm an mtt player I'm wondering how much(roughly) antes will effects the ranges.
If it's a big difference, do you give private coaching and if so do you think it's worth to translate some off these "baseline" ranges to ante play.
Thanks inadvance
It hard to say. I would say that in general, for aggressive lines,
antes affect the ranges in a pretty huge way, and for passive lines the
effect is less significant, but the since these
things are hard to quantify I don't think that answer means much.
However, in order to get specific you would have to look at an
individual spot which is also pretty useless in getting to an answer you
can apply in the general case.
I'll give a shot at structuring a general answer so that you can get an idea.
Say
you are in the following scenario: You are in the BB; BU opens to a
minraise with a 55% range. You would be able to profitably defend any
two suited cards as long as you realize 65% of their equity with them.
This seems like it makes any suited cards a snap-defend, but that is not
necessarily true: are you really realizing 65% of your equity with 62s
OOP against the top 55% of hands?
Now a scenario with antes:
For aggressive lines antes play a much more significanteverything is the same as it is above, only there are antes which
together sum up to 1bb, so now in the BB you are getting 4.5:1 instead
of 3.5:1 on a call. In this scenario, given a suited hand it would need
to realize 54% of its equity to make it a defend. A significant, but not
a huge difference. Widening the BU's open range in this scenario
doesn't do much (and why would it - if you are sitting there with 63s,
widening an opener's range mostly just adds more hands that have you
dominated) - if you let the BU open, say 70%, then you would still need
to realize 52% of your equity with a suited hand in order to call with
it.
role, but give you are an MTT player I probably don't need to go into
this since you already know how valuable antes are when you are stealing
blinds and/or shoving.
wauw thank you for that, that was a very good clear post. Do you give private coaching and do you think these concepts are valuable in mtts where you often have to estimate very rough what peoples ranges are ? :)
Amazing content.....this has really opened my eyes to how closely push calls can be calculated. Much better then intuition and guessing. So much to learn
I really liked this series. Hope you make part 3
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