+1 I kinda feel the same way.

Ooo, wow, yeah - good eye on seeing that we are actually on the table for his BTN 3x sized 3bet. That's really interesting what you make of his sizing "sign on his forehead, i aint foldin!" (good way to say it too). Jason felt the same way too, one of his first comments was that this guy would be prepared to 5bet here a lot.

My big assumption in the hand was that villain would be 3betting tons, but would not have the courage to 5bet his weaker 3bs like QJ, 44, and A8s. So I felt I was just getting tons of folds with my 4b bluff. As I said in the video, I felt like villain would be taking the maximum amount of bluff combinations Like every time he gets dealt A8s, he's very happy to 3bet vs me here. But yeah, maybe what's really happening in villain's mind is this "This guy is chip leader, he has opened every hand since he's been here, he's opening like 50% of hands here right now, if he is 4betting me with a premium hand, well then lol, and GL him, cuz I'm allin with my A8s [and 44, and all the hands that got 3bet as bluffs]". And maybe I am not giving players enough credit for having the courage to be able to pull such a move in this important situation.

A couple more notes. One, at the time of this hand, I had never really played with villain before, however I recognized his screenname and new he was a regular. I did not know he would turn out to be such a tough player who likes to battle and put pressure on. If I had known that prior to this QTo hand, I would not have 4bet because I would have realize villain is more than capable of 5bet bluffing allin.

Also, I really dislike my sizing here. It can be much smaller. Since he made his 3bet a full 3x, the sizings are different than they normally are, so I think I can make my 4b < 2x his 3b, whereas usually I try to go around 2.1x his 3b (depending on stack depth).

My final conclusion is I don't fault myself for making the 4bet, and probably would do so again if I had the same information. However, now after knowing villain, I would not have 4b QTo here in this moment. I also wish my sizing was smaller on my 4bet. Also, and perhaps most importantly, in the future I will keep my eyes open for signs on people's foreheads (I'm being serious). I need to see these obvious things that you and Jason seem to be seeing and I haven't discovered yet in my years of playing. But, to me, this is also part of the beauty of poker. All 3 of us strong players can see things very differently, and we are all always learning.

Thanks for the great post, and I apologize to you for taking so long to reply to it.

Ya, just watched the video again, super glad Jason said something at the end, because my original comment could easily be interpreted in a couple of different ways.

Thanks man, and sporting the Jordan IIIs - my fave shoe of all time! Wpwp

I agree, I would even prefer open folding cause raise folding to an 8BB stack is really meh..

You know what, I think you are spot on. Super sharp eye here guys. I know that in game, and in making this video, I didn't adjust my estimated shove range for the villain - at all really. I just sort of gave him a default wide (but good) get-in range vs a loose BTN open. Definitely not the case with this villain here. Geeze Louise, another mistake lol. How did they let me top 3 this tournament? Thanks his lucky stars Ha.

I agree that it's a fold but not because his hand is face up. His hand actually isn't face up at all, he could be 3ing-5 with a hand like 22 or A5s. The main argument to give up is because the guy is an extremely hard fighter and doesn't seem to be the type to 3b fold as often as he should.

Haha, I ALWAYS get an A for effort. But are you saying that he makes his 3b smaller or bigger or what if he has like A8s here? You do think he would 3b bluff me here sometimes, right Sam? In any case, I agree with my current knowledge of villain that I should fold to his 3b.

I really liked that A9o flat idea as well.

No, I think I would bet fold the overs vs checkolino. I think after I bet 23k I wouldn't have a good enough price vs his range to make an oddscall with my overs. I'm not certain of this, but that's my impression on first glance.

You know I'm nodding my head as I read your post about K3s BB defence. Your logic is very sound, and I agree with how you see this situation, including all of your reads on more passive and tight player types, as villain in this hand appears to be. Perhaps if he bets > 1/3 pot OTT we can just fold our hand? If it's a tiny bet, I find that a lot of times guys are making that bet as sort of a hedge between checking and giving a free card, and betting a big, committing amount. I find they do this with medium strength hands a lot.

Really good thoughts about his Kx combos vs his PP combos, and how they relate to his UTG opening range. There is some question as to if he cbets 100% of his PP's though - although in fairness perhaps he wouldn't cbet all of his Kx either.. Just some food for thought. Check jam is interesting.. I hadn't given it much consideration until now. I think between him possibly checking back PP's some % of the time, and folding some of the PPs he does cbet to our shove, and the damage that's done when he calls with AK or w/e, that it adds up to enough to make check calling flop a better option. When we check call flop, there are a number of ways the hand can play out where we can make highly accurate (though certainly not perfect) and good decisions, and avoid getting stacked by a better king.

+1 to this I feel like you glossed over this a bit. It's a fairly recent trend amongst elite players to defend their bb off these stack sizes. Pretty interested to know what sort of defending range we should have Vs a shoving range if we are the bb. Also if he's defending some portion of his range rather than shoving can you ever fold to a shove or are you pretty much always snapping any two regardless?

Really good question guys. I'll start by saying I'm no expert in this area, though I do feel like I have an alright understanding of the components in play here.

I just think that a lot of the reason why we defend the BB wide in the first place is because of our PF pot odds. Now those odds are the same if we have 5BB, 50BB or 500BB. Sure other considerations change (like reverse implied odds) , but pot odds are the main / most important factor in our decision (and almost right) to defend the BB wide.

So when you see guys defend the BB wide off 7BB, they're just saying, well, my pot odds are still good. Sure it sucks to invest one of your remaining 6BB in a spot where the most common outcome is you check fold and play the SB with 5BB, but given the odds, this is actually often times a really good situation for the BB overall.

When the BB has 7BB, it needs to think about which hands to shove with and which hands to defend. And at least at it's most basic level, this is pretty straightforward, where if you think your hand is ahead of villain's opening range, then you get it in. If you don't think it is, then you just defend it, taking your odds and knowing that you're making a +EV call.

So overall I think his defend range should like a lot like it usually does, minus hands that you can shove at 7BB stack depth that you can't at 50BB. I think it should have some pretty bad hands in. Where the exact cutoff is, I really don't know. I simply haven't done any math to try to answer that question. I just estimate.

Interesting question, because of his massive sizing. Most of the time vs 3bets, I'm very happy to call KQs. The odds are good, it plays well, it can even dominate some of his 3bet bluffing hands. Here I still very well might just call it. In fact I think that I would. But I am more inclined to shove allin just because the hand does a bit better when called than QTo does. I think our odds are good enough, and villain's 3bet range is wide enough that we will be able to profitably call the 3bet though. That's my choice here, in a close decision.

Interesting question, because of his massive sizing. Most of the time vs 3bets, I'm very happy to call KQs. The odds are good, it plays well, it can even dominate some of his 3bet bluffing hands. Here I still very well might just call it. In fact I think that I would. But I am more inclined to shove allin just because the hand does a bit better when called than QTo does. I think our odds are good enough, and villain's 3bet range is wide enough that we will be able to profitably call the 3bet though. That's my choice here, in a close decision.

Calling does seem pretty dirty. Especially because our pot odds are worse than usual when facing a 3b, and we can be pretty confident that this villain is going to be 3betting tons of broadway hands, quite possibly every combination of hand that dominates us (QJo, ATo, etc). I just don't see calling this 3b as being +EV. With KQs, as I talked about in the post above this one, I would be peeling vs a 3b here.

To me, as I see it now, the whole crux of this hand is that I had assumed in the moment that villain would be 5betting way less than I now think, and I think in actuality, he is. So you're right, my 4bet bluff here is really flimsy and ineffective, cuz he's just going to say "oh yeah, check this out, allin 5bet). PureCash25: folds. Haha.

I disagree that my 4b puts me in a bad spot (beyond making a -EV bet [4]bet!) though. I don't feel that I'm committed to call at all, even if the odds suggest it's close. Before I talk about the math side of things, I want to point out some overarching considerations that are in play here. I don't know that there's a proper term for this/these, but something along the lines of tournament management, or stack management, or equity-protection. Like if it turns out I can make +1BB by calling this 5bet based on the price my 4bet ends up laying me, well forget that, I'm not taking it. Because that means that slightly less than half of the time I'm losing a big chunk of my stack, a big chunk of my leveraging apparatus, and that is devastating well beyond the chip amount numbers involved. That is future EV gone because I can now longer leverage stacks on the FT bubble and at the FT, things like that. I hope this idea makes sense? And it is just that - an idea, that I have. It's not a confirmed theory or principle or anything like that, but it is an idea that I personally believe very much in.

The math: It is 331,090 for us to call this shove. The pot is 647,890. This makes our pot odds 1.96:1 to call the shove. When one is getting 2:1 to call, one needs 33.33% equity to make a BreakEven call. We're getting slightly worse odds than that, so we need slightly more equity. Let's call it 34% needed to BE.

I made 3 scenarios. 1. Tightest possible 5bet shove range for villain. 2. Your range (and what I would deem the loosest possible range) and 3. A range in between, that I think can be considered pretty wide, and wider than average.

1.

2.

3.

It's interesting to see that despite drastic changes to villain's 5b shove range, our equity only shifts within a 5% range. We struggle to find a range for villain where we can barely make money on calling; he has to be very wide. And I would argue that with what I said at the start of the post holds true; that the risks of calling and losing vastly outweigh the rewards of calling and winning, even beyond the pure math.

I would fold this hand after seeing the math and thinking about everything else involved, but kudos for putting the idea out there, because I did not notice / would not have assumed that the math was anywhere in the same universe as being close enough to call.

1. I rewatched the video, and it's funny, even during a 12 minute conversation on this topic, I never once clearly stated that this would be my intention - to bet/fold the turn. Everything that I said about this spot was from the perspective that this was my plan here. I wish I would have said so explicitly, and I'm not even sure that Jason realized that was my intention. Oops. I think that line works pretty well, although there is a lot of margin for error in making assumptions on villain's tendencies (to state the obvious, as there always is in poker).

2. I can't say for certain if this is what he was going to bring up, but it's a good topic to discuss. I almost always just min raise preflop. In any field, and stack depth, basically any condition (I do make exceptions here and there). And I know this is technically and fundamentally incorrect. The reason why I do this is I am just most comfortable doing it this way. I have done it for years now, and I am just very familiar with how betting plays out PF and all 3 streets postflop when I start with a min raise. Now this is a pretty poor reason to keep using a method (open raise size in this case) that I know to be less than optimal. At some point, I hope to change, but it hasn't happened yet.

To highlight this point, I was at a table in the 25k at PCA this year with Trickett, Tony Gregg, Dani Stern, Darren Elias, and a couple others, and everyone at the table was using the same raise size (about 2.5x) (mid stages, say the tourney average was 40-50BB?) , and I was min raising, lol. I felt pretty self-conscious about it to be honest. Actually to the point where I changed my size to copy their size, their better PF raise size. But after a short while I switched back because it simply wasn't my game. It felt pretty ignorant to have 4 better players all use the same size, and then me choose to use a different size, hahaha. I kept getting a nice chuckle to myself at that. They were probably loling every time I opened.

A few final thoughts. I've heard multiple strong players say in videos that "PF raise size isn't a huge deal either way". I hope they're right! Because I've taken that advice to heart. I also think that min raising has the added benefit of getting you more experience. When you min raise, the BB calls lots of the time. So you get practice playing flops. It's like I pay the same $100 to play the Benjamin as everyone else, but I get to more return experience wise for my money, because I'm involved in thinking through more postflop situations. Kind of a weird way to look at it, ha. However, this was a big thought I had in the 25k too. I'm not gonna be playing with Trickett all too often, so I want to learn as much from him as I can while I am.

I know Jason disagrees with my min raise 100% of the time I open (except SB) approach, and as I said before, he's right. I'm not sure exactly what size he would advocate, but I know it would change at different stack depths.

Just reread your post and want to make sure I address your questions completely. For one, I think any raise size here commits us to FlushE in the BB here, when he shoves over our open pre. And the short answer is no, I'm not going to adjust my raise size in instances where the BB is a good player who will defend wide. I still like my range and my position, and I'm fine with giving him good odds in exchange for him having a wide (weak) range postflop. But more than anything, I'm just using to clicking min raise! Ha.