Rupert Elder

I think check calling the river is a big mistake. His hand mostly looks like some dumb A high that decided to 3 bet (KQ, AQ, AJ or some random silly hand). I think AK is the most likely hand to check back the flop. Our hand also is fairly disguised. I think we can get A high to call the river quite often. I would call.

Apologise for not reading the thread. The way I see it is that a lot of people, especially non-regs but not excluding regs, are complete pussys at the end of tournaments (especially high buyins). The LAGs come out on top more often (and lets face it all the money is in the top 3) due to the fact that they are applying a ton of pressure on these players, stealing their blinds, 3 betting them absurdly wide, and running them over postflop etc and in the process accumulating a ton of low variance chips (much like you alluded to). Basically the success rate of the things these players do are so ridiculously high against some players that it doesn't really matter that they are playing 30% of hands in a full ring table.

I think some people take this to too much of an extreme and try to bully people in spots where it is completely inapplicable (e.g. some reg trying to battle another reg too hard in the early ante stages of the 109c isn't going to work out well for them) but when you look at players destroying people on big bubbles or in big ICM situations where they have the big stack it's because everyone else is caged and too scared to play back.

With stacks set up as they are I'd just fold. There are 3 big stacks that aren't as susceptible to ICM as you and although Full Tilt is top heavy there are still 2 stacks that are considerably shorter than you and worth laddering against. Even if one of the short stacks goes all in, they are in EP and likely won't be jamming that wide of a range but still wide enough for us to have to call off.

I think though the reality of this hand is that while it is a common situation, it's not a situation that matters all that much since the EV of r/f r/d and f are all pretty similar IMO. If you open 44 or fold TT it's a tragedy but hands that are really on the cusp of a range aren't going to be the difference between what makes you a 25% ROI and what makes you a 26% ROI. It will have a negligible effect and would be far more productive putting time into selecting better tournaments to play/working on postflop.