russ thomas

great video.  I actually think having two good players talking back and forth is much much better than just one (although i enjoy both of your videos individually).  I think growing in poker is done through argument not lecture and you can do that here with two people.

So in knockout tournaments I kind of think of them this way... There is a state at which your stack is capable of knocking your opponents out and getting their bounty.  In the a9s hand, you seem to have a decent chip stack capable of knocking out shorter ones and even if you 3b/called the a9s and lost you would still have knockout potential.  In a knock out tournament i think this is a very clear 3b/call as i'm sure this for sure +chipev and certainly +$ev due to the knock out and the retention of your stack with knockout potential even if you lose.  These first few sentences in this paragraph are just to try and convey that their is a $ value to retaining a stack with knockout potential, so just because you engage in a knockout opportunity does not necessarily always mean it is much more $EV to get it in as compared to a normal tournament.

also @david stephany.

The A9o spot is quite interesting for a few reasons. 

1) if he knows we fold A9o then we are folding a pretty large portion of our CO range for him to autoprofit pre and we can undoubtedly be exploited in this spot. 

2) he doesn't necessarily know that we will fold a9o 

3) we don't know if he is the type of player who can recognize this and will exploit us in this spot by 3betting very wide

We simply don't have enough information to do anything about this 3bet.

The truth of things IMO in MTTs is with how much money is in the pot pre and the steal ranges in late position we see I think there are just infinite auto profit pre spots and we just don't know who is taking advantage of them until you have a lot of data.  You don't even need to size small against 30+% ranges when there are antes in the pot to auto profit pre if they don't have a significant 4betting range.

i was just thinking of this a9o in the context of a regular MTT but i'm not sure how people's ranges change here when they are sitting there with 25 blinds in a knock out tournament.  I think they should perceive the other player with a big stack to shove lighter because of the knock out opportunity but that should also make the original raiser think that the 3better knows you are gonna shove lighter and therefore isn't as bluff heavy.   I dunno

this is a pretty clear fold with you being covered by JasonX85.  My reasoning is simply because you are never crushing supernova9 with this hand so you may have slightly enough equity to call but the ICM consequences of Jason overcalling are simply disastrous for you (look at the stacks).   Also, i don't know if Jason is gonna cbet here with pure air so his range could be decently strong here

i dunno, 150bb deep this is a slam dunk call for me on the flop not a 3 bet.  you can call any turn and plenty of implied odds when you hit and he may keep bluffing on flush runouts and give up when flush misses