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| Day 4 - VDSE again | |
| Last Updated: 2011-11-09 17:16:28 | |
| I haven't read every PLO book ever written, but I have a hard time imagining better books if you want to learn about Omaha than Jeff Hwang's series. No this is not going to be a PLO blog, but I do have a quiz today in Jeff's wonderful style. The decisions made in the hand are not necessarily the correct ones... | |
| Before I start, if the term "M" doesn't mean anything to you, I also highly recommend the Harrington on Hold'em series. "M" is basically the number of times you can go around a table without playing a hand before running out of chips. Off the top of my head, "M" above 10 is good, "M" below 10 means you should be looking for a good hand to get your chips in, "M" below 5 means you should shove all-in the next time action is on you and nobody has raised yet with any two cards. I'm not going to get into all the logic behind those cutoffs. | |
| Here's the situation... | |
| You are over 3 hours in a poker tournament with over 300 of your closest poker friends and you're stuck at your starting stack of 12,000 chips. Blinds are 200/400 with a 50 ante, they are about to go to 300/600 with a 50 ante so you are about to be at 20BB. When the blinds go up a round is going to cost you 1150 chips which means your "M" is right around 10. One round of blinds and antes and your "M" will fall below 10. | |
| A desperate short stack under the gun (only 3800 chips) shoves all-in, 2nd to act folds and you look down at pocket 10s. 3800 to win 4650 in chips, but that's 1/3 of your stack. | |
| 1) Do you: | |
| A) Fold B) Call C) Move all in | |
| You call. | |
| Everyone folds around to the big blind who has been an active player, but also a good player and is a big stack. He goes over the top all-in. | |
| You've got 1/3 of your chips in the pot. It's going to cost you your remaining 8200 to play for 12250 in the main pot plus the 8200 from the big stack so you're getting about 2.5-1 on your money, a side pot that is big enough to put you 1/3 above where you started the hand if that's all you win. | |
| 2) Do you: | |
| A) Call B) Fold | |
| You call. | |
| The short stack turns over K-10 both clubs, the other all-in turns over A-Q off. | |
| 3) Were the calls mathematically correct now that you know the hands? | |
| A) No, Neither was correct B) The first one was only correct heads-up C) The first one was correct either way D) The second one was correct E) C & D | |
| The flop comes A-K-rag two hearts and you have 10h, you're down to the case 10, running flush cards or running straight cards. You get a Jh on the turn to give you hope on the river, but all you get is a blank and you and the short stack are sent to the rail. | |
| Pete's scoring: | |
| 1) A - 5 pts; B - 3 pts; C - 10 pts | |
| In hindsight, I should have moved all-in here. I never believe it is correct to put 1/3 of your chips into a pot and if you ever do you're pretty much pot committed anyway so why not get them in? Folding is gets more points than calling for that reason. In the big picture you need to find ways to get your chip stack from your starting stack of 12,000 to a number like 200,000 to get into the money. You've gone nowhere for 3 hrs. You can't wait forever, and you're going to have to take a chance sooner or later. So I'm not going to say folding is a really bad choice... but if not here, when? The most reasonable argument for folding is how many people are left in the hand. | |
| As far as call vs shove, not smart on my part. I was inviting other people into the pot. Reality is that having decided not to fold I should have isolated the original all-in because the hand plays very well against the range of a desperate short stack. A shove will get rid of most hands with an ace and should get rid of any unpaired hand that doesn't have an ace. The big stack probably wasn't going to fold A-Q but many tight players would have and maybe he would have too. As it turned out it didn't matter, but we're decision oriented, not results oriented. If you run into a bigger pair, that's the breaks. Sometimes you get unlucky, that's poker. | |
| I don't know what I was thinking just calling. Dumb. Who knows, had I shoved I might have had 8000 chips left and still been desperate but alive. | |
| 2) A - 10 pts; B - 0 pts | |
| 2.5-1 on your money, 1/3 of your chips already in the pot. I AM going to say that folding is really bad here. You cannot fold, plain and simple. | |
| 3) A - 0 pts; B - 5 pts; C - 7 pts; D - 3 pts; E - 10 pts | |
| The math says it's a good call. It goes like this: | |
| i) You made a great call and would have gotten very unlucky if it was just you heads up with the short stack. You would have been a 63-35 favorite with a 2% chance of a split. | |
| ii) Even with three of you, you had 34.22% equity in the main pot and it cost you 32% of the pot. That means you had slightly more equity than what you put in, plus there was the small blind and the antes to make this a profitable call in the long run. It's close, but the call was mathematically correct. | |
| iii) In the side pot, unfortunately I don't have an odds calculator that does a "what if you knew two other cards but they weren't active" so i can't account for the 10 you no longer had to hit a set with, but that also takes away some straight possibilities for the A-Q. Had you been heads up all-in in the first place just you vs the big stack you would have been almost a 57-43 favorite to win the pot with only a .38% chance of splitting. | |
| So it turned out to be a good call all around. | |
| The closer you got to 30, the better you did...at least in Pete's World. | |
| I quite often talk about stack size awareness, or lack thereof. I strongly believe that Dan Harrington has "M" exactly right and that it's a much better standard than where you are relative to the big blind when you're in large tournaments that have antes. I see many folks focus on the "10XBB" standard, which is fine when there aren't antes. | |
| When there are antes, you have to consider that you're spending another big blind per round in antes in most structures. You might have almost 20 big blinds and that might seem like a lot, but when you consider you're losing 2.5 big blinds per round you need to understand that in two rounds you will lose 1/4 of your stack. After those two rounds, you've gone to losing 1/3 of your stack over the next two times around...and so on. | |
| But the same standard shouldn't necessarily apply to smaller tournaments. Quite often deep in small tournaments almost everyone will have an "M" below 10 and many will have "M" below 5. In that case, your "M" relative to everyone else's "M" is more important than what your "M" is in a vacuum. | |
| That's all for now, will do aria and random stuff in a final post tonight or tomorrow. | |
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