$0 NL HE MTT: MTT Turbo - All in for my tournament life

A player went all-in against me from the CO. He was shoving all-in roughly every 4 hands and had the second-largest stack at around 70 BB.

I called with KQs for 35 BB because I thought I could have decent equity against lower pocket pairs and possibly dominate some weaker hands, given how often he was shoving.

He had A2o and won. Was calling the right or wrong play here?

You lost didn't ya? ==> Wrong play

Mr.Matt said:

I called with KQs for 35 BB because I thought I could have decent equity against lower pocket pairs and possibly dominate some weaker hands, given how often he was shoving.

He had A2o and won. Was calling the right or wrong play here?

Click to expand...

Because you felt that KQs competed very well with the bulk of his jam range, and you're not exactly wrong. He is jamming every 4th hand so we can assume his jam range to be 25% or the top 25% of hands, or more likely he is not thinking of how good the hand is, but probably simplifying it (maniacs are lazy) by just jamming all of Ax and all pocket pairs (not necessarily the best 25% of hands but Ax and pocket pair have best showdown value pre-flop). 21% of all hole card deal combos are pocket pairs or contain an A. Yep, close enough to 25% that this is probably what he is doing. Can you say LAZY?? : P

So, if we wish to stay ahead of most of his range, we could start by cutting that in half, say A8 and up (fold A7 and down) or any pocket pair 88 or higher to call him. Or to be safer be a bit tighter with the Aces, maybe AT or AJ or higher, and maybe even lower pocket pairs down to 66 or 55. This would give us a significant range advantage. But there are no guarantees in a single hand of course.

Now, I have seen players far better than I post on forums like this that they will call down maniacs like this with any pocket pair or almost any A and they do well but that is probably in cash games, not tournament play. But there is nothing wrong with tightening right up so long as we are not entering icm stack depths. I wouldn't tighten up to AA KK AK only, that would be too tight, but A8s and up, AJo and up, 88 and up. Work with that, adjust that as you like.

Now if he's jamming 50%, 75%, 100% you can call him quite wide, any A, any pair, probably any 2 broadways.

But of course also make sure that you have isolation. If you are closing the action, awesome! Let it rip! But if there are players still to act after you call, then you need to be super tight because if you call down with A8 and the player on your left has AK ... you beat the maniac but lose to the tight player who happens to have it.

If the maniac is on your right, then everyone else at the table is still to act (unless it folds to him on SB). This sucks so we might have to just be super tight, fold a ton and let someone else take him down.

I understand how you feel, they play recklessly all-in, and when I finally have a good hand to counter, they end up helping the opponent win as if encouraging that kind of action. But they'll soon be stopped by that style of play, though it brings negative feelings to me. Calling that hand proper isn't wrong, in the long run, it will be beneficial, so don't let a win or two shake your way of playing.

Even if he is jamming 25% of hands, KQs is only slightly ahead of that range. If I let Equilab construct a 25% range, KQs has 52,4% equity. This does not include all AX hands, like the one he actually had. If I include those and remove some suited hands, it drops to around 50%. So you are not getting it in with an edge here. Typically in these situations its better to be patient and let someone else walk into the line of fire. And if you are going to call it off, you really want to have high card value, which KQs does not. AJo would have 60% equity against the latter range, where KQs only had 50%.

Remember, his range here is heavily Ax. If he is jamming any pocket pair or any Ax, approximately 70% of his jams will be Ax. The best way to beat this is to dominate him with a better A. So 35% of his jams will be A8 or A7 or lower. So if we call him with AJ or better, most of the time he will only have 3 outs. ; )

Furthermore, if we call him with 88, 35% oi the time we will split his hand and A7 and lower has only 3 outs. A9 or better has 6 outs and we are still a 55% favorite.

Further yet, if he jams pocket pairs and we call with AJ we are 45% against all pairs TT and lower.

So that's your basic math against this guy. We can see that the pairs are more powerful than the Aces, even the low pairs a tad more powerful.