In this post, we are going to run through some Tournament Poker spots where we found some common leaks to patch…
77 UTG with 18BBs
This is one of those tough spots where we have a short stack and a good hand, however, due to our positional disadvantage how should we play our 77?
We are just going to Fold them
- We have too short of a stack to look to play with our equity, we just aren’t going to be able to realise it on many boards.
- Facing a 3-Bet we will just have to muck
- We can’t profitably Jam All in, as it’s a -EV play
Let’s look at which hands we can jam from this position with this stack depth
We are going to want to raise with hands that are blocking our opponent’s strong hands like A5s and KQs over raising hands like 77, however, it’s worth noting that we can profitably shove hands as wide as JTs and A9s here with this stack.
KQo in the Big Blind Versus Late position Open
In this example, we have KQo in the Big Blind versus a 20BB open raise from the Cut Off, 5 players off the money in a mid-stakes online tournament.
I fell like this is a big misplayed hand, a lot of players will take the low variance line here and take a flop with KQo. Which can be a fine play when deep stacked and way off the money bubble.
However, when we have the added pressure of having our opponents covered and a hand that blocks a big part of their value range by blocking hands like KK, QQ, AK, AQ this hand is a good candidate to 3-Bet and play for stacks if our opponent finds the 4-Bet All in.
Let’s look at what hands our opponent might 4-Bet all in with:
It’s fair to say that the Villian would want to push all-in with any pair a lot of suited Ace high hands and hands better than ATo and KJo
Let’s see how our hand does against this range…
We have around 45% equity even if our opponent finds the all-in with this tight range that includes hands that have us crushed sometimes… so we can profitably 3-Bet call off if needed and a vast majority of the time our opponent is going to have to find a fold with there late position open as we are close to the money and they shouldn’t be risking their tournament life at this stage of the game.
Flopping Gut-Shots Out of Position
We have found this to be a good example of how many players will misplay hands choosing to check-call a bet and give up if they miss with poor draws is definitely a leak, so what is a better line?
We look at a hand where we have JTo in the Big Blind on a 6 Handed tournament table, with stacks over 50BBs.
UTG raises and Cut Off Calls, We are getting a good price to complete and take a flop 3 ways with a hand that plays decently, we would prefer some suited combinations, however, JTo is just about within a hand that we can play to this action.
We flat call and see a flop of:
- I like leading straight out here, we accomplish a few things, we get snap folds from many the initial raiser’s hands, we also put him in a squeeze spot where its hard for the initial raiser to float us without hitting this board as there is still a player behind to act.
- We can build a bigger pot for if we hit the turn card and make our straight.
- We set our own price… if we check and one of our opponent bets large, we hate continuing just calling to hit our gutshot.
As this hand goes, luckily both our opponents found the fold and we just scoop the pot with Jack High! A lovely result for us.
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