Would you ever call two all-ins with just Jack high??

Well, this is the question Sam Trickett got asked in the Premier League Poker Final Season 6.

Watch The Action

History

Blinds were at 8,000/16,000, Jennifer Tilly had been losing chips all over the place before this hand and was the shortest stack aside from businessman Talal Shakerchi who just moved all-in against Antonio Esfandiari from the Button with A8o and didn’t spike anything versus the Pros AJo in the Big Blind.

So we have two players that now have just below 5BBs each, one of which just lost nearly all his chips in the previous hand… a little more history on this pot is that Talal Shakerchi was actually the chip leader going into this final table and was now sat in last place! So we can only imagine he wasn’t playing his best game.

The action unfolds: 
(MP)Tilly: Moves All-in for 54,000
(HJ)Shakerchi: Calls All-in for 48,000

Everyone else folds to the Big Blind where Sam Trickett looks down at J3s, with already 16,000 committed to the pot he can flick in another 38,000 to call the largest all-in and play to win a pot of 180,000 and possibly knock out two players from the game!

What Would You Do?

This is a pretty tough spot, it’s important to note that Sam’s decision would be made much easier if he had a huge stack himself, let’s say he had 40+ Big Blinds, well then losing just another 4BBs would barely make a dent in his stack, he would be risking just 10% of his overall chips to try and knock these two opponents out.

However, he only started the hand with 189,000 in chips, which is around 12BBs.

Let’s Do Some Maths

It’s important to know how to work out how much equity we need in these spots.

This means that we will need 21% equity in this exact spot to call and this hand is a pretty good hand to go by, obviously, we could be in some nightmare scenarios if we are overcoated, meaning our suit (in this case clubs) are not live or if someone dominates us with a hand like AJ for instance.

But we are against Ace high and pocket Kings here and we still have 22% equity with just J3s! Meaning we will win this more than 1 out of 5 times.

So we are getting the right price to call here…. however, it’s important to remember Sam’s stack depth here, whilst he could chip up hugely if he scoops this pot, he will make a big dent in his stack the 4 out of 5 times he doesn’t win this pot, so it all comes down to whether he wants to have 12BBs, which is a reasonable shoving stack with fold equity against everyone on the table or whether he thinks there is little difference if he just has 8BBs.

Sam opted to make the fairly tight fold with all things considered and this time it worked out fairly well because he wouldn’t have won the pot and ended up having more chips for when he did finally get his double up.

Sam ended up moving all-in from the Cut-Off with his remaining 155,000 and doubling up with his King high against Tilly’s Ace high a few hands later and went on to get second place in the tournament for a cool $200,000 on top of the money he had won for the earlier sit n go’s played in the build-up to the final.