Picking up where we left off from part one of this two-part post, we are now down to just a few players remaining on the Final Table of the Hot $22 Turbo on Pokerstars, let’s try and take this thing down.
Pick Spots to Get Aggressive
When we are short-handed we need to start getting a little more aggressive as there are less good hands in play so the more aggressive players will come out on top with more chips.
In this pot our opponent shows weakness by just limping into the pot, now if we had a more playable hand we could just look to check back here and take it to the streets.
However we have a terrible hand in the bottom of our ranges, so these hands make perfect steal attempts because we don’t care if we get re-raised all-in.
We get a decent flop for keeping our foot on the gas once we get called, it’s going to be pretty hard for our opponent to continue here unless they were trapping us pre-flop with a pair. So we look to keep the aggression going and C-Bet hoping to take down the pot.
Sadly we get called and our opponent moves all-in on this King Turn card. So it may have been that they just limp called with King high and then after hitting this Turn want to protect their holding.
It makes it easy for us though as mucking our Ten High here is no issue at all for us.
Re-Steal Hand Selection
We will want to have re-steals in our range from the Blinds that include suited Ace high hands and pairs, we will want to tighten our ranges a little in these short stack spots and just choose to move all-in with a slightly tighter range than we would defend with normally.
The reason for this is it’s going to be hard to realise our equity playing out of position in these spots, so we are going to just want to get the money in pre-flop and pick up the chips or run our equity if we are called.
Look for Nitty Players to Steal From
On this table I noticed that the player in the Big Blind was playing super tight from the Big Blind, never really defending even against small raises.
So normally I would look to limp with a decent amount of my range but because of this weakness on their part I then changed my usual game plan to minimum raise 100% of my hands Blind vs Blind.
It’s always good to have a very fluid game plan when we are playing on Final Tables, we will notice things pop up like players get too active or certain players playing very tight, make sure to counter these observations with the correct counterplay.
The best counter to Nitty players is just to not give them any action when they choose to open raise pots because this player, for instance, played a few hands only and two of those holdings were pocket Aces.
Get to the Lab with Hands that You want to Check
So unfortunately for us we re-shoved versus the player to our right a few times and then I guess they just had enough and decided to raise call us with KQo.
A pretty horrible play on their part, I would prefer to just see an open raise all-in.
So we end up getting it all-in with our Ace high hand from the Big Blind and losing the flip sadly to end up in third place.
Never feels good to hit top pair on the Turn and bet drawing dead in the hand, this would have all but locked up the win for us with around 700k in our stack and both our opponents having around 10BBs.
So let’s make sure we made the right move and check our play with ICMizer…
So it’s all pretty close on whether we should be folding or pushing all-in with our A5o but it’s a fairly +EV play, so we definitely didn’t make a mistake with our hand given our stack size.
Looking at this spot in the long run against two players I feel I had a pretty big edge against we could have just flat called and taken it to the post-flop streets, but I probably wouldn’t have felt this way had we held up and grabbed a stranglehold on all the chips in the tournament.
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