In this article, we are going to look at how to play pocket Queens with deep stacks in the early stages of a hyper-turbo tournament, we have 187BBs at the beginning of the hand and we are facing an open from Mid-Position and we are in Mid-Position 1 (MP1) to the direct left of the original raiser.
So we have to start putting more money in this pot with our strong holding, we want to limit the number of players and improve our equity in the pot, so we 3-Bet to 640 chips around 3.4x the initial raise.
We get another 2 flat calls of our 3-Bet from behind, one from the Button and another from the Big Blind. This is quite common in low-mid stakes tournaments with deep stacks. Players will often just be able to call fairly wide because stacks are deep they will play wider than they would if stacks were shorter stacking stacks.
When the action gets back to the original raiser they then decide to 4-Bet, this is a little annoying for us because now if we decide to flat call this bet we may end up playing the pot 4 ways which is never good even with hands like Aces, however, our hands are tied here because if we 5-Bet we are going to only get action from AA, KK and sometimes AKs.
Let’s look at how our equity will look against these holdings:
Not too good! We will have around 27% equity against our opponent if they are only getting their stack in with AA, KK & AKs, so we want to avoid overplaying our Queens into this kind of range whenever possible… So we just decide to flat call.
Post Flop
The player on the Button folds to the 4-Bet but the Big Blind comes along, so we get to see the flop 3 ways…
We are going to include a decent amount of pairs in the Big Blinds flat calling range that we dominate, so we are quite happy to have them in the pot, as when we have the best hand versus the 4-Bettor we can win a good amount of chips versus the Big Blinds wide calls.
The action is checked to us on the flop, which is almost a sign that Seat 1 the initial raiser and 4-Bettor has missed the board, with their most likely holding now being AK, so we could start betting to protect our equity here a good percentage by betting on the small side.
I like mixing in some checks for when seat 1 is going to be looking to check-raise us all in on the flop with their AA and KK holdings.
This is the play we end up making, this is good for some other reasons like deception and being able to get bets on later streets from weaker pairs as our hand will look weak.
Another big factor to keep in mind is the SPR (Stack to Pot Ratio) being so small for all players in the pot we can get all the money in on two streets of action in this pot.
The Turn
Brings another Jack, a safe card for us, we just didn’t want to see an overcard to our pair. It’s hard to think someone could have a Jack in this pot, the initial raiser certainly doesn’t have AJs in their 4-Betting range too often and would have to look to build a pot with it at some point, so when we are checked to again on the Turn we can look to go for some value…
We bet fairly small with 2,880 chips into the pot of 7,835, which is 36%, this is a fine sizing, it allows us to set up an easy pot-sized all in against either opponent on the river if they choose to call.
We get one call from the Big Blind in seat 6 and the original 4-Bettor in Seat 1 gets out of the way, we take the River heads up…
The River
Is a blank, only really A♣ 3♣ got there and that is only one combination, so we are all set to go for value here and get calls from hands like 66-TT and possibly even some stubborn A5s.
Luckily for us, our opponent is a non-believer and looks us up for their remaining 7,370 chips with 8♣ 8♦
We may have induced this action from our turn check back, or who knows maybe they are just some fish that was always going to call us down, but the important lessons here are paying attention to pre-flop ranges and realising what the SPR is looking like and how many streets we have to bet to get all the money and maximum value from our hand.
This is a good example of getting a full double up without having to just punt off our stack preflop and play guessing games as to whether we would have the best hand or not.
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