AK Deepstack Spot

Given your description of villain and the odds you've given yourself with your sizing, I don't see how you can fold. Calling 52BB to win 93BB... you don't even need 36% equity to break even here, which means it's a big mistake to fold if you're flipping, let alone chopping or if he has any bluffs or AQ here.

Obviously never fold.

After Villain Jams, there'2 92 BB in the Pot, you have to call 52 BB. Pot odds to call: 52 / 144 so about 36.1% equity is required in order for this to be a breakeven call so what to do here depends on how wide you think the Villain's 4-betting range would be here.

If you only ever think he's doing it with AA, KK, QQ, JJ, or tighter, then your equity against that range is at best only 34.7% so calling here would be losing in the long-run.

If you add AKsuited and nothing else to that All-in 4-Bet Range, then your quity is 36.1% exactly (accounting for possible wins +ties) - If you believe he's willing to add AKs to their range, then calling this all-in is the breakeven play in the long run.

However, as soon as you add AKo to villain range, your equity increases to 39.6% so calling becomes slightly profitable in the long run.

If you believe his range is any wider than AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AKs, AKo, then calling is the long-run profitable play; If AQs / AQo is in his range, then your equity in the hand is approx 50%.

I got 93; I assumed there was a big blind ante, though.

There was a big blind ante. Thanks for all the comments. I think a call is correct in theory. It's just that in these live tournaments, when I get into these situations I'm usually up against QQ+. Of course, my sample size is small and my memory is imperfect. There's also the fact that the field was very soft. So maybe it's worth it to trade a little cEV for lower variance?

Anyway, I called.

In this live tourney, Id see it like that.

We got to take care of how we categorize someone as aggressive. aggressive != aggressive.

Villain was aggressive in a certain way with his 3bets, that he may feel comfortable with to outplay his weakish opponents in a soft field.

We should not generalize too fast that he'll moreover be aggressive in every other possible way.

We may even find ourselves being counterexploited if he looks down at his aces and in a flash of inspiration thinks "oh, Ive such an aggressive image right now, let's take advantage of it and fastplay my aces like I would some other weaker premium" when he usually may trap with a flatcall or go for a 4bet.

normally Id assume that stronger premiums like AA and KK will find themselves in slower played lines at a higher frequency than QQ and so on, but here you already reraised to 18 bigs after he raised to 5 bigs, so it's more like a normal 4bet size that you put into the pot. Thus our situation is not comparable with a classical 3betpot and all his premiums will rather be expected to be jams.

regards his jamming range overall, it's just gonna be AA KK QQ so often here that I agree with you. He will send AK into a jam at a lower frequency in this live tourney. He may also not want like you to take marginal chipEV spots with higher variance when he can comfortably exploit the soft field with postflop play and identify growing noses instead of potentially flipping for his stack in a preflop allin.

There's much more motivation for you two guys to take only cherry on the cake spots and maybe also avoid exposing yourself to higher variance spots.

even if his range was AA KK QQ JJ AK which I think is wider than his real AA KK QQ(75%) AK(50%) JJ(25%) range,

you'd have 40% equity when in chipEV you need 36% equity, and live that's just not enough.

Others have done the math, and I think it's a call assuming they are at least shoving AK half the time. It's also day 1 and people can shock you and show up with some junk you would never expect them to jam. Even if he's just shoving AQ this becomes a fist-pump call. Just because he had aces this time doesn't mean the call was wrong.

Speaking about the general philosophy of these situations. Several people said you should pass on these spots because the field is so soft. Personally I think that's the wrong approach, assuming this is a large field event.

Passing on spots is going to lead to more min cashes but less chances to run deep where the big money is.

To win the tournament you've got to keep pushing small edges, especially on day 1. There will always be more tournaments.

Maybe this is right, but it goes against my experience. My last really big cash $100k was in 2018, and it was immediately followed by a 20th place finish in a WPT main (which I won the buy into by virtue of the first place finish for the $100k). Obviously, poker was very different at that time. But in both those tournaments, I was consistently taking a "small ball" approach and not taking high variance sports as I was able to keep chipping up. Now it very well may be that this run was a fluke (both were big field events) and/or the game has improved so this is no longer a valid strategy. But it does show that we can (or could) avoid high variance spots for all our chips and win it all by chipping up with an aggressive style. Indeed, I adopted this style after reading D. Neg's "Small Ball" style explained in his book ... and Daniel certainly won a lot of large field tournaments this way ... maybe not so many any more.

@greatwhitefish

extremely simplified, ***toy game***

say you get 2 spots per blind level where in one of them you can get it in as 80% favourite and in the second one as 55% favourite for your whole stack (and the rest of the spots will be -EV spots).

now you have the option to choose which spots to play, when one blind level lasts for one orbit.

let's compare two scenarios:

a) you choose to play only the 80% equity spots

result: once per orbit you double up with 80% probability and bust with 20% probability, and pay blinds and antes.

b) you play all +EV spots

result: once per orbit you quadruple up with 44% probability and bust with 56% probability, and pay blinds and antes.

now back to scenario a) for another orbit:

we take another 80% spot, and after two orbits we (almost, besides relatively negligible blind impact) quadruple up with 64% probablity and bust with 36% probablity, and pay (blinds and antes)x2.

we begin to see that one difference in strategies a) and b) will be the theoretical time we need to chip up and potentially win all the chips, but as long by paying doubled blinds and antes doesn't outweigh the equity gain of our strategy we wont feel in any hurry as nothing else is gonna rush us.

in strategy a), we keep our chances of busting with each multiplication of our stack lower.

but not only that, we also increase our chances of making a deep run and winning.

lets assume, simplified, that we need to quadruple up to win all the chips in play and the tournament.

then our chances of winning are (simplified besides negligible blind impact) 64% in strategy a) and 44% in strategy b).

similarly the chances of deep runs will differ and be greater in strategy a) than strategy b).

when does strategy a), in a broader sense, begin to fail?

that's when paying doubled, continuously increasing, blinds and antes every orbit begins to outweigh the equity gain of strategy a) over strategy b),

so when for example the equity for best available spots drops from 80% to 56%,
the cost of paying doubled blinds and antes will outweigh the equity gain from passing on marginal +EV spots that we had before and our winning chances and chances of making a deep run will drop.

fewer high equity spots will also contribute to that.

all of that amounts to the following conclusion:

we can make more deep runs and get more wins with a strategy that passes on +EV spots,

but if there are not enough "nice" spots for us to take we may have to pay a high price and end up winning less.

altogether, big enough edge makes passing on marginal +EV spots theoretically optimal strategy and does not reduce your chances of making a deep run.

I'm not sure where you're pulling these numbers, but if you can get your money in an 80/20 spot once an orbit, then sure you don't need to take flips, because that's awesome. It is very rare you could find yourself in that situation.

The reason we take +EV spots is because we don't know when the next one will come. "Waiting for a better spot" does not guarantee that a better spot will come.

And here's the thing: With the description of the villain-- "V is a early 30ish white male who has been pretty aggressive. He has 3-bet a lot in position (hardly ever comes in for a call), about average VPIP. V is table chip leader"-- there is no reason to range him on exactly AA here. There are some players who will only have AA here, but they're bad OMC types who are terrified of having their aces cracked. If you think he's a player who's only shoving AA/KK here, then of course you fold, but that does not fit the description of villain.

Folding to a chop would be pretty bad, and AK is probably the most likely hand in his range that 4-bet shoves here. (Really, AA should be trapping some amount of the time.)

It does matter somewhat what villain thinks of you, I suppose. If he thinks you're 3-betting pretty tight and only with hands you will get it in with, then that might tighten up his 4-betting range. But, again, if you don't have any reason to think that, you have to get it in here as played.

If you don't want to get the money in preflop, there are ways around it. You could 3-bet smaller, so you're getting worse odds to call a shove. I dunno what else you could do, since you don't really want to just flat call here. But really, this just seems like some bad luck where you got a strong hand against a properly aggressive player who raises and 3-bets a lot from the button, but this time happened to have AA.

Against the V you have described as basically a GTO/Solver guy, his BTN range can be fairly wide here.

Once you make a 3-bet to 18 bb's which is close to 30% effective stack it should also include the decision to call the jam. I doubt Villain is bluffing with some of his A5s type hands and definitely not with any SC's or Broadways like KQ. But Villain can be jamming with JJ+/AK IMO and even TT/AQ sometimes. But I do think the jamming range is mostly QQ+/AK. AQ will call a lot. AQs will sometimes jam. In Prague this was a no brainer call for me against Villains who were exactly like who you described.

I think in part it matters what your image is. Have you had to show any of your 3-bets especially in the SB and BB? How frequently have you been 3-betting? If you are looking balanced and widish in your 3-bets it is an automatic call. If you have 3-bet infrequently and only shown very powerful hands then I think you eliminate JJ from Villain's jam range. But I don't think you eliminate all AK/AQs. Maybe half of the time he will call and half the time he will jam.

There are also two other things going on here. I am very tempted to just jam AK here. I don't like 3-bet raising OOP to 18 bb's against the chip leader who did not just raise first in preflop but raised after there were 2 limpers. I think Villain will call a lot with hands that will make our OOP postflop play very difficult. The other thing is that I am very tempted to just call in the SB and see if we hit the flop and fold to a cbet if we don't. I would prefer to do that with AKs but against a GTO/Solver type I sometimes just call here with AKo. I doubt the other limpers will raise/jam. And sometimes they will fold. Villain's original raise size is really good given the limpers stack sizing.

Today at Foxwoods in a $400 NL tournament I had about 72, 000 and AK and there was a limp at 1, 000 and a raise to 5, 000 and a call. The limper had sometimes tank called large raises after limping. The raiser was an absolute GTO/Solver and the raise caller was a very solid tight player who in my opinion had 99-JJ. I didn't want to 3-bet to like 18, 000 to 20, 000 even though I was in position here, so I jammed. The crazy thing was the BB tank jammed. The original limper tank folded. The Raiser tank folded (with JJ I think) and the raise caller tank folded TT he said. The BB had AQo and miraculously I held without hitting a pair.

As far as three bets, I think I probably had the third or fourth highest 3-bet frequency at the table. Most of my three bets did not go to showdown post flop. And I had never had a super premium (JJ+/AK) until that very hand.

Snap calling online but I could see making an exploitative fold here live. They just always have it live besides a few obvious psychos (and then call against them of course).

I'm doing my best to start over folding in live as much I hate doing it.

In theory it's definitely a call especially with the dynamic of button potentially punishing the limpers and you potentially 3 betting him light to take advantage of that.

It is a call. You are not that much behind pot odds if he has KK. AK's blockers reduce the combinations of AA and KK to a half.

I'm not disagreeing that the "small ball" approach is effective. I also play a similar style, but I'm not passing on many +EV spots. There's a way to play "small ball" where you just choose the lower variance lines when the EV is similar. Like you might flat on the button with a hand that has similar EV as a call or 3-bet... That kind of thing.

What you don't want to do is be the guy who 3-bet/folds way too often (unless it's a conscious exploit against an OMC type). You also don't want to be the player who opens too many hands from a 20 BB stack and then over folds to rejams. I suspect that the majority of my win rate comes from these types of players.

Look at the EV difference between various jams and various calls on GTO charts. Usually jamming a little too tight loses a minimal amount of EV. Calling off too tight can give away significant EV.

It's not just the EV you lose by not calling that is relevant either. If you're raising with something resembling a GTO range, but under-defending to jams then people can exploit that tendency by jamming wider. You'll end up just bleeding off small amounts of chips.

Good luck with that strategy. Just wait for aces, literally the only hand with 80% equity and fold everything else. See how that works out for you.

If you are not willing to stack off, you should just flat call with AK.