Akward Stack Size in the SB

Unless you are going to fold because you think that’s how strong CO’s range is, jam. No other option makes any sense.

CallMeVernon is right. Any raise commits you to the pot, with AKs you should try to apply whatever pressure you can. If CO's range is OMC tight then folding could be better but your pot odds are good enough that CO has to be real tight.

Straightforward jam. Most of the time you take down the pot with Ace high, including folding out a lot of pairs which beat you. Sometimes you get called and flip. Occasionally you get called by AQ and dance a little jig. Occasionally you get called and are crushed. Simple bread and butter shove when you're playing this shallow.

To bring some context, real tight is AA and KK. Everything else, you are getting pot odds to jam.

The only exception would be if you are under bankrolled. If getting felted is going to put you on tilt or ruin your night, then fold.

That’s not quite true. For example let’s say V’s range is QQ+ and he’s always calling a jam. We are flipping with QQ and we are a dog against the rest of the range. So we’re flipping half the time and we’re behind the other half (way behind a quarter of the time). We aren’t flipping often enough for the dead money to compensate us for when we’re behind.

For jamming to be good we need to know that we are flipping the vast majority of the time we are called or that we have fold equity (or both).

To clarify, COs is a reasonable tight player but not a Nit. After a couple of limpers I would expect him to have a range of something like TT+, any two suited broadway cards, maybe A8s+. What concerns me is he has put $25 into the pot. If I jam for $200 from the SB, I think a reasonable player folds out most of that and you are left with QQ+, AK and not much else. If I had $100 behind, it's a no brainer shove. If I had $500, then I could 3-bet to say $125. But $200 is just really awkward here.

Just jam. It's harder to get action post when you flop an A or K and TT wants to fold or play 1-street game at most.

Ship it all day. Taking $50 down without a sweat is a great, great outcome. Riding your equity for $425 or $600 is an almost equally great outcome.

No it’s not. You can shove. One thing to keep in mind is that someone else has put $25 in the pot as well. So if you jam and take it down you win $50, not $25.

I don’t have time to write out the exact math but in fact it’s OK to jam against that range even without the dead money. You can do this yourself. Under the assumption that he calls with all the pocket pairs and AK and folds everything else, count combos. You win $25 when he folds, and you have pretty good equity when called (flipping with way more combos than running into AA/KK). Since you get a lot of folds, the jam will be profitable.

Thanks all.

I did jam and CO tanked for a while before calling with QQ. Button folded but unfortunately I didn't improve postfolp. I think CallMeVernon and others have it right. Against the range I gave, I pickup $50 here way more often than I am called, that's what makes it wort it.

You are also forgetting about the fact that with the extra $25, it is actually profitable to take the flip here, because you win $225 when you improve but lose $200 when you don’t.

Also his tank with QQ implies there is a chance he folds TT or JJ which would be a coup for you.

I think overall I would jam here, although I've likely made some nitty folds against certain player types too. Taking down a quarter of our stack rake free preflop is a huge coup, as is getting him to fold JJ/etc. some of the time.

ETA: After reading how wide CO can open, this is a fistpump jam for me.

GcluelessNLnoobG

There's nothing wrong with laying 200 to win 60 with a premium hand (except when the CO's at the top of his range. "that's poker").

Flat calling is fine, honestly. It's not the worst thing to flat from the blinds with a hand that flops well enough and is going to be disguised when we do hit. There's $56 in the pot, laying us better than 2:1 on a call. We can call for $25, and fold to further aggression on the flop when we miss, or check-jam with TPTK+.

Compare that to jamming $200 into $56, laying the CO 1.5 to 1, and flipping at best when he calls, or only winning $56 when he folds. Even if he calls with worse, he'll still suck out sometimes.

The problem with jamming AK here is - what else is in your jamming range pre? Are you just going to play jam-or-fold with your entire range, waiting to pick up premiums? Or are you also jamming JTs, 99, etc?

I get that you're not playing every hand from the SB, where we should mostly be playing raise-or-fold, but if we're going to be jamming AK and flatting or folding with most of the rest of our range, we're probably missing some opportunities to flop well, and bleeding chips when we don't.

Picking up $56 by jamming here (and getting folds) is great, don't get me wrong. But we can pick up that much and more, and risk less, way less (only $25) if we flat call, and see a flop. No one is going to fold worse AX or KX if we spike an A or K on the flop and check-jam.

I'm prolly the least raise or fold guy here (see overlimping KJo in LP thread / etc.), but +1 to this being one of those spots. Just can't be putting in huge percentages of our stack preflop hoping to bink flop and not realize our equity otherwise.

GcluelessNLnoobG

It's $25, out of $200. That's 12.5%. It's not a "huge" percentage.

If we were $100 deep, I'd want to jam, knowing we're going to get called by a fairly wide range, when there's already $56 in the pot before it gets to us. We're going to have decent equity against the range that calls us in that spot.

But we're jamming $200, because we want folds? For sure, we are going to get a lot of folds, but if we get called, it's going to be by a stronger range, and we're now risking $200 to win the $56 that was in the pot, versus risking half that amount.

We're getting a good price to call. Raising here seems like not taking a free card when we're on a draw and have no fold equity.

Maybe I'm just a scared money fish. I'd rather flat call, see a flop, and jam if we hit / fold if we whiff, thus protecting our stack, in order to get it in better in the future.

We might have to agree to disagree here. 10%+ of stacks is huge and should almost never be put in as a flat that will often be giving up on the flop UI. Only real exceptions would be tarping monsters or perhaps some crazy case where we're closing the action eleventeen ways and setmining.

GimoG

So are we going to get a lot of folds or does it seem like we have no fold equity? Which one is it?

Personally, I think we have plenty of FE, plus we're not in bad shape when called except for AA/KK (even KK we have ~ 30%). Plus the dead money.

We're getting lots of calls when we jam $100 into $56.

We're not getting lots of calls when we jam $200 into $56, but WHEN we DO get called, we're usually going to be crushed by AA/KK, or chopping with AK, or occasionally flipping against someone who just couldn't let go of QQ.

The best scenario we can hope for is to be chopping of flipping.

Jamming $100 to win the $56 in the middle, laying 2:1 on a call makes sense. Calling $25 to see a flop, when we're being laid >2:1 makes sense.

Jamming $200 into $56, laying 1.5 to 1, when we're going to be chopping or flipping 70% of the time when we get called, and a huge underdog the other 30% of the time, doesn't seem to make as much sense.

We're not necessarily always giving up post-flop. The flop might check around. We might turn our hand into a bluff. If we call in the blinds, we can rep a pretty wide range post-flop, something we can't do if we just jam pre.

A few points. We whiff most of the time on the flop if we only call. Say 70% of the time, we don't even get a pair. Probably worse, given card removal.

From OP's stated range for V's raising and V continues after a jam, we can say the following: OP didn't give any offsuit combos to V, I added all KQo and AJo+ for raising. If we do that, I get 105 V combos to start {TT+, A8s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs}. And continues with QQ+, AK. Or 21 combos. We assume all limpers fold.

84/105 times, we make $56. For the other 21 instances, we have 40.56% equity. On a total pot of $456. Or $184.95. We invested $200, so we're losing $15.05, ~21% of the time.

We make over $41 on net, over all of the scenarios.

I'm going to need to see some data that shows calling here beats jamming, when we don't make a pair 70% of the time and we make $40 when we jam.

Doc, one small, nit-picky-adjacent thing you can learn from this thread is that “laying odds” does not mean what you think it means.

When you jam 200 into a pot of 50, you are laying 4:1, that is, 200 to win 50. It’s a shorthand for discussing fold equity—if you are laying 4:1 you are showing an automatic profit if you pick up the pot more than 80% of the time. You are OFFERING your opponents 2:1 (150 to win 300). I’m not sure where you got 1.5:1 but there’s no relevant correct calculation that uses that.

And the point of realizing that you are laying 4:1 is that if you really believe you will only be called by AA and KK, you will win the pot WAY more than 80% because of how much gets folded. Even if we think he calls with all flips but still folds all dominated hands, we run into AA/KK 6 times against 30 combos of suited Broadway that get folded. So if we count flips as neutral, which is actually understating it due to dead money, 30 out of 36 is over 83%. Jamming is clearly good.

Always open to learning what I'm doing wrong.

When we jam $200 into $56 ($25 raise x 2 + 2 limpers for $3 each), we're risking $200 to win $56 when they fold. But if they call, they're calling off $175 to win $256 (the $56 that was in the pot, plus the $200 we jammed), which is 1.46 to one, which I rounded up when I said we'd be laying 1.5 to 1.

Is that not the correct way to express the wager, from the opponent's perspective? He's not risking another $175 to win $306, he's risking $175 to win $256, no?

I know it's a mistake to assume everyone else plays the same way we do. But in the 1/3 games I play, most opponents aren't calling off a $200 short-stack jam with worse than AA, KK, or AKs, when they only have $25 in the pot. I know I wouldn't call off $200 with worse, because I'm expecting to be shown AA, KK, or AK more often than not.

So, yeah, we're picking up the $56 in the middle the vast majority of the time, but if and when we get called, we're behind AA/KK, or chopping with AK, and occasionally maybe we're flipping against a guy who doesn't know that the 3B-jam for $200 isn't a bluff or a worse PP than QQ. I don't think we're getting called by all flips, which is why I don't like the idea of jamming, when we can just call.

If we just call, yeah, we're whiffing a lot, but so are our opponents. It's hard to make a pair, and we have the nut no-pair. When we hit, we can bet for value. If we miss, we're not necessarily giving up on the hand. Worst case, we lose $25 if we fold to a c-bet. Best case, we double up when we make a hand and get paid.

I'm not arguing the theory or probability or equity of our hand against various ranges. I'm arguing that there are better ways to play a $200 stack than jamming AK into $56. Like I said, if we had $100, I'd jam all day, and expect to get way more calls, from hands weaker than AK and QQ. But with $200, I think we can see a flop, and just play some poker.

We have 32% vs {KK+, AKs}. Which comprise (let's see if I can screw this up again) 9 total combos, right? Vs the ~100 combos that V could be raising us with.

10% of the time, we have 32% equity in a pot of 431 (200 + V's 200 + 31 of dead money). Or $138. We spent 200 bucks to get there. So we lose 62 dollars each time. But that's only 10% of the outcomes, given V's stated raising limpers range. So we lose 6.20 on average. The other 90% of the time V folds, we make $56. $50.40 on average.

We still make >40 bucks by shoving.

If V is OMC, and is really restricting their raising range here, this doesn't apply. It's a bit of algebra, but V has to be raise/folding like 10-11 additional combos beyond the 9 they're going for it with, for the jam to be profitable. Is V really only raising QQ+, AQs, AKo here?