$500 PLO tourney - $40K guarantee - 13 left - 11 make the money
Average was $200K and my stack was $280K. Two away from $.
Blinds 4000/8000 and folds to button who makes it $28,000. SB folds and I look down at AA78 ds spades and diamonds and repot to $85,000. He thinks a bit and calls. He has around $350K.
Flop QJ6 with two hearts and one diamond. Do you bet here?
I checked and he quickly says pot which is 182K basically putting me all in. Call or fold?
Thanks!
3 Replies
Firstly, most people think in terms of cash strategy so I'd take anything anyone says, including me, with a grain of salt. But cash and tournament are different. For example, as the years have past, people in tournaments are preflop raising smaller and smaller. At the WSOP main event, later in the tournament, some people were using a open minimum raising sizing. So when I look at your post and see the villain open raising pot, I think to myself this guy is playing horrible and raising way too large this late in a tournament. The bubble is enough to make people fold, villain doesn't need to open raise pot. And this ends up making your preflop 3bet huge. The other 11 players in the tournament, especially bubble boys, are jumping for joy that two above average stacks are playing such a huge pot.
I think you should have bet the flop and kept the initiative. Cash poker will often see a pot control attempt made with a 1/5 to 1/3 pot sizing. But this is a tournament with smaller starting stack sizes, therefore I personally think you could even go below 1/5 pot (20% pot). You said your preflop 3bet made the villain think for a bit before calling. You could have kept the flop initiative and kept villain thinking and on his heels. Or if villain raises your small flop bet, then you can fold with more confidence that you were beat and still have only slightly less than an average stack left.
As played on the flop with your check, I fold to villains pot sized flop bet since you are facing a board with a flush draw you don't block and a two broadway board providing lots of straight draws. But instead of your flop check, heck I would have been happier had you cbet any amount. Even tournament cbetting 1bb is better than checking here in my opinion.
I think you have to shove the flop as played. Backdoor diamond and 6 for straight redraws on flop are both important.
Flatting pre-flop is probably ok given the dynamics.
I'm just bumping this to give tournament PLO some love. Most people here are probably cash players. If that is the case where you simply play the random PLO tournament from time to time, then maybe simplify to the below strategy for OP's situation...
Out of position with the flop range advantage always c-bet here and you can have different bet sizes.
Out of position without the flop range advantage always check.
This seems like a very human approach for a cash player playing a random tournament once in a blue moon. Now you can decide for yourself if the villain here who preflop open raised way too large an amount this late in a tournament is also playing wide enough and calling our 3bet wide enough that we have the range advantage. The big headache is if no one really has a range advantage here. This (bad?) villain betting that big preflop almost guaranteed they were going to bet big postflop if given the chance. Therefore, I personally am going to try and slow them down postflop with a small cbet for pot control all the time. But against a good player, I am going to use the above simple tournament hack rule of checking or cbetting on who has the flop range advantage.
