How not to bust midstacked 8th on final table during your deep run in 2k player tournament
I want your opinion on my ICM punt in this 2k player tournament having 70 bigs and being 2nd / 3rd in chips,
resulting in getting chips in against covering stack on the turn and busting 8th when his flush hits on the river.
three players in late positions enter the hand, I am in the small blind with 65 of hearts.
perceiving weakish ranges from my opps in late positions, I want to 3bet pressure them, having thoughts like:
- especially the button overcalling as 3rd will have a weak range
- the other two reggish players being sandwiched will have a difficult time playing when calling my 3bet and going postflop, so they may find tight folds in this spot
- If for some reason we happen to go postflop I oftenly just win the pot on the spot with a small cbet
- I connect well with low boards ... as in the hand 😀
- I can represent strong hands on high boards as the 3bettor
- Im almost chipleading (or chipleading) if I win this hand
anti reasoning as to why NOT to play the hand as I did:
you already have 3 players in the pot ... let them bust, don't interfere!
6 Replies
I’d say something but I can’t (respectfully). And yes, I’d ICM fold this pre on ft, for the reason you mentioned, the last one
Call pre. You have a good hand to close the action, ranges are going to be tighter at a final table so you're , and this deep-- like 70BB?-- you do not want to ramp up the variance. And especially not against the only stack who can bust you!
As far as the hand postflop, there's not much to say, because getting it in as good as you did on the turn is something you gotta do once you get there.
I haven't had a chance to look at your other posts in detail yet, but it feels like there's a pattern of overdoing it on hitting the gas preflop, especially in ICM-sensitive and final table spots.
Im in the small, not closing the action. isnt it just a fold? let them play and bust.
yes 70 bigs .. GG finals with blind rollback. I now thought if one ends up having that stack, just fold to 2nd place 😃
okay about the hand:
I really thought he may reason himself to folding, to what extent by your opinion would a reggish player want to enter the pot in that spot against another reggish player with suited broadways or something as strong as he had, AJs, both around equally bigstacked (though he covered me)? he's sandwiched there with button possibly overcalling. not much room for him postflop in such a case. maybe he just assumed I may be rather fishy and button too.
Oh, in the SB, yeah, probably just fold. I guess you could call if you want to get involved in pots, but you don't have to.
As far as preflop calls here from the CO, the calls are often strong but not nutted hands, since so much of the important action happens preflop. AJs is a great hand to call, since a 3-bet isn't going to get any better hands to fold and you'll have to fold to a 4-bet. The button is something of a problem, but it's also not like there are a lot of players who will just take any two as the chip leader and 3-bet here.
And yeah, you can't literally fold into second place, but you should tighten up and not try to build big pots against anyone who covers you. You're playing a 4.40? Generally to the ICM aspect, your opponents at these stakes probably aren't going to be that familiar with the concepts and principles, so folding has even more value because they'll make mistakes and bleed chips and bust themselves.
Fold pre, move on.
This is something I might do early in a tournament if the original raiser has a widish range. But my bet sizing would be more like 2,200,000 (i.e. close to 6x the original raise). I would prefer to take it down right away.
But here at the final table there is absolutely no reason to play a huge pot OOP against anyone who covers you. Especially with a 65s hand. You may be able to bluff them off their hand on the flop but the last thing we want to do is have to double or triple barrel bluff with so many players on the edge of going out.
Given what happened and your preflop choice I would bet the flop more like 3,000,000 for several reasons. When I do stuff like this its because I want people to think I have an overpair to the board something like TT+. I also want people with BDFD to fold and I would rather have smallish overpairs fold and even 44. This sizing also makes a turn jam (when another spade or 2 doesn't come) seem less polarizing. In this case it likely wouldn't have worked because Villain hit TPTK on the turn and is basically getting the right price to continue even if we have 2 pair+ which is unlikely anyway. More likely is a hand like KK/QQ but basically getting 2:1 on a turn jam is likely going to be a call because we could also have AK/AQ in theory or even TT.
But again I don't want to be in this big of a pot against somebody with basically our chip stack when there are 8 players left and we are close to 2nd in chips.
In general in these spots as much as I love SC's I would fold in the SB rather than play potentially large pots OOP. I do often call OTB and in the BB but here when we are the SB, the BB could 3-bet jam and we would have to fold.
