WSOP 10k Main, very close to bubble.

shoving is good, limpcalling is good, and limpshoving is good.

what's best? that will depend on the situation and incentives.

Id likely limpcall and go postflop.

Shoving is certainly +EV. The solver plays it as a pure open. So presumably, either are fine.

In a vacuum, I think I would shove because the last thing I would want is to have overcards come, get into a sticky situation, and end up losing 1/4 of our stack, putting us in an even worse position as the bubble approaches. I'd prefer to just take down the dead money now. It's very unlikely we're behind and a flip could put us in a better position for the bubble stage of the tournament.

However, in this particular case 50 players from the money is a lot closer to the bubble than it would be in just about any other tournament. That's only about 3% of the remaining field, so it might be better to play tight and lock up the min cash. This is particularly true if you're taking a shot here and the 5 figure lock up makes a difference to you. In that case, I might just open 3x, cbet favorable flops, and give up on the hand if we face resistance, unless we hit our set.

At ICM25 at even stacks we mix raising and limping 99 from the SB at 20 or 25bb and usually call a raise after we limp (at 20 we can limp/shove).

However, we are even closer to the money than that.

There are a couple of ways to approach this. One is to play passively and keep the pot small. The other is to use fold equity to shut down the hand.

I'm assuming you're not playing 10ks on the regular and this cash is meaningful.

If you think the villain is going to raise your limps a lot because of the ICM pressure, then limp/shoving would be my preferred play. If you think he's on the tighter side and will only raise strong hands here, then probably limp/call and play carefully. (With GTO ranges, if we limp we have to call a shove-- the shoves are mostly hands we dominate, offsuit Ax hands too weak to raise/call and pairs below 99.)

Open shoving is an option, although I suspect it's not the most profitable. It does achieve the goal of maximizing fold equity, though.

I'm not as big on open raising in this spot because that makes it too easy for BB to call and for us to play an inflated pot OOP with a hand that can be difficult to know where we're at.

I think my favorite option is limping to limp-shove, and if it goes limp/check just playing carefully postflop unless we hit something nutted. (I'm not sure an overpair is "nutted" vs. a wide range but we can probably play it aggressively. If we make a set or straight then obviously we're comfortable getting it in at some point, barring the obviously really bad set boards like JT9 monotone.)

thanks for the opinions, the hand's been bugging me the last few months. After looking at the nines for a minute I just shoved. I was only worried about an overpair, which would be highly unlikely. I figured less than 5% of the time that would happen (I later found out it's 2.45%). If he had overcards and I lost a flip I could live with it. He peeled the first card and said if it matches he's calling. He said it matches, hesitated for a few and called with tens. GG me. oh well, next year...

If your starting stack was 60k, this is clearly a punt in my opinion. Average stack would have been around 600k, no one is folding to your shove. My guess is that could have folded your way to a min cash with your 2.2x stack. The money bubble broke during the next level 8k, 8k, 4k.

No, BB vs. SB is certainly a better spot than most but there is no way he should have been playing for stacks, preflop and all in, with only a middling pair this close to the bubble. Looking at the actual end of day three stacks, 126 people had 900k+ stacks, 1242 of the 1474 survivors had stacks larger than 130k. The bottom 50 players going into day four had 65k or less.

Putting it another way, of the players his size and smaller, he only had to survive 1/5 of them to make the money.

Believe it or not, I think this just an open fold, or a limp and hope to for a favorable flop (a set really).

If we fold till the end of the day, per hero's math, we will face another set of blinds, and come back to day 4 with 115K, and a guaranteed cash (there is no way this is going another 6 orbits).

Jamming and picking up the blinds, then going back to fold mode we will have the same 130K. There just isn't enough extra in the stack to take a 2% chance of busting to make a shove profitable.

Oddly, the main is the one event with a 1.5x min cash; if this was a different event, the min cash would be 2x and the answer would be clearer.

One way to avoid these problems is to consider your range before looking at your hand. If you think to yourself JJ+ (I think that is about right), you can just look at the first 9 and fold without even seeing the other card. This will avoid folders regret.

One of the posters said this is not a satellite. While true, these VERY large events play like 2 tournaments; there is an element of satellite until the bubble bursts, but because there are no pay jumps for a long time, and the FT is so far away from the bubble, the ICM looks a lot closer to a satellite than if you were playing a 100 person tournament and the bubble was at 15 players; now you are meaningfully close to the FT and big pay jumps, so there is more reason to take spots like this.

The flat payjumps for a long time are a good and valid point. Gotta beat 50 people to make $15, 000, then gotta beat several hundred more to get the next $15, 000.

Ok, I did some math on this spot. This is back of the envelope, so consider this a very rough estimate:

If we fold this, and have to pay one more set of blinds, then we cash with a stack of 115K, our stack will be worth 15K (min cash)+9200 in residual value, or 24, 200

If we jam this, and it gets through, then fold as above, our stack is worth 25, 400
If we jam this and lose, we get 0.
If we jam this and get a double, our stack 36, 280

All of this assumes we are not going to play any other hands between now and the bubble. Folding here is slightly better than that, because we might find AA between now and the bubble and win that pot (the dreaded better future spot). There are lots of other scenarios; we jam, get called and win, and now get some other better spots. But it gives you the right idea.

Where does that leave us? If Villain could see our cards, and calls TT+ and folds everything else, we win $1200 97.5% of the time, for a gain of $1170. We lose it all 2% of the time, and we get the miracle double 0.5% of the time.

All that makes the shove worth about $750. Pretty darn profitable. Note, this is comparing it to open folding; limping, or raising some other amount might be more profitable.

Also note that it does not include Villain calling unpaired overcards. If we shove this, and Villain calls AK...55% of the time we get 36820 or 20250. That's a very bad result for us. I suspect most Villains will call with that as well.

New math...shove gets through 96.5% of the time. When we are called we win 31% of the time. New value is $24, 900. Still $700 profit. Note how ICM is working here; we are called, and are a favorite, but it still costs us $.

This all contradicts my previous post; It looks like this is a pretty profitable shove.

Your math is incorrect. His chip values don’t double and triple with a double up, where he still only has 1/2 of average chips. The payouts are flat for 100’s of spots.

You had to finish better than 413 to get paid more that 35k. (Not that the ICM value of his chips wasn’t worth more, but my calculator doesn’t
allow that many spots.)

In general I play this hand limp/shove in the SB when it folds to me. And it has worked (I won an EPT tournament when I did this with 3 players left).

But here in the WSOP Main event I have learned the painful lesson of this spot near the money and I would limp/fold.

The first objective for me would be to cash and get the $15, 000. I just don't see the value of gaining 15, 000 chips by jamming because we are unlikely to be called by worse pairs. It is likely that AK would call and possible that AQ would too. But there we have only 54% chance of survival in those cases (or 52% against AKs/AQs).

And if we get raised to about 24, 000 it just isn't a true set mining spot. So I would fold. I would call a min-raise but at this point in the Main Event people don't typically play that badly.

I bounced in Day 3 of the Main event with AQo and about 22 blinds when I got 3-bet by a guy who had been 3-betting very wide and had folded to every 4 bet. But when I jammed I got called by AA. And I hadn't really noticed that the 3-bet was 4x in position which should have told me to fold...