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Late Stages Strategy/Mentality

edited September 2015 in Tournament Strategy
So this is a bit of a general question but i'll use a HH to make it easier for people to comment on (hopefully). Basically i'm not sure if i'm getting the right balance towards the latter stages of MTT's.

Put simply: I play to win in any Tournament I enter. But I think I get confused in certain situations on how to proceed given my aim to win the tournament and in terms of the old adage 'find a better spot'.

Like I said i'll give a HH to make it easier to explain. So this is last night's £5 MegaStack, we're 3 or 4 off the money. I know that if I double-up i'll have just above average when the bubble bursts, and since we're well ahead of the blinds that'll have me in a good place to make a tilt at the win.

The villain in question is guilty of mis-using his big stack from what i'd seen up until this point IMO. He's being aggressive, but often in the wrong spots, yet still being strangely passive in odd spots. As an example, he called a flop c-bet in position with KQ on a dry, 9 high flop and with only a backdoor straight draw to speak of. That's fine if he tries to take the pot away for me when I show weakness on the turn/river, sure, but he checks behind on both streets as if he's thinking the KQ high is good (the turn and river didn't hit my perceived range at all). Of course on that occasion he runs in to the bottom of my range in that particular hand and the KQ is good - but he's still played the hand weird.
PlayerActionCardsAmountPotBalance
YoungUn Small blind   1000.00 1000.00 39575.00
Villain Big blind   2000.00 3000.00 124865.25
  Your hole cards
  • 7
  • 7
     
hhyftrftdr Fold        
GREGGER01 Fold        
bernie1968 Fold        
YoungUn Raise   4000.00 7000.00 35575.00
Villain Raise   13000.00 20000.00 111865.25
YoungUn ????
So my instinct is to shove. However, given my stack I don't think the villain is ever folding to the shove, which means a very high percentage of the time i'm flipping for my stack. I get that you'll very rarely get through an MTT without having to flip for your or someone else's stack at some point, and it goes without saying you'll need to win those flips if you want to win the whole thing.

But is folding and waiting for a better spot a viable option here? I feel as if this villain with his stack is an accident waiting to happen and folding here still leaves me with ~20BB's which should give me enough time to find a better opportunity. Because (if i'm right in my read) flipping with a bad player for my stack is clearly not optimal. But then I feel as if folding is too nitty and is the move of someone who's desperate to make the min cash.

Just calling is horrible IMO because we'll just have to check/fold so many flops and with only ~10BB's left we're relying on getting pretty lucky to get back in a position to go very deep.

Comments/criticisms welcome please!

Comments

  • edited August 2015
    shove or fold 

  • edited September 2015
    Hand in OP is a fold imo. Two important facts...

    1) I don't think he's ever 3betting this size and folding to our jam
    2) I don't think he's ever 3betting this size (or any size) with any hand we dominate. It won't be A2-A6, and it wont be 22-66

    So if those assumptions are correct. We have zero fold equity and we are either flipping or crushed, there's just no hand we want to see him turn over. We got a perfectly playable stack if we fold.

    People say you need to win flips to win an mtt, and that's true to an extent, but it doesn't mean you have to knowingly call it off when best case scenario is a flip.
  • edited September 2015
    Thanks for the response Paul.

    What you've explained is pretty much exactly what I was thinking. My only problem was I followed it up with "Well, I want to win this tournament, and maybe folding is just too nitty", so I shoved. As you (and I) suspected, he called with KJ and I think binked a J on the river. Whatever it was, I was out.

    I saw you post on the AJo with 20BB's thread that you limp 100% of your range with those stacks - I presume you'd do the same here? I'm wondering would that be the better play in my example too, given that we're agreeing we should fold to the 3-bet? Outside of the early stages of MTTs I only ever raise or fold when its folded to my SB regardless of stack sizes, which I'm starting to think now is a leak because there are awkward stack sizes (like in the OP) where limping could be better?
  • edited September 2015
    Yeah often people use that as an excuse to gamble. When playing MTTs, you should of course always be going for the win cos all the money is in those top 2-3 places BUT that's not an excuse to just gamble/make bad plays. Not having a go at you lol, I've been in this spot many a time and jammed after talking myself into the fact they may be 3bet/folding lol. You're obviously looking at whether it's right or not, but a lot of people just think 'well I need to win flips to win an MTT so that means its fine to just keep forcing myself into flip spots over and over'.

    Yeah, it's something I've been doing since I started doing my coaching with Marc Wright. There are circumstances where I may do things differently if I have a lot of information on someone but generally with these stack sizes I'd be limping everything (that I'm not folding), that includes 55, 89s, JTo or AA. You can't start limping everything except QQ+ (unless they're very fishy) cos they'll soon pick up on the fact limping means you never have a huge hand.

    SB v BB is the only time I'm limping btw. Firstly, it effectively makes the stacks deeper which is beneficial to the better player. The other important factor is it changes how people react.

    When you raise, people have this thing in their head that they have to defend their BB pretty wide, which is true/fine etc, cos they got position blah blah, and then once they've contributed chips pre, they kinda feel more attached to the pot/don't wanna give it up, partly because they've already committed some chips and also because the pot is that much bigger and so there's more to win and that's why you see so many car crashes BvB.

    However, when you limp...

    1) It kinda forces them to reveal if they have a big hand. Alot of people might flat raises BvB with AA to be sneaky but they're a lot less likely to when you've limped cos it's gonna be pretty hard for them to stack you if they don't raise, so generally people just take the free flop with anything marginal QJ/JT/A8 etc and only raise the very premium hands.

    2) When it's a limped pot, they do feel less attached to the pot cos they haven't voluntarily put a single chip in. People are gonna miss the flop 70% of the time and when they have nothing committed will just give up straight away.

    So like if it's 100/200...

    Normally BvB, when raising it's the only positions I'd go bigger than a minraise cos people just don't like folding their BB v the SB and we're OOP. So say we go to 500 total, pot is now 1k if he calls, if we just go half pot as a cbet that's another 500 so in that spot we've risked 900 chips (cos we already had SB in). And as I say, people have now committed chips so they think 'meh maybe i should float, maybe i should raise as a bluff' etc.

    Now if we'd limped for the extra 100, pot is 400 and we can just stab for 1bb (200) and take it down a ridiculous amount of the time cos people have committed nothing, they see they have no hand and just think 'meh no point fighting over this tiny pot'.

    I'm pretty confident the latter option has a higher success rate of taking the pot down by the flop. It also allows more postflop play, and keeps ranges wider and people make more mistakes cos they flop things like bottom pair w/ 62o that they'd normally just fold pre and have no idea how to play it.

    Sometimes we win a bit less than we would if we raise, but it's to my advantage imo to play lots of small pots.

    Went off on one a bit there lol.

    Basically in these spots I would limp with the intention of either limp/folding, limp/calling, or limp/jamming. With 77 I prob limp/jam unless villian is vv nitty.

  • edited September 2015
    I'm a fan of limping the SB vs BB but I don't do it with 100% of my range. I'm still going to be raising some hands and 77 probably falls into the category of hands I'm often raising. But if I do raise it; it's mostly with the intention to GII facing a 3b.
  • edited September 2015
    That's a great post Paul, thanks very much. And for your comments too Ivanovic, genuinely appreciated.
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