he knew middle pair was best

what is the point of raising to 90? it just builds a big family pot.

If I were going to raise, I would raise 150-200 to try to take it now. OF course you do have position, so a small raise may be better, but if they check to you on the flop, did they miss or are they setting you up?

the flop is tough, you have a lot of equity, but the pot isnt that big. and your hand is only a coinflip at best if you get called, and could be worse.

I was every so slightly ahead -

23,867,284 games 39.096 secs 610,478 games/sec

Board: 9s 2s 6c
Dead:

equity (%) win (%) tie (%)
Hand 1: 50.5142 % 50.51% 00.00% { AsTs }
Hand 2: 49.4858 % 49.49% 00.00% { Ks6d }


I managed to recover and get a decent stack but then I got knocked out in a bad beat.

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BB is t100
Preflop: Hero is UTG with :3d :5d,
Hero raises to t500

Here's how I play this hand:

PF: Call. This is a weak, speculative drawing hand at this stage of the tournament. Everyone has an M in the 30-40 range, so the value of top pair is probably negative (just good enough for the bad players to go broke with). We really want to see a cheap flop, and hit something like this:

or or

or even

If I hit a board like yours, I want to draw as cheap as possible, and go all in when I hit the flush (yes, morons will call this often enough to make it hugely profitable). Note that in a live tourney, people will just shut down in the face of a flush board, so you have totally different implied odds.

In the early going, I'm looking to hit a very strong made hand, and then get all my money in as fast as possible. The key to this is to seek out the fish and stack them. We want to get our $ in when we're huge favorites, not on small edges like a coinflip.

Will the good players be able to dodge this tactic? Of course, but you're targeting the dead money, not the good players. So reraises to "take down" the tiny little pots are incredibly -EV (good luck getting anyone to fold early in a tournament for some small reraise). And "winning the blinds" is also a pointless effort.

So your bets and raises should be traps to lure in the maniacs or value bets to get the passive players to dump chips into medium strength hands you have dominated. They should never be aimed at "ending the hand now" because there literally is no such thing at this stage.

And building big pots with weak hands like ATs is a great way to look around and suddenly have half your stack vanish (or bust out 45% of the time, as in this hand).

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Jason75: Ok, you check and the button bets 400. Now what?
Beavis68: You play poker.
Jason75: Darn, I was really hoping for canasta. Maybe Gin.

Here's something to consider. Lets say that at the beginning of a tournament, we get AKs 3 times and go all in PF. Each time, we're called by a pair of 2's for all of our chips. Is this the situation we want?

My answer: No. WHy? Because we'd bust out 87.5% of the time [ 1-(.5*.5*.5)].

12.5% of the time, we'd have 8x the starting chipstack (24K).

In a tourney structure that pays 10% of the field, the average chipsstack in the $ will be 10x the initial starting stack. Not making the $ 87.5% of the time is really going to hurt unless we can manufacture a big finish in those 12.5% of the times. And remember, that 24K is at the beginning, we then have to survive the blinds and antes all the way to the $. And the larger the field, the farther away the big payouts will be (First ITM payouts are typically just better than your buyin).

So pushing marginal edges early in a tourney has an extreme downside.

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Jason75: Ok, you check and the button bets 400. Now what?
Beavis68: You play poker.
Jason75: Darn, I was really hoping for canasta. Maybe Gin.

Damn it, I was going to ream you for this, but I misread it.

I don't like the term "marginal edge" because I am not sure you have an edge here. With all the hands typical opponents will call you with, the move could be clearly -ev. I would save this move tll later in the tourney. I would like to pot to be bigger, and I would rather have a K or Q kicker.

Don't worry Beav, I'm sure you'll find something else to ream me for!!! LOL

:good:

The reason I describe this as a "marginal edge" is because he's a coinflip on the flop getting just better than 1:1 on his chips.

It's one of those situations where it's +chip EV but -$EV.

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Jason75: Ok, you check and the button bets 400. Now what?
Beavis68: You play poker.
Jason75: Darn, I was really hoping for canasta. Maybe Gin.

B/c doubling my chips doesnt double my EV for the tourny, right. Thanks for the input guys.

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BB is t100
Preflop: Hero is UTG with :3d :5d,
Hero raises to t500

that is still debatable.

also, you need to double up sometime, and the chances are limited due to blinds.

Another way to think of it is this:

A large portion of the field in any tourney is dead money (IMO). If you're a good player, you should be able to vacuum up a lot of chips in situations where you're a dominating favorite. Thus it's not really about whether or not pushing these marginal situations is +$EV, it's about deciding to take a route that is significantly more +$EV.

The larger your M, the longer you can wait to find that type of situation. As your M decreases, you have less time to wait for the big payoff hands like straights, sets, flushes, FH, etc . . . . the value of more marginal hands like pairs begins to go way up, because everyone is being forced to either play more hands or get blinded away.

Note that in a rebuy tournament, this is not the case during the rebuy period. For instance, in the recent $3 rebuy tourney I won, here was my 11 of 15 total rebuys (also added on, even though it might be -ev, just for the hell of it):

My first 11 rebuys looked like this:
call first hand, rebuy to double chips (Double rebuy trick).
Get AKs, all in, rebuy when all in (get the chips next hand), get 1 caller, lose race.
Do the double rebuy trick again, get JJ, go all in, do allin rebuy, lose to dominated pair.
Do the double rebuy trick again, get AKo, all in, rebuy while all in, lose to dominated A.
Do Double rebuy trick again . . .

This was all in the space of about 25 hands . . .

Then next time I picked up TT and beat 2 other players, and did the rebuy and was on my way from there . . .

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Jason75: Ok, you check and the button bets 400. Now what?
Beavis68: You play poker.
Jason75: Darn, I was really hoping for canasta. Maybe Gin.