Dubious hand #1

Taken from this tournament.

The setting: $15 tournament, 108 players, 23 remain. Top 20 get paid, but nrs. 11-20 get a prize which is in fact slightly lower than the buyin (including fee)! The real prizes start at nr.10.

My stack was 7500, blinds 250/500, so I am doing reasonably well: my M is 10. I think that my stack is slightly above average at this point. Oh I can just calculate it from the amount of players that remain :-) Say there are 22 left (to make it easy), we started off with 1500, then the average is now practically 7500. So my stack is basically average.

I limped for 500 with JTs in early position (a bit too speculative at this stage, perhaps?), three others paid to see the flop, which was J97, two spades. (I have no spades.) I bet half the pot and got two callers! On top of that, the turn was an Ace. I was much less happy to see this ace than the previous one (but at least it wasn't a spade). However, my opponents checked this round to me as well. I went all-in for my remaining 6000 chips, I had both my opponents covered and they folded, although one of them had to think about it. I guess that they were both on draws of some kind. Fortunately!! This move could have put me down to only 1500, with the blinds at 250/500.

Was it a bad move? Hard to say. People really like playing Aces, I got a lot of proof of that also during this game. The pot was 5000, my opponents still had 2500 and 4500 left at this point. By going all-in, the pot for my first opponent became 7500, so he obviously had to call (3:1 odds, which is the same odds that he got for calling on the previous round). But he folded. For my second opponent, the pot became 9500, so he got only 2:1 odds and decided that he did not like them. Fair enough. However, if the first player had made the right move (calling), the pot would have been 13000, and he also would have had 3:1 odds to call.

So quite apart from the question of whether or not anybody had an Ace, my betting in this way practically forced them to call (even though they in fact folded). My conclusion should be that I played it very dangerously. Not just by going all-in on the turn, but more importantly, the half-pot bet on the flop! At this stage, I should just be happy to make top pair and just bet the pot, certainly on this draw-heavy board (I underestimated the straight draw when I was playing it, but somebody with QT has an open-ended straight draw). This denies everyone the odds to call, and also makes it clear that it is going to cost them their entire stack to get to showdown here.

Of course, against thinking opponents this scenario does not even occur. Consider the situation of the opponent with 2500 chips. On the flop, he still has 3500 chips, the pot is 3000 when it gets to him and he has to call 1000 to see another card. Calling here is out of the question. When you do that, the pot becomes bigger than your stack, and you have to call any future bets due to pot odds. So if you want to play here, you must go all-in. This has the added advantage that the better (me) may have been bluffing and folds -- although, in fact, I already cannot fold: the pot would be 6500 when it got to me and I would have to call for another 3500, that is nearly 2:1 odds. Certainly good enough with top pair (plus, I might add, an inside straight draw). So the only choices of this opponent were to go all-in and head for a showdown, or fold. As I wrote above, he took the absolutely worst option: first give away 1000 chips and then fold after all...