This one didn’t go as well as my other recent big buy-in events. I made a few good hands, took a few bad beats, and was right around my starting stack of 30,000 when the following situation went down in Level Four. With blinds of 200-400 and a 50 ante, a tight-straightforward player opened for 1,400 UTG. I called UTG+2 with two queens, and a loose-ish, decent player called in late position. The rest folded. With 5,225 in the pot, we took the flop three-handed. It came J62 rainbow. UTG led out for 5k. I called. The LP player thought for a while, asked both of us how many chips we had (UTG had similar to me), and eventually raised to 20,000. UTG muttered and folded, and I had a decision. I had about 23k behind after calling the 5k, so i would be getting about 1.9-1 to put all my chips in. My read was that my opponent could have AJ as easily as a set, and so I would win the showdown often enough to show a decent profit getting my chips in. I don’t know if that read was right, but that’s what it was. It turned out my opponent had a set of deuces and I didn’t hit any miracles. Good game, me.
Another aspect of the hand is that there were two legitimate preflop choices. Even before the tournament I was going back and forth about what hands to reraise with and what hands to call with in spots like the above one. This is to say, I knew going in that by flat-calling preflop I risked going broke to a small set. I thought the benefits outweighed the risks as part of my global strategy, but I’m certainly willing to listen to counter-arguments.
I’m not sure yet what my next big brick-and-mortar tournament will be. My next focus will be on the FTOPS currently taking place. Good luck to all playing events in that series.
Im curious to how much the loose player had and the remaining players behind you had during that hand. Were you the big stack on the table? What type of players did you have behind you? I can understand the call. Because you do have a tight player, UTG, raising and yall have about the same amount. Why risk re-raising with QQ. If there were loose players behind me, I might wanna re-raise just so you could get them out of the hand with smaller pairs or trash cards. Obviously they know the player UTG is tight and a re-raise would pretty much mean you have a big hand. But you can also look at it, by saying AA and KK are the only pair higher than yours. I wonder if the UTG player had been getting frustrated, he calm, had bad beats earlier, starting to seem impatient? Plus, say he did have AA or KK and it was just you two, with a flop like that, could you get away from that hand? Plus, its a tournament, so why not raise and get your chips in there with a premium hand? I understand theres alot of factors to this, but like in your book, in tournaments, you need to get as many chips as possible. I think the play was good, just bad timing for a loose player to put you all-in with an over pair and him hitting trips with Deuces.
I was one of the smaller stacks at the table, as a few people had been knocked out already. Even my smallish stack was pretty deep, though, as you can tell from the write-up of the hand. It was hard to tell if UTG was getting frustrated, but my read was that he was very straightforward, and too afraid to open UTG with a less than premium holding. Therefore, I did not consider QQ a premium hand preflop, which factored into my decision to just call.
And I can see that. Lets say you re-raised and forced the opponents behind you to fold. Now, your UTG player re-raised all-in. What do you do? Or lets say he called, J 6 2 came on the flop. And he bet big. How would you play it then? Can you get away from that hand? Im sure it depends on how much was in the pot and how big his bet was, I am just curious if you would just let it go since yo still had a pretty deep stack or would try to get alot more chips to stay up in the tournament.
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