Pushing hands: Some hands are better than others
It comes up a million times in tournament poker especially sit n go's: it's folded to you in the small blind, you have some marginal hand, you or the big blind is pretty short-stacked, and you have to decide whether to push. To simplify the discussion a little bit, we're going to ignore the possibility of just calling. Calling isn't a good idea all that often anyway once you're short.
So say it's folded to you in the SB and you have K7o. Is that a good pushing hand? Well, it depends on what kinds of hands the BB is going to call with, and that depends on everyone's stack sizes. Suppose that the BB is going to be very tight. For example, there are 4 people left in a sit n go, and three people have 3200 chips and the last guy has 400, and the blinds are 150/300, and the BB is one of the ones with 3200. Since only the top three get paid - 5 units for first, 3 for second, 2 for third – and the jump from fourth to third is a relatively large 2 unit jump, nobody wants to go out in 4th.
If you push, a reasonable BB will only call with a very narrow range of hands. He'd toss AJ without a second thought and may fold a hand as good as AK. You could guess a calling range for the BB – for example: AK, TT+ - and then do a lot of detailed analysis about whether you should push or fold your K7o. But that's not what I'm looking to do in this post. What I want to do is to correct the mistake that some people of not being able to rank which hand is better than others in certain situations. There are a lot of people who would say, “Well K7 isn't totally horrible, it's kinda high, I'll push it.” But these same people would be horrified if they had to show that they had pushed 23s, even though 23s does a little better against AK, TT+ (23.4% vs 24.8%).
On the flip side, trying to take a cute little drawing hand like 23s against someone who is going to call with a wide range is suicide. In that case, you just want a nice big club of a hand like K7o. It's not pretty, but it'll get you in as a ~62-38 favorite a lot of the time. Sure it's crushed against something like AK or AA, but that doesn't happen much. Say you're in the SB with a bunch of chips against a BB who has 400 left after posting 200, and we're nowhere near the money. The villain is going to be happy to call with anything that's not totally horrible. A reasonable guess might be everything except 93o-, 92o-, 52s-, 43s. This makes up 87% of the hands. Now K7o performs like a champ: it's 53.5%. 32s, on the other hand, is a big loser at 35.4%.
The myth of “live cards”
There is one tendency I want to warn you about. That's to underestimate how bad Ax hands do against strong ranges. Suppose you raise with A5o, and the BB raises all-in. You think he's pretty tight, so his range looks something like 77+, AT+, A8s+. Looks like you'd rather have something like 74o so that you would have live cards against all of his Ax hands, right? A4o is 28.3%, and 74o is 26.8%. The problem is that 74o is very not live against a hand like 99, whereas A5o is in bad shape but not terrible shape. If we expand BB's range to include some Kx hands, it gets more pronounced. Against 66+, AT+, A8s+, KQ, Kts+, Qjs, A4o outperforms 74o 34.2% to 28.1%
Here's a good general rule: “big club” hands like K7o and A4o do well against big wide ranges but much less well against premium hands. “Cute” hands like 46s and 23s and 22 will never do well, but they aren't too terrible against tight ranges. That means that even if you think a villain is a crazy maniac who'd push any hand he got, you shouldn't call his big push with a hand like 34s. You're probably not too huge of a dog. Whoopity. Wait for something more like KT.
The easiest way to get a feel for this kinds of things is to download pokerstove from pokerstove.com and use it to see how various hands do against ranges. It won't tell you exactly which hands to push and which ones to fold, but it'll help get a sense for how to avoid folding the good ones and pushing the bad ones.
It comes up a million times in tournament poker especially sit n go's: it's folded to you in the small blind, you have some marginal hand, you or the big blind is pretty short-stacked, and you have to decide whether to push. To simplify the discussion a little bit, we're going to ignore the possibility of just calling. Calling isn't a good idea all that often anyway once you're short.
So say it's folded to you in the SB and you have K7o. Is that a good pushing hand? Well, it depends on what kinds of hands the BB is going to call with, and that depends on everyone's stack sizes. Suppose that the BB is going to be very tight. For example, there are 4 people left in a sit n go, and three people have 3200 chips and the last guy has 400, and the blinds are 150/300, and the BB is one of the ones with 3200. Since only the top three get paid - 5 units for first, 3 for second, 2 for third – and the jump from fourth to third is a relatively large 2 unit jump, nobody wants to go out in 4th.
If you push, a reasonable BB will only call with a very narrow range of hands. He'd toss AJ without a second thought and may fold a hand as good as AK. You could guess a calling range for the BB – for example: AK, TT+ - and then do a lot of detailed analysis about whether you should push or fold your K7o. But that's not what I'm looking to do in this post. What I want to do is to correct the mistake that some people of not being able to rank which hand is better than others in certain situations. There are a lot of people who would say, “Well K7 isn't totally horrible, it's kinda high, I'll push it.” But these same people would be horrified if they had to show that they had pushed 23s, even though 23s does a little better against AK, TT+ (23.4% vs 24.8%).
On the flip side, trying to take a cute little drawing hand like 23s against someone who is going to call with a wide range is suicide. In that case, you just want a nice big club of a hand like K7o. It's not pretty, but it'll get you in as a ~62-38 favorite a lot of the time. Sure it's crushed against something like AK or AA, but that doesn't happen much. Say you're in the SB with a bunch of chips against a BB who has 400 left after posting 200, and we're nowhere near the money. The villain is going to be happy to call with anything that's not totally horrible. A reasonable guess might be everything except 93o-, 92o-, 52s-, 43s. This makes up 87% of the hands. Now K7o performs like a champ: it's 53.5%. 32s, on the other hand, is a big loser at 35.4%.
The myth of “live cards”
There is one tendency I want to warn you about. That's to underestimate how bad Ax hands do against strong ranges. Suppose you raise with A5o, and the BB raises all-in. You think he's pretty tight, so his range looks something like 77+, AT+, A8s+. Looks like you'd rather have something like 74o so that you would have live cards against all of his Ax hands, right? A4o is 28.3%, and 74o is 26.8%. The problem is that 74o is very not live against a hand like 99, whereas A5o is in bad shape but not terrible shape. If we expand BB's range to include some Kx hands, it gets more pronounced. Against 66+, AT+, A8s+, KQ, Kts+, Qjs, A4o outperforms 74o 34.2% to 28.1%
Here's a good general rule: “big club” hands like K7o and A4o do well against big wide ranges but much less well against premium hands. “Cute” hands like 46s and 23s and 22 will never do well, but they aren't too terrible against tight ranges. That means that even if you think a villain is a crazy maniac who'd push any hand he got, you shouldn't call his big push with a hand like 34s. You're probably not too huge of a dog. Whoopity. Wait for something more like KT.
The easiest way to get a feel for this kinds of things is to download pokerstove from pokerstove.com and use it to see how various hands do against ranges. It won't tell you exactly which hands to push and which ones to fold, but it'll help get a sense for how to avoid folding the good ones and pushing the bad ones.
posted by pokerschwab at 8:53 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home