Friday, February 19, 2010

AJs Question

Here is the situation:

It is early in a $1.10 forty man F40 tourney standard blind speed. These things are filled with superdonks and higher buyin regulars looking to cash in on the F40 bonus. Blinds are at 25/50 a Silverstar utg raises 4x to 200. Three players call around to me in the small blind with AJs. I have 1440 chips. The silverstar hasn’t made any noticably donk moves so I assume he has a pocket pair or AQs+. The three callers are presumably loose-passive donks and could have ATC.

I hate calling raises with marginal As and I hate even more playing this hand out of position at a full table. Normally, so early in the game I’ll fold this hand. However, there is 875 in the pot and it costs me 175 to call with only the bb left to act. Furthermore, this is an MTT so I need to accumulate chips. Finally, I confident I’ll get paid if I can land a flush and it is easy to toss the hand if the flop in unfavorable.

There are plenty of good reasons to fold here and plenty of good reasons to call. So early in the game I’m not going to risk an all in reraise. It would probably result in a long string of callers even though I may just have the best hand at the moment.

What line would you take?

Roland

2 comments:

  1. As a general rule of thumb, I don't like to invest more than 10% of my stack in an early pre-flop speculative call (and preferably less than 7%) but as you say, the pot odds and implied odds are enticing. Assuming you're only going to continue after the flop with two pair or better or at least a flush draw, that's about 15% of the time which is about what the pot is laying you. (Of course, you won't always win with those hands.) I would probably call. Easy call if it was only 3xBB. What did you do?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I called, bricked the flop and folded when the origninal raiser made a new raise. I couldn't decide if it was a good call or just spewing chips. Thanks for your thoughts.

    Two of the callers called his raises on every street with Ax and air lol. The silverstar original raiser had AKo and won with tptk after catching a K on the flop.

    ReplyDelete