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Tournament – Sunday Special $25 Buy-in (ChipEV situation)

UTG (41BB) Folds
UTG+1 (18BB) folds
MP (65BB) opens to 2BB
HJ (31BB) calls
HERO (29BB) A♣5♣ is your turn to act.
What would you do? ????

Poker is a complex game and there is not always a single correct line of play, interesting arguments emerged from our #hand-analysis channel in discord, Standard Backing coach Wanderer_pro brought us interesting reasoning of the hand:

Wanderer_pro reasoning:

The models that I am working with are models for 1bb ante (which would be something like 12.5% ante for 8-max MTTs), I’m assuming that the hand is played in 8-max MTT with 12.5% antes

Squeeze

At 30bb effective stack the only reasonable sizing for squeezing it would be ALL IN, so if we enter the correct RFIs for 50bb for LJ (25%) and correct 30bb CC range from HJ (7%) into Holdem Resources and we calculate EV of A5s as a JAM this is what pops up assuming 8max 12.5% ante:

We can see that A5s is very far from being a +EV jam here, having said that, we can discard the squeeze line.

Call

We are CO vs 1 uncapped range, 1 capped range, and 3 uncapped ranges behind, each of which is gonna squeeze a minimum 5% of hands, meaning we will not see a flop at least 15% of the time.

we are also flatting vs a capped but playable and strong 7% CC range and we are dominated by all his Ax from that part of a range.

We are also dominated by OR range, there our Flush equity is gonna be blocked on two ♣ flops by CC range a lot since he flats very suited heavy, we cannot realize all of that PF EQ vs 2 ranges that dominate us and we cannot bluff efficiently 3-way, not to mention that the times when BB comes along and we are in a 4-way pot in which our value betting thresholds goes way down so does our bluffing potential.

Fold

Folding looks like the best line in this spot given the analysis and ranges in the hand, this is a CO 30bb vs MP RFI and CO cc that I am using:

Conclusion

I honestly think we should focus on how this spot is looking like and not how it seems to be. Axs vs 7% CC range 3-way is totally destroyed and will probably under realize it’s equity being a multi-way pot also if we are talking about exploiting population in 20e buy-in, then 3betting > flatting.

But we shouldn’t add random hands to our preflop strategy, we should increase the frequency of hands that are already bluffing there but we had no info except the buy-in, so I wouldn’t assume too much. the preflop strategy is the easiest to master, so the average player should have an idea about his preflop range construction.

Do you agree with the justficatión of the hand by Wanderer?
leave your comment below ????

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