Poker Quiz Question #5

Q#5: It's the early rounds of a tournament. Blinds are 200/400 with 25 antes. You have T14,000 in chips. The table is 9-handed. You're in the cutoff seat with Ah9c. Everyone folds to you and you raise T1200. The button folds and the small blind goes all-in for a total of T4000. You don't have much information on your opponent, except that he seems solid and you assume he has some kind of a real hand. The big blind folds and the action is to you. What should you do?

1. Fold
2. Call

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A#5: Like the previous question, we need to look at EV and pot odds. Why? Because calling will effectively close out the action, therefore this problem just boils down to a basic math calculation. In other words, are you getting the right odds to call or not? I.e., is calling the shove a plus or minus EV play? To calculate this, we have to first put our opponent on a range of hands. The problem stated that the villain was "solid" and "has some kind of real hand." What does this mean?

First off, if the player is solid, he realizes that he's in trouble M-wise. He also knows that you're raising from LP, so your range is very wide. Said another way, he's doing this reshove with a similarly fairly wide range of "real" hands. It's hard to put the opp on a specific range with our limited information, but it's probably something like any pair, any broadway, and all suited aces. His range may in fact be wider than this, but this is a pretty good guess for a good player with an M of ~5, who is well into the danger zone.

The opp's range of 22+,A2s+,KTs+,QTs+,JTs,ATo+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo , per poker stove, is a 55:45 favorite against our specific hand, or nearly a coin flip.

Now, we need to look at the pot odds. After the blinds and antes, our raise, and the T4K reshove of the SB, there is T6025 in the pot. It will cost us T2800 to make the call, which is 2.1:1. This is far ahead of the 55:45 we need to break even. We can see this easily if we look at the EV calculation:

EV = ((45/100) x 6025) - ((55/100) x 2800) = T2711 - T1540 = T1171.

Answer: Call.

All-in for now...
-Bug