to Defend, or not to Defend. that is the Question.

While waiting for my computer to finish a big synch before I jump back into work tonight, I surfed to the hand of the day. As it's been a while since I tackled one of these, I decided to give it a go:

My standard method to tackle poker hand analyses is--big surprise--REDi. While this method works great for cash games, I'm still tweaking the method for MTT play and I'm not 100% sure it's perfected yet for tournament play. I have to find a way to fold in opp stack sizes and their commitment level. Here's a stab at including that part of the Read into the process:

Reads: What's a little strange about this hand is the statement that your opponent has been "raising about 20% from late position." If this were a cash game, I'd start with that approximate VPIP and evaluate my hand against that range. Ah, but this is a tournament, and we have to put ourselves in the head of the villain, given the size of his chip stack relative to the blinds and antes.

Before raising, the villain had about 15.5 big blinds, which isn't horrible, but the antes have kicked in and his M = 6276 / ((9x50)+200+400) = approximately 6. This is a little more serious. If the opp is worth his salt (and he should be halfway through a $100 large field online MTT) he has to realize his growing desperation. In other words, he should be shoving with his entire range. But he's not. Why? He has to know that he's seriously hurting his stack if we 3bet and he folds to the re-raise here (his M will drop to under 5).... so he's probably not going to fold. Adding to this read on him is that our own image is "aggressive," which means he knows we're likely to re-steal out of the blinds against a weak stack. This in turn means his range is actually probably tighter than the 20% stated in the problem. In other words, it feels like he wants a re-raise.

Putting all this together, I would err on the side of caution, and put him on 88+, AQo+, and KQs. 

Evaluate:

• Against this range, our KQs is a 2:1 dog.
• Even if we make his range 22+, AJo+, and KQo+, our equity is just 41%, which is a long way from a coin flip.
• We're not pot committed.
• We have a non-desperate M.
• We have the big blind yet to act after us.
• We have very little fold equity.
• If we call, we'll be OOP with trap hand.

Decide: I don't see why we want to do anything but fold and wait for a better, lower risk opportunity to build our stack. If our hand was AKs, our equity would be significantly higher (~50-55%), which would make this a much easier call. But when we have significantly less than 50% equity, we're not committed, and what we stand to gain helps us less than what we stand to lose, this seems like an easy fold.

Implement: Fold.

All-in for now...

-Bug