[Solitare]

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If hero's chances are around 80%, even playing KK starts to look unappealing. Push KK, get called by a bigstack with AQ, and suddenly you've traded your 80% chance to get a seat for a 70% chance.

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Or, you fold anything but AA and due to blinds your chances to get a seat drop to 60% awful fast.

I don't think 80% chance to get a seat in this case means folding into a seat with 80% chance of success.

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A few points:

- The blinds are hitting everybody else the same as you. And they are effecting smaller stacks more than you.

- The strength of KK, and all hands, will vary more based on position. Probably more than in a typical tournament. In hero's position, KK UTG doesn't look so good, but KK folded to you in the SB is huge, and even more so against a smaller stack.

- You are only thinking about your equity dropping. If you instafold an orbit and the blinds hit you, but 2 more people get knocked out of the tournement, you are probably not dropping to 60% equity. In this situation, the size of the blinds and time are powerful allies.

- 80% does not come from being able to fold to a seat 80% of the time. You might be able to fold into a seat 40% of the time, when the other 40% comes from situations when your stack does dwindle, your equity drops, and you are forced to play some hands. The issue is that you don't need to play when your equity is 80%, you can wait until it drops to 50%.

I'll grant you, that even in hero's position, instafolding KK and below is probably wrong -- if everyone is playing perfect satallite poker. If everyone is playing super tight (raises/all-ins rarely called), if people are going out of the tournament at a glacial pace, if the big stacks are largely inactive (only targeting the very small stacks with raises and select calls), we've got a different situation. It's also a situaton where playing KK is a alot safer, since your riase/all-in will likely get nothing but folds and less likely to get loose, but overly painful, calls by AK/AQ.

But my experience in satallites is that the play is pretty bad. Medium stacks are too willing to call all-ins from small stacks just because they are bigger. Two big stacks get invovled with each other and one gets knocked out needlessly. Medium stacks continue to play AJ like a regular tournament. Etc.

In hero's situation you can pretty much count on half of the stacks below the bubble being knocked out pretty easily. At least one or two big stacks will knock heads needlessly, or get dealt AA vs. KK. A couple of medium stacks will do something foolish. And suddenly you have walked into a seat with ZERO risk.

Now a $650 sat to the WSOP may be very tight and nothing like a $10 sat to the Sunday Million. The one $650 sat I've played in certainly was not super tight but maybe hero's was. So again a lot of this comes down to judgement.