650 wsop sat qq with 44 left

[dudeoflife]

People were dropping very slowly as we approached the top 47 which was the bubble for $650. In took 15 min to get 2 people out once we hit that point. 36th place had 23,000 when I got knocked out. I realized my error once I raised and realized if I fold, I'm even with the bubble stack. The open push caught me by surprise and felt like this has to be call. There's no way he pushes a set here I thought at the time.

My main question is if there is any value to raising and getting those extra 3600 chips from villian by raising 3 bb and when I take the pot 88 percent of the time when he doesn't flop a set. Had he folded, then I feel I could've coasted to a seat. I didn't feel comfortable in my position with a big stack 2 seats to my left which has left me unable to steal pots for the most part. My view on the villian was that he was fairly aggresive considering he didn't really have to be playing so many pots. Any other lower buy in sat qualifier that I play in I pushpot at this stage in the tourney. It shouldn't be any different for a 650 sat.

[Solitare]

Here's one quick calculation you can make.

There are 44 people left and 35 spots. If everyone had the same chances to get a seat, the chances would be 35/44 = 79.5%.

Hero is in 23rd position. Essentially he has a median stack size. 22 have more chips, 21 have less. By this measure you could say he IS the average person left in the tournament, so you can direcltly assess his chances at 79.5%.

However, the chips are probably bunched at the top a bit. He probably has a slightly below average, or below mean, chip stack. This should decrease his chances a bit.

At the same time, though, the smaller stacks are affected by the relatively large size of the blinds more than the bigger stacks. This should increase his chances a bit.

These forces and others are up to judgement. But since these two particular forces are opposing, they cancel a bit. Hero's chances to get a seat are not going to vary much from 79.5% here.

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.

[kutuz_off]

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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.

[Solitare]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[kutuz_off]

You are forgetting that short stacks always win all-in confrontations when you want them to bust.

[Bakes]

good posts by solitaire i like that line of thinking

[whynot?]

me 2- he said what i was trying to say earlier in a much better way. are these accurage takeaways?

if you cant fold into the seat you need to assess your chances of getting a seat vs the chances you have of winning the particular hand in question.
if you really assess you have an 80% chance of getting in by folding then you should auto muck any 2.
- if you do play, play big hands very fast - dont try to extract max value the blinds are too valuable
- when you do play hands play very aggressive and pick on mid stacks preferably from late postiion
- almost never call if youre a mid stack - even with kk theres a good chance youre only a 70% fav and if you assess your chances of getting in better then that then a fold is better then ok

[Thegunshow]

A bit of a question about calculating the average stack at the bubble and assessing your standing for folding into a seat. I know the easy way to calculate this is the total number of chips in play divided by the seat available, but this seems to give an unrealistic view of where most stack will be at the bubble.

Most sats I've played in have a few big stacks with a larger than normal percentage of the total chips. I'm trying to come up with a good way to take this into account when calculating the stack target required for a seat and would like any suggestions on the matter.

Right now I tend to see tourneys where the top 3 can have 10-15% of the total chips in play at times and this drastically changes the stack required to be considered 'safe'. If it looks like the tourney will play out this way, I remove those chips from the total chips in play calculation, reduce the available seats by the number of big stacks(in this case 3) and calculate an adjusted mean. This becomes my goal for a maintenance stack and target I feel comfortable with getting me a seat. I know this ran on a bit but any and all feed back would be appreciated.

[kindling]

I wouldn't get too comfortable with removing the top chip stacks from the total. I'm not sure how much it reduces your Avg Chip Stack at the bubble, but I like to have some cushion. I've bubbled out when I thought I was safe because 4-5 short stacks won their BB or SB or it was folded around, and I never thought I would see another BB. Unless I'm the huge stack, you can't be completely comfortable with folding into the money, cause you can't predict exactly when that will happen.

[whynot?]

But I think the key here is - Pick you're spots to be aggressive but almost never call - this is like a SNG bubble on steroids

FE will be higher if the table understands the satellite structure so have the first in vig makes most sense, but calling with almost anything when you assess you have an 80% chance of getting a seat by doing nothing makes no sense