[Gramps]

Colin, the wheel called, it's been invented already. And although you articulate it's square existence very well, it's actually round. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

Don't neglect the future affect on calling ranges. If CO pushes and folds out the blinds, you have a bit of evening out of the short stacks, with close to a 3:1 chip edge on the nearest stack. That's a hugely pw3nable situation and you should be up against pretty tight calling ranges, giving lots of highly +$EV puhsing spots. People are human, people take notes, people don't like to be [censored] with (like the big stack coldcalling/overpushing with Q6o or J8o), if you play with any regularity, the "spite equity" will come back to majorly bite you in the ass. P3wning big blind poker is about building chip edges and controlling/manipulating calling ranges. Don't [censored] that up with a marginal (er...-$EV) play that loses you even more $$ in future hands.

I mean, if a player is constantly pushing into/through you on the bubble when you're the big stack and he figures you don't want to [censored] up your chip edge by calling loose (thus allowing him to profitably push a much wider range), then it's fine to make a loose -$EV call every now and then (even a -cev call that's quite -$EV) that is a bit of a $$ "write-off" on that hand, because it lets him know you're a looser caller than he's giving you credit for, and that he has to tighten up in the future (meaning more blinds get folded to you, and you get to take more +$EV open-pusing opportunities) - but you are losing $$ every time you do that, and there's an optimal % to do that for each player (and some that it may not make much of a difference). I think if you asked the biggest 50 winners in online SNGs over the past few years about what their overpushing range would be in the hand described, I'd be surprised if 5 were close to what you propose - most would be much, much tighter than the ranges suggested, for the reasons stated above - that and the fact that it's very arguable that a +cev play here is necessarily +$EV in a 50/30/20 payout structure (even assuming no affect on future variables such as calling ranges, image), but I'll leave that issue to the more hardcore math/stat guys.

Also, I disagree with your overcalling assumption - a lot of people are smart/experienced enough to understand the dynamics of a 3-way all-in on the bubble when they're 2nd/3 in chips - that in order for one of the blinds to be knocked out in 4th place, it has to go CO>CL>them which should happen probably < 15% of the time (1 of 6 possibilities, that will happen < 1/6 of the time since they will have a stronger hand on average than CO (and CL given the proposed range)). If you do this loose overpush play with any regularity, if the blinds have observed this in previous SNGs (people do take notes) and are intelligent players they will overcall with at least top 10% of their hands here, if not more. If CO>them>CL, well - they pretty much have the same stack they started with, no big deal. If CL>CO&them, they get 3rd place, they got the 20% equity jump from 4th to 3rd, which is a biggie in the 50/30/20 structure.