Low on Chips, Play with AT?

[M1cKmAcK]

You're right being aggressive is vital to tournament play and survival. But you have to pick your spots a little better. Raising 4x the BB utg with AT is not exactly the spot you're looking for. Now if it gets folded to you, and you're in the co or button, the aggressive play would be to shove. That would be a good spot. There's more to the aggressive play then just raising/betting. You have to be aware of stack sizes and position as well. You have to have a better hand than AT to bet utg with imo. Keep reading, posting, and playing.

Edit: If you're playing this hand utg, you have to go all the way with it. If you raise utg, you should call/rr any raise (with your stack size). That's why it's important to pick your spots and make sure you have a hand when you bet here.

[ZenMusician]

Lots of good advice here, OP.

GL

-ZEN

[Pokerfarian]

Mentioning HoH is a good point. Harrington discusses a lot about how you have to get more agressive as you get lower on chips, how through yellow & orange zone you have to raise more, and there's some quote about one of the worst things otherwise decent players do is not to loosen up at all until they hit the red zone.
However, I'd say most MTTers wouldn't completely agree with that, especially with around 12-18BBs. Bond wrote a great post on stack sizes recentlyish so I won't bother to copy anything/expand hugely on that, but basically 12-18BBs is a bad stack size to steal with & as such when open raising you have to be fairly tight.

[Dunkman]

[ QUOTE ]
Mentioning HoH is a good point. Harrington discusses a lot about how you have to get more agressive as you get lower on chips, how through yellow & orange zone you have to raise more, and there's some quote about one of the worst things otherwise decent players do is not to loosen up at all until they hit the red zone.
However, I'd say most MTTers wouldn't completely agree with that, especially with around 12-18BBs. Bond wrote a great post on stack sizes recentlyish so I won't bother to copy anything/expand hugely on that, but basically 12-18BBs is a bad stack size to steal with & as such when open raising you have to be fairly tight.

[/ QUOTE ]

One thing to keep in mind is that the "Gap" in the Gap Concept was a lot wider in live tournaments a few years ago than it is in online tournaments today. You could expect this raise to fold out AQ in a live tourney a few years ago, whereas online you'd be really lucky to fold out AJ. Similarly, villains may be shoving mid pairs in the online tournament, where they'd all be folds in games that Harrington cites. As a result, a raise/fold here is not good, nor is a raise call. If you raise fold a lot of the time you're turning down a flip with overlay, and if you raise call you're still a 70/30 dog or worse a lot of the time. In short, a lot of the times raising in a spot like this you end up in a nasty spot that seems to be almost cEV neutral and the end result is that by opening initially you were just leaking chips.

The optimal use for a stack this size is not to take shots at the blinds with marginal hands, but rather shove over LP raises that have a very wide range. The key here is understanding how to make use of the gap concept. Many times, the gap between a LP raising hand, and one that will call a shove, is huge. However, the gap between what you open with and what will call/shove over it is usually a lot smaller than that specified in Harrington. So, you have to adjust to the way the game is changing, and the conditions in your usual games, and make the most of where you have the biggest advantage.