Question on checking down?

[rodders133]

Ok, NL B&M MTT. Play is down to 4 handed.
Short stack moves all in and gets 2 callers from large stacks.
First player(who is holding QQ) to act after flop bets out. The flop is rags. The other large stack folds. Player with QQ ends up taking the pot and knocking out all in player.

We have been discussing this hand and the all in player was saying that QQ should not have bet but should have checked it down. I was the other large stack who folded, but I could not fault how the QQ played his hand.

Should QQ have bet out as he did or should he have checked it down?

[TheFoxNL]

well its an unwritten rule to check it down to increase the chance of knocking down a player but when you got QQ on a rags board i dont blame one for betting because they can take down this pot and if they check they can still loose if a K or A hits

[SellingtheDrama]

Different players have different goals - you should always maximize your goals. If you feel you maximize your EV by getting the all in guy to go broke, you should check it down. If you feel you beat that hand, you are well within your rights to bet.

Note that if you don't think you beat the all in hand, you should not bet, unless the side pot is so large that its worth the risk.

Personally I don't find its worth checking down until very late in the tournament (within a few places of the money). After that it generally is worthwhile (though I tend to run people off their hands preflop if I have a monster pair - I'll isolate preflop by moving in behind the all in).

[pzhon]

It's a common misconception that it is very valuable to check it down. There is nothing inherently wrong with betting for value or to protect your hand, and a QQ overpair is easily good enough to bet.

It is almost always a terrible mistake to make a pure bluff into a dry sidepot. This is wrong because you win nothing when it works. There are rare exceptions when you have a huge chip lead, and you want to keep the short stack alive so you can keep stealing from the medium stacks.

If you act to try to knock a player out by making a bad call or by failing to bet your hand, you bear 100% of the cost. You only benefit when the difference between the plays knocks the short stack out, which is much rarer than the short stack losing, and you share the small benefit with all of the other players left in the tournament. Your share is usually microscopic. See this thread in which I calculated the value of a bet as 675 chips for the bettor, helping the all-in player by 105 chips. The 675 chips are worth a lot more than the extra 3.5% chance to knock the player out, unless your share of the benefit from knocking the player out is worth the equivalent of 19000 chips.

It is collusion (cheating) to agree to check it down when a player is all-in. Part of the equity of the all-in player comes from the times that the eventual worst hand knocks out the eventual best hand, e.g., when someone with a worse pair than the all-in player bets more than a gutshot can call.

[ahsfl]

I personally would check the queens down here. Keep in mind the equity of a tournament that size gauranteeing 3rd place money atleast. I'm assuming the large prize % to be in the top 3 so the difference there in 3rd or 4th place money could be 100s or 1000s of $ and therefore, a very large bit of $ equity given up to protect t$ equity given up if the all in takes the pot.

[pzhon]

[ QUOTE ]
I personally would check the queens down here. Keep in mind the equity of a tournament that size gauranteeing 3rd place money atleast.

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't think a rational cost-benefit analysis would support that, even one taking into account risk aversion. Here is a start:

If X (QQ) bets and Y folds and while Z is all-in, the only way that can hurt X is if the final order of hands would have been Y>Z>X. In the other 5 orderings, X is at least as well off. When X is QQ, an overpair on the flop, the final ordering Y>Z>X is extremely unlikely. In the 99 example, which I constructed to try to produce a large chance of Y>Z>X, this case only happened 3.5% of the time; let's say it happens 3% here. In this unlikely event, X ends up with just as many chips as from checking it down.

The only cost is the tiny cost of having the chips split between Y and Z instead of all belonging to Y. This would make the most difference on the bubble of a SNG, since most multitable tournaments do not reward survival nearly as much. We can use an ICM calculator to estimate the cost of splitting some chips among 3 opponents instead of 2. Let's assume first prize is 68% of what is not allocated yet (i.e., after subtracting off the 4th place prize), 2nd is 23%, and 3rd is 9%, following the prize distribution of a random PokerStars multitable tournament I chose. Let's suppose you started with 4000, Y had 4000, and Z had 500, while the 4th player had 1500. 3500 against 3500, 1500, and 1500 is worth 33.01% of the prize pool. 3500 against 5000 and 1500, the result of Y>Z>X when you check it down, is worth 35.41%, a difference of 2.40%. So, the reward from checking it down is about 2.4% of the prize pool perhaps 3% of the time, about 0.07% of the prize pool.

What is the reward from betting? To be conservative, let's ignore the value you can get from lower overpairs and top pair. Let's suppose Y correctly sees that you have a strong hand and folds. A lot of hands such as overcards, gutshots, and middle pair decrease an overpair's winning chances by over 10% in a 3-way pot. They aren't always out there, but I think 10% is a conservative estimate. In the example with stacks of 4000, 4000, 1500, and 500, the difference between winning the main pot to have 5000 against 3500 and 1500 and losing the main pot to have 3500 against 5000 and 1500 is about 8% of the prize pool. Betting to protect your hand then increases your share of the prize pool by 0.8%. Your gains are over 10 times as large as your 0.07% losses.

It's hard to imagine that rational risk aversion could justify passing up that opportunity. Even if the difference between 3rd and 4th place is a lot of money, you are guaranteed to win at least 4th place, so you will definitely come out way ahead, unless you assume you started the tournament in debt.

For an advantage player, it's clear to bet to protect your hand even with much worse hands. The cost of having the same chip stack but failing to eliminate the all-in player is tiny compared with the reward of winning the main pot more frequently when the other big stack has a live draw against you.