AKo Middle of 20/180

durkahdurkah · #1 10-05-2006, 08:52 PM

Villian has been somewhat aggressive since I moved to the table ~20 hands ago.

I'm just wondering how to handle AK given the somewhat awkward stack sizes.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t200 (8 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: 2+2 Forums)

UTG+1 (t4688)
MP1 (t3767)
MP2 (t4864)
CO (t9480)
Hero (t6330)
SB (t5985)
BB (t7610)
UTG (t4850)

Preflop: Hero is Button with A[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], K[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img].
4 folds, CO raises to t800, Hero ???

mornelth · #2 10-05-2006, 09:31 PM

Shove it, there's 1,100 in the pot and it's 1/6 of your stack. If you get a fold that's great, if not you're either flipping or in gerat shape against AQ or something. Running into KK+ would suck, but you are not like MASSIVELY AHEAD of the field at this point to try and somehow find out if you'er ahead or not and fold if you think you are...

Habib Marwan · #3 10-05-2006, 09:38 PM

all in?

mastr · #4 10-05-2006, 10:07 PM

definate shove, no thought

cking · #5 10-05-2006, 10:58 PM

make it a game, see how fast you can go all-in

durkahdurkah · #6 10-05-2006, 11:26 PM

Hmmm, apparently this isn't very close lol. I kind of half expected to hear that to be honest.

Regardless I did in fact push, villian folded, thanks for the chips. It seemed like a very easy decision in the heat of the moment, but it got me to thinking about these types of scenarios that arise all too often in tourneys where you have an awkward stack size facing pressure.

I wanted to post this hand to get a feel of how hands like this should be handled in the case when calling sucks, folding sucks, raising commits ~1/3 of your stack, and pushing is a gross overbet. Having AK seemed to make for an easy decision in this case, but there are plenty of other times you have a more marginal hand and the decision becomes much closer.

Just out of curiosity, how would this situation change if you have AQ here? AJ? 77/88? Where is the cutoff where folding is preferable to pushing? Are there any hands you would flat-call here? Would you also push AA/KK or would you try and extract more value out of these with a smaller raise?