Early stages in low buyin tournement holding AK AQ

[kimos123]

What do you do when you are holding AQ or AK in the early stages of a low buy-in tournement?

everyone is a calling station and i tried the standaard raise 3xBB +1x for every limper but this didnt work almost the half of them call and when i dont hit my hand i lost alot of my staks even if i CB then they will call with any pair they hit [img]/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]...

please give me some advice of the early stages of the low buy in tournements where its full with donks

[levAA]

i don't think you need to adjust.
play your hand for value if you hit it - as you will get a good payoff of all the calling stations.
don't play it if you don't hit it, while i still do some c-betting also in the early stages against a single opponent. somtimes you need to fire a second or third barrel, but can win some good pots against the calling station that hasn't hit anything until the river.

[kurtkatt]

poooooooooooosh pf obv.


and when u don´t, just keep from c-betting missed flops against 3-4 players. trying to bluff that many probable calling stations is just spew.

so just valuebet them when u hit, save the c-bet game for later or when u occasionally go h-up and sometimes when u are 3way to flop (prefferably on some dry raggy flops and not stuff like jt8 2suit flops etc).

[levAA]

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poooooooooooosh pf obv.

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no good advice - there are better ways to play your AK,AQ than pushing 50-100BB early on.

[footnbaseball]

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poooooooooooosh pf obv.

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no good advice - there are better ways to play your AK,AQ than pushing 50-100BB early on.

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I think he was joking.

And OP, I really hope you look back on this post someday and wonder how you could ever think this way. You need to get it into your head that you do in fact WANT people to call you with worse hands. Of course, if half the table calls you are going to lose the pot more often, but your also going to get paid off more when you do hit something. It sounds like one of your problems might be c-betting, its not mandatory. If half the table calls your raise and you don't flop anything, just check fold.

[levAA]

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I think he was joking.

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hope so [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[kimos123]

yea i think my problem is CB when i miss the flop
thanks for the advice

[chh]

POOOOOOOOOOOSH PF ftw

[typically]

Personally I'm not so happy when I get five callers on AA, let alone AK, AQ. If you get that many callers this means you need to increase your standard open raise. Seriously, 5,6,7X raises will still typically get one or two callers. Much better to get the same or more $$ in with less opponents, no? If there are already limpers, you can bet they'll see your crazy overbet as a challenge and gladly look you up with their AJo or 77 or astonishingly worse garbage (which they will often subsequently fold to an overcard even if you miss your AK). This is called maximizing value. I don't mind pushing with TT,JJ and crazy raising with QQ either. This gets called more than enough to be +++EV.

Edit: I'd actually rather limp with AQ though.

[typically]

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Of course, if half the table calls you are going to lose the pot more often, but your also going to get paid off more when you do hit something.

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You also get busted much more easily by garbage that you have no way of predicting. What will happen more often than you getting paid is that one of these callers hits a set or a hidden straight or a flush draw they don't know how to let go of, and you lose a huge pile of chips or your entire stack. Too many callers versus a premium hand is basically suicide; you have the goods preflop, you want to charge the maximum to see the flop, as well as limit your opposition to a small, tightly-defined field.