Tags:
Hold' em, Intermediate, Multi-table tournaments, No Limit
While it’s true that most of your profit in poker will come from bad players, finding a good spot to value-shove often has as much to do with your position at the table as the type of opponent you’re facing. It’s widely known that online tournaments have become very aggressive in the last few years, with players throwing in three-bets and four-bets with abandon. A year or so ago the phrase ‘under the gun is the new button’ was coined because button raises (and late-position raises in general) no longer garnered any respect. For the same reason it’s easy to see that value-shoving is likely to be very effective in these seats, as few players will ever credit you with a big hand.
For example, let’s say you’re in the early stages of a tournament with effective stacks of around 50 big blinds. If you open the button to three big blinds with a strong hand like Q-Q and get re-popped by the small blind to nine big blinds, your options are to flat-call, reraise to around 25 big blinds (effectively committing yourself) or value-shoving all-in. Clearly you don’t have to value-shove and get called very often for this to be more profitable than calling or four-betting to 25 big blinds. Flat-calling preflop here with Q-Q is arguably the better play, but both flatting and shoving all-in will disguise your hand far more than four-betting to 25 big blinds
The mid stages
In the middle stages of a tournament when stacks are shallower, it’s not uncommon for many players to be sitting with 20-30 big blinds, putting you in a good position to three-bet all-in preflop. So if the button opens to 3x from a 30 big blind stack and you have 25 big blinds, a ‘normal’ three-bet would be to somewhere around 8x, hoping to induce a shove. However, in this spot you can also just ship the lot in, as your value shove here will look exactly like a re-steal. Your overbet also looks weak because it appears you’re simply picking on a late-position bettor, with a good stack size for re-stealing. One of the benefits of this is that many opponents immediately discount A-A and K-K from your range as ‘there’s no way you’d do that with those hands’. Oh really?
Read part I
Read part III