We saw in Part 1 of this series that calling all-in on the bubble is extremely risky, and that with roughly even stacks it can be very costly unless you have a strong hand. Because of the structure of Sit & Go’s, calling is always less preferable to moving all-in, but depending on the situation and stack sizes that statement can be stretched quite a bit. For example, with the shortest stack, ICM considerations aren’t that important, as you simply need to double-up to stay in the game, and you may have too few chips to force a fold by going all-in anyway. As such, calling another player’s all-in or calling all-in in the big blind when pot-committed is fairly routine when you’re getting good pot odds. In fact, if you are very short-stacked having another player shove before you might even be helpful, as they will often force the blinds out and leave you with attractive pot odds. For example, if you have 600 chips at the 200-400 level you would be getting 2-to-1 if another player raises and you call when not in the blinds.
Chip daddy
Having a big stack makes calling much easier too, since you are not risking elimination. For example, if you have 3,000 chips on the bubble of a ten-player $40 Sit & Go and your opponents have 1,000 chips each, your stack value in equity terms is $148. Knocking someone out increases it to $170.67, but losing only reduces it to $121.33. So, you either win $22.67 or lose $26.67 which means you only need to have about 54% equity to call (which pot odds will reduce further). But being a short stack here and losing is disastrous, since your stack value of $84 will only go up to $121.33 if you double-up, meaning you need more than 69% equity to call. And that means only calling with monster pairs.
The most perilous position to be calling in is as a middle stack against a larger stack. If you call all-in here you’re pretty much freerolling the fourth-place player into the money. Suppose in the above example the stacks are 4,000, 2,000, 1,000 and 1,000. Now the second player has a stack value of $110.48, which would only go up to $148.95 if he doubles through the first-place player. He would actually need over 74% equity to call all-in. Now A-K would be an automatic fold and the only hands that could be worth calling with are high pairs. Pocket Tens barely scrapes by with 75% equity against a random hand.