Taking An All-In Risk

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In tournament play, you make decision after decision that could result in risking all your chips. You’ll make at least one decision for all your chips in virtually every tournament you play. And in most tournaments you’ll make multiple all-in decisions.

Whenever you choose to go for it, and you lose, it’s easy to second-guess your decision. “I thought I had an edge at the time, but maybe I should have waited for a better spot.”

Tournament decisions can be complicated by the nature of the prize structure, but in many cases the second-guessing is unwarranted. Recently a reader sent me a question, wondering about some of his all-in decisions:

Lately I’ve been having some bad results calling all-in bets near or at the final table.

Usually when I’m at or near the final table (in the live tournaments I play) average stack is around 10 big blinds, so there isn’t much happening except all-ins and folding (with a lot of stealing).

Obviously this can’t go on forever, so whenever I think I have a good chance of having the best hand, I call. A lot of times this turns out to be a coin flip, and I was wondering if calling the all-in was the correct play.

I’ll give two recent examples:

1. I called an all-in with 7-7, the other guy had K-J, and the board paired aces and tens leaving me empty handed. I thought he might shove with any ace, any pocket pair or two face cards, so in my mind I had a slight advantage.

2. I called an all-in with A-Q suited, the other guy had T-T, the board came up dry, and I headed back home. I had this guy on A-T or better, any pocket pair, or two face cards.

Now obviously i shouldn’t be calling these bets if we had bigger stacks, but with the short stacks you just can’t wait around for A-A and K-K all the time.

So my question is should I be making these calls, or should I just let them steal and wait until it’s my turn to steal back?

Unless the prize structure for the tournaments was exceptionally flat, I like both of my reader’s decisions to get the money in.
Let’s look at his equity against the hand ranges he put his opponents on. (By the way, the hand ranges he proposed for his opponents seem fairly reasonable to me and within the range for typical players in all-in situations.)

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