Message Board : Luck factor

Pim,

In the hand that you described, 55 vs 95 on a 995 flop, you’re right, you will never get away from the hand.

But I disagree with what you said about small and medium versus big pots. A lot of big pots get played where neither player has a hand nearly as strong as the ones you describe above, and it’s important to play those well.

In addition, SNGs are a bit of a peculiar type of poker. Since 50 percent of the prize money goes to people who go broke (2nd and 3rd place get 30 and 20 percent respectively), once you get down to about 5 players or so, the game takes on a very heavy "don’t go broke" aspect.

You might want to check out SNG Power Tools (http://sitngo-analyzer.com/). They have a free download and they say they have a tutorial that goes with it.

Pim said:

What do you mean wih "don’t go broke aspect" Ed?

In my opinion when you are down to the last 5 players and with the blinds increasing rapidly you have to play more (super) agressively otherwise you will get blinded away..

Whats your opinion?

SNG strategy is a little bit counterintuitive once you get down
to 4 or 5 players. The reason is that finishing 3rd gets paid very well
compared to finishing 4th… and you don’t need to win particualrly
more chips to finish 3rd than to finish 4th (as opposed to finishing
1st where you obviously need to win all the chips).

For example,
say 4 players are left and everyone has 2,500 chips. The prize pool is
$100 paying $50-$30-$20. Ignoring the effect that the position of the
button and blinds has on equity, roughly everyone’s seat in this
tournament is worth $25 right now. (That is, everyone has an equal
chance for all three prizes.)

Now, say on the next hand that
Player A open raises, Player B pushes all-in, and Player A calls. The
winner of that hand will have 5,000 chips and the other two players
will have 2,500. Now what’s everyone’s equity?

Well, everyone is
now guaranteed at least $20. Let’s say the player with 5,000 chips now
has a 50% chance to finish first, a 35% chance to finish second, and a
15% chance to finish third (rough estimate, but it’s good enough to
make my point). His equity is now:

(0.50)(50) + (0.35)(30) + (0.15)(20) = 25 + 10.5 + 3 = $38.5

The other two players still have equal equity, so they share the remaining $61.5 for $30.75 a piece.

So before this all-in hand, everyone had $25. After it, the player who won had $38.5, and the other two players had $30.75.

Something
weird happened. The players that DIDN’T play the hand just made a 20%+
profit on their equity by sitting it out. And the player who won the
all-in didn’t double his equity… he only increased it by about 50%.

So
the player who got all-in was actually LAYING EQUITY when he got
all-in. He was risking $25 to win about $13.5, or laying just shy of
2-to-1. In order to lay that amount profitably, he’d need to win the
all-in confrontation more than 65% of the time to make it profitable.

That
makes SNG strategy very strange. On one hand, the blinds are high and
there’s pressure to raise all-in a lot. On the other hand, you REALLY
don’t want to get called, even if you have a pretty good hand. You
can’t just be a >50% favorite to make money. You often have to be
>60-something percent just to break-even.

And if someone has
raised all-in on you, you often need a very, very strong hand to
call… even if you know your opponent is raising a wide range of
hands. Because when you call, you hurt both yourself and the raiser and
benefit the players who sat it all out.

I think you read some advice into what I said that I didn’t at all intend. In this situation with 2,500 chips apiece, the near-optimal strategy for each player would be to push all-in with a wide range of hands and to call those pushes with a very narrow range.

Indeed, in Mathematics of Poker, the authors suggest that if your opponents are calling only with hands that offer them a positive expectation, you can profitably move in with any two cards from under the gun because you’ll succeed in winning the blinds nearly 85% of the time.

So I agree… the basic strategy is to move in very aggressively and to call quite tightly. You might have to adjust that strategy, however, if you know that another player at your table is calling far too frequently.

Pim said:

Then I have misunderstand your remark "once you get down to about 5 players or so, the game takes on a very heavy "don’t go broke" aspect"

I thought you ment that you should be carefull and therefore play more tight in order not to go broke.

You definitely don’t want to go broke, but sometimes your best option to achieve that goal is to maintain your aggression.

This is precisely why I said the strategy is counterintuitive. In Mathematics of Poker, they liken it to a game of chicken.

In case you don’t know, chicken is a simple game. Two people each get in a car and drive toward one another on the same road. If neither person swerves, they have a horrific head-on collision. The "object" of the game is to force your opponent to swerve before you do. If you swerve and your opponent doesn’t, you "lose." But, naturally, if neither of you swerve, then you both really, really lose.

They said the SNG strategy in this example was like a game of sequential chicken (as opposed to the "simultaneous" nature of the real game). The first player declares that they aren’t swerving by pushing all-in. If the remaining three players have any sense, they’ll get out of the way, because a collision benefits neither them nor the all-in raiser (unless they have an extremely premium hand).

So assuming everyone is a good player and understands the situation correctly, the UTG player will move all-in and the other players will fold without an extremely strong hand. The main catch is that sometimes players don’t "know what’s good for them" and will collide with you out of ignorance or spite. That possibility adds a bit of a wrinkle to the choice of whether to move in or not, because if you move in and get called by the reckless player, you lose and he loses, and the other two players win. So you’d prefer one of your two opponents to have the collision with the reckless player. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you fold every hand… you just have to evaluate the situation on the fly and figure out which hands are strong enough to withstand some reckless calling.

Pim said:

 Usually a small raise of 2BB is enough to pick up the blinds etc.

Then your opponents are playing poorly.  If someone bets 2BB into your blind and you have around 10BB stacks, you should shove over the top of him with a very wide range.

The thing about SNG’s is that you need to threaten to play for stacks a lot by shoving, not calling.  You should be very, very reticent to call bets.  You want to threaten, not be threatened.  This is particularly true because near the bubble, people are more risk averse than they should be.  When you are near the bubble with an above average stack, it is time to start your own personal reign of terror.  People don’t call both because the shouldn’t and then won’t for fear of busting.

Pim said:

Todd,

In Daniel Negreanu’s book Hold’em wisdom for all players Negreanu gives the advice to play agressively in tournaments. Furthermore, he gives the advice to play small ball agressive for good players and home run agressive for beginners. Small ball means a raise of 2/2,5BB and home run 5BB (to open the pot in middle to late position). So it seams this advice contradicts your comment above.

I’m pretty sure he’s talking about early/mid stages of MTT’s and not the end stages of a SNG.  Very different strategies are in place for those situations.  Small raises on the bubble also probably work if you are the big stack in a big MTT.  But, the stack structures and goals are going to be different there as well.

The reasoning is simple. People tend to play more conservatively in tournaments (especially near the bubble) and you can steal a lot with minimum risk if you can assess the players at your table. Opponents fold a lot against a minimum raise, especially near the bubble.

People fold a lot to big re-raises too.  This is really, really powerful at bubble time.  The original raiser can’t profitably call with less than a premium hand.  It depends a bit on stack sizes and who has the short stack, but expert players will shove on you all day and all night if you tee up those little bets at bubble time.  Once you hit the bubble and effective stacks are less than 10BB, it’s push fold time.  What you can push and fold profitably is pretty well understood under the ICM model if you can make somewhat reasonable guesses of calling ranges.  In really passive games, 2BB raises might win some pots, but it isn’t winning strategy against better SNG players.

Off course I agree with your comment that you should not be willing to call too loose. Waiting for the next hand and raise yourself is, in general, better. 

SNG profitablilty comes from this notion for sure.  You just can’t call with very many hands even if you know the villain is shoving with a wide range.