Re: Poker & Shoving All In Hands Heads Up That page is for Texas holdem, I assumed that this would be what you wanted. I have not found other games on betonline to be prominent. If you were to shove here you still have the big stack to act (who could call you) and our original raiser who might have a hand he’s willing to live and die with – meaning your fold equity is poor and against the top 15% of hands your holding of KJ offsuit is a 58-42% underdog! By shoving, we’ve put max pressure on our opponents and now the “ball’s in their court” as the saying goes. Push/Fold Considerations. The stronger your hand, the less fold equity you need; the weaker your hand the more you need. Try not to change your plays based on the strength of your hand. Poker Starting Hand Chart (6-max Cash, 100bb): Hand Chart Notation Getting to know which hands to play and in which positions is even more important than the actual hand. This 6-max Cash Hand Chart details the hands you should play and the position.

One situation every tournament player finds themselves in often is the decision to shove or not with a marginal hand when down to a stack of between five and eight Ms.

A lot of these situations are standard. If opening from the button with an M of 5, when there are antes and fairly tight players in the blinds, you’re pretty much shoving anything. If under the gun with an M of 7 against a table with a couple of players who have limp/folded recently, you’re saving your chips with virtually anything but premium hands.

However, all too often we find ourselves in marginal situations. When opening with a shortish stack from mid position, it’s not clear whether one should be shoving or folding with hands like A6o or JTo. Certainly, with antes out there and a stack with anything under an M of 5, I think a shove is warranted, but there are lots of contributing factors. I want to have a closer look at these marginal situations.

First, let’s consider these other factors:

1. Table dynamic. Is the table passive? Are you getting walks in the blinds? Are people limp/folding? If the answer is yes to any of these, you might consider being less risky with your open shoves.
2. Position. If you have one player behind you, the chances that he has Kings or Aces is about 1%. With five players behind, it’s about 5%. The more players behind, the more likely you are to get called, regardless of player type.
3. Fold equity. Steal success is also down to how tight the players are behind you. Players who are folding everything but Aces and Kings should be shoved on with anything – the maths is irresistible here. However, note that this factor has two dimensions – the looser a player is, the more equity your hand will have against it when called.
4. Hand value. Last but not least, we have your actual hand. Where fold equity is usually the reason that stealing is profitable, you should expect to be looked up by opponents too. How your hand fares in this situation can be a major contributor to equity in your hand.

It’s this final factor that I want to pay particular attention to here.

In the table below, I’ve taken a motley collection of hands which I find can be marginal in those not-quite-short-stacked-yet situations. These are times when continuing to fold will mean having to shove a whole bunch of rubbish in a couple of rounds, but shoving just yet doesn’t seem like a money-making play given your opposition, your position and your holding.

I’ve pitted each of these hands against a calling/shoving range from the opponent of top 5%, 10%, 15% and so on up to top 50% hands. Note that the resulting equities are just as valid if you find yourself looking to call a shove with one of these hands (presumably with much shorter effective stacks) or whether you are doing the shoving yourself and looking to steal or have some show down value.

I’ve put Q7o in there too just to show what the so-called “middle of the range” hand looks like in comparison. Note that Pokerstove (my resource for these equity figures) actually puts Q7o at slightly above the median hand (it says Q7o is around top 48% – reckoning T7o is the median hand).

I’ve colour shaded the equities to make it more obvious how steep the rise in equity is for certain hands as compared with others. Note also the right most two columns. The “percentile” column is where Pokerstove places that hand in ranking. So J8s is in the top 24% of hands according to Pokerstove. The “P(next 5)” column is the probability that you will NOT get a hand in a higher percentile in the next five hands (if you fold of course).

Although it’s very rare these days that anyone will shove with only 5%, it’s certainly possible due to ICM that people will having a calling range that narrow. It’s interesting that all our marginal hands perform quite badly against such a range (all of them, including the low pocket pairs, are between 3/1 and 2/1 shots). However, if your opponent is folding 95% of their range, it’s presumably profitable to be shoving anything if there are antes and you are shortish stacked.

More interesting is the way the equities increase as opponents become looser and looser. Low pocket pairs, which start off being roughly as much of a dog as the suited and connected type hands such as JTo, J8s and 97s steal a march on them as opponent ranges get to around the 15-20% mark. At that point, the pairs are a full 10% better equity wise that the drawing hands. Yet as we expand the opponent’s range to 40-50%, the margin closes again to within a few percent.

The broad reason for this is domination. Up to the 5% part of an opponent’s range, there is a healthy portion of high pocket pairs – holdings that dominate hands like 44 as much as they do 97s. However, expand the range to 15-20% and the hands that get added are the suited and unsuited Broadways, along with a few suited Aces. These are holding which hands like 44 are not dominated by, but hands like J8s and 97s are.

Expand the range a bit further – to 40% or so – and the hands that get added are those which the likes of JTo and J8s can do better against; hands that they themselves dominate (e.g T8s). By comparison hands such as 22, much as they will always have around 45-55% equity against unpaired hands, are not getting any new “bump” in equity. They’ll be around 50/50 against 75o, just like they will against AJo.

I’m not sure one should start tinkering with shoving ranges solely depending on an opponent’s likelihood of calling. It’s also still contingent on how many players you have to beat and your stack size. Nevertheless, the table does show that certain types of hand are better against generally cally players and generally foldy players.

Against cally players weak Aces and low pocket pairs do reasonably well. Against foldy players, the hope is that they fold(!); hence we can add marginal hands such as the J8s and 97s to the range in the knowledge that our equity if called is not terribly worse than if we had shoved with a more genuine hand such as A6o or 44. The caveat here is that against generally foldy players, you need a whole bunch of them behind you (say, more than three) before you opt not to shove with ANY of these hands (excepting perhaps Q7o).

The other point of interest is the final two columns. They assess the likelihood that if you folded this hand now, you would be dealt a better hand in the next five. Note that the percentiles I’ve used are from Pokerstove’s ranking which is derived by pitting every hand against every other hand. 22 thus performs relatively badly (Pokerstove says it’s only a top 60% hand) because it doesn’t do well against 54o for example. However, it’s worth noting regardless of how the hands are ranked, that if you have a top 20% hand, the chances of you being dealt a better hand in the next five is only 33%.

The scope of this article is too narrow to conclude shoving and calling ranges based on stack sizes and number of opponents behind (I would recommend Kill Everyone and No Limit Hold Em Theory and Practice for that). However, it’s worth noting that these marginal hands – despite being quite different in other poker terms (how they flop, what depth of stack is best for playing with them) – when it comes to the shove or fold part of a tournament, they all fare quite similarly, regardless of opponent shove/calling ranges.

This article first appeared in Bluff Europe magazine.

Table Of Contents

Covering live poker tournaments for a living affords me the opportunity to see countless thousands of hands played out, many of which offer interesting and potentially valuable insights into how players — both amateurs and professionals — play the game. In this ongoing series, I’ll highlight hands I’ve seen at the tournaments I’ve covered and see if we can glean anything useful from them.

The Scene

I recently got a chance to dust off my playing chops for the first time in a few months as I traveled to Milwaukee for World Series of Poker Circuit Potawatomi. There, I participated in a handful of tournaments, including the $1,700 Main Event, which is where I saw this hand take place.

A player on my right had been playing a very tight strategy overall, and when he did play, he often just shoved all in preflop. While he had nursed a short stack for awhile, he'd recently found a triple up when he got pocket queens in three ways and nailed a queen on the turn after a player with flopped a king. So, he had around 35,000 when this hand started at 400/800/800.

The Action

From middle position, Eddie Blumenthal (pcitured) opened for 1,600. The player on my right jammed from the cutoff for about 35,000. Action folded back to Blumenthal, who agonized for a few minutes.

'Man, one higher and I'd snap-call and one lower and I'd snap-fold,' he mused.

Finally, he did opt to call, turning over . The other player also held and they chopped the pot.

Shoving Hands Poker Card Game

Concept and Analysis

When we went on break a bit later, Blumenthal confided that he wasn't sure about his call and he actually felt like it was likely a losing call. I considered that it was likely close, and thought I'd take a look at the math to see whether his post-mortem was correct.

First off, the size of the pot and the size of the call. Blumenthal made it 1,600 and he didn't ask for a count, so we'll go with a rough estimate of 35,000 for his opponent's stack. That means he had to call 33,400 more into a pot of 38,600. He was getting about 1.15-to-1 on his money, and the math works out to where he needed a little over 46% equity to profitably call.

That's a big price, and indicative of how you have to play against this sort of massive overbet shove.

Shoving Hands Poker Games

So, what sort of range can we expect the player in the cutoff to have in this spot? If he's shoving queens, we can expect he'd likely shove aces and kings as well. Most players are aware that ace-king is a good shoving hand too, but some very tight players may not shove with it. We'll give him ace-king suited to factor in that there's some chance he's shoving these also.

What about jacks? Clearly, Blumenthal was on the fence about whether his opponent would shove with jacks since he second-guessed himself afterward. We'll the calculation both ways.

If you run these ranges into an equity calculator against a pair of queens, here's out it works out:

Either way, if these estimates are correct, Blumenthal was right. He made a bad call if his opponent is shoving this tight. Throw in and it becomes a call as the queen edge north of 50% equity.

Shoving Hands Poker Game

I certainly count myself surprised here as I'd have thought with jacks in the range, queens would at least be very close, but it's actually a clear fold. Basically, if someone is shoving a very tight range for this many blinds, you need kings or better to call.

Even if you include every combo of ace-king along with queens or better, the queens still only have just north of 40% equity, making them a fold. Jacks-plus and all ace-king combos pushes the queens just over 47%, making them barely a profitable call.

Shoving Hands Poker Rules

Sometimes, in low-stakes environments, you'll run into newer players who aren't confident enough to play postflop and actually do approach poker like this player in the cutoff. They'll occasionally peel a few hands with preflop calls while mostly playing a very aggressive shoving strategy when they have the goods.

Bottom line is, against someone playing this way, stick to raising their blinds as often as you can and folding to most of their shoves. Only call when you have one of the absolute best hands possible, because if their ranges are this tight, jacks aren't cutting it and queens are on the border.

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