Moxie Mike
Full House
No equity calculators please for this thread. It gets weird.
$225 live tourney with a fairly soft field. Pays 12 with 27 remaining, so a little ICM pressure but the payout curve is really steep (42% of prize pool to 1st) and mitigates some of this.
9 handed, hero covers table. Blinds 1000/2000 with 300 ante.
UTG Folds
UTG+1 (55000) raises to 7000
1 fold
MP (64000) raises to 15000
2 folds
Hero (110000) action on button with?
I've read no responses so this might be redundant but this is a pretty standard fold. AQo looks pretty, smells nice and you have position. But this spot has a litany of problems. Keep in mind you've posted no reads whatsoever about the individuals involved so these remarks are generalized.
It would help to know how many players started the tournament (I assume ~120 based on payouts), how fast the blinds move, whether there are antes and what the average stack is at this stage of the game. But usually, this is the stage of the tournament where the short stacks start dropping like flies.
UTG+1 has shown significant strength with a 3.5x raise in very early position. Usually this means a player has a hand he wants to protect - and is content to pick up the blinds if that's how it plays out. AQ through A-10 ,88, 99, 1010, JJ, and of course the monsters are all in his range. Maybe this is his standard open, but at this stage of the tournament this feel like a hand he'll stack off with.
MP's raise is ~1/4 of his stack. It's possible he's trying to isolate UTG+1 without committing if he pushes - but that's a pretty advanced play you don't usually see in what is as you've described as 'fairly soft' fields. Chances are he's just betting his hand. His range is narrower than UTG+1's in that he's probably not raising like that with medium PPs or any unpaired holdings worse than AQo.
So you're in position with a quality hand facing two opponents who've shown significant strength. Calling leaves you vulnerable to a jam from the EP opener,. which even if the MP player folds you really can't call. But even if the EP opener just calls closing the action, the pot will be 48,000 preflop, and either player can open jam the flop as a reasonable bet. If you connect with the flop in any meaningful way, you're probably going to have to call and just hope you're not dominated.
Conversely, it seems highly unlikely low flops will check through to you so you can pick up the pot with a bet. I just think you're going to flop top pair to find yourself dominated in one way or another more times than now. Better to get out of the way and let them fight it out.
Raising of course is an option worth examining - but all you can really do is set the two of them in and hope neither of them calls. Neither one of them will call with a hand you dominate (AJ or worse), and EVERY hand that will is either a coinflip or has you crushed. And chances are one of them has an ace, so even if you're called and it is a flip, you're still at a disadvantage.
You want to flip for ~60% of your stack when you're quite deep and primed for a deep run?
Sucks to fold a hand like this in that spot, but from a risk-reward analysis, there's no reason to get involved and the probability of a good outcome is rather low.
.
.
