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Poker Video: MTT/SNG by AMT (Micro/Small Stakes)

Been waiting for this !

Great job as always AMT. The (first) Q3o with 4 people left blew me away, I would have auto-mucked that, wow.

Excellent job AMT. Your doing a very good job of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Keep the info coming

Great. I really like it a lot. Are you looking forward to record (and post) a few SNG sessions? I often have a lot of trouble using theories I learned before without viewing it live in action.

Great job as always AMT. The (first) Q3o with 4 people left blew me away, I would have auto-mucked that, wow.

I want to stress that you need to have a feel for your opponents before making awesome shoves like that. As I indicated in the video, if they're both on a very feasible tight range with the bubble and stack size dynamic, let it rip with basically any two (especially in a structure with antes but either way)! but often at low buy ins, or against hugely loose/non thinking players, they will make terrible calls on the bubble, and as such we have to tighten our ranges when that situation arises (which is often the case in these games...but it's important to understand all aspects of the knowledge before applying it in my opinion). A good time to push any two in a spot like this (or close to it) would be vs any combination of nits/thinking players/regulars on the bubble with a similar stack setup as indicated in the hand review.

I'd also like to remind everyone that next week will be a continuation of pushing with a bit more involvement in the ICM, so if not everything is clicking with it yet, next week's episode should help too! Thanks for the comments everyone.

edit: I semi lied in the vid, I said that with the Q3o that there would be no spot with more FE as the big stack than the one in the vid, but if someone had a micro stack on the bubble, you'd probably have even more FE just to be a nit about my own commentary.

Excellent vid.

is there ever a time, when we with a stack size of say 10-15 BB,
We can make a smaller raise(say 2 1/2 BB) with the idea of NOT calling a re-raise.
We are making this raise vs very tight players when we think
our FE by itself is enough to raise any two,(players are too tight)
but do NOT want to risk running into a big hand that calls
and puts us out.
I guess my question really asking is, how tight would the opponents need to be to make this a +EV play?
thoughts?

AMT is da man

Is it sad, I have been waiting all day at work, to get home to watch this video.

The QTs fold on the button with 12bb stacks and 8 people left seems pretty bad even with your description of the blinds. With that hand in a cash game with those stacks sizes its almost profitable to push there with QTs and then show your cards allowing your opponents to play perfectly against you. So when your opponents will still fold most Kx hands and may call with a Q9s or JTs it seems like your missing out on a ton of value in that spot. I cant imagine it being that different in a STT with 8 players left considering how far from the bubble we are.

I look forward to next episode since I dont have any experience doing ICM calculations.

Excellent vid.

is there ever a time, when we with a stack size of say 10-15 BB,
We can make a smaller raise(say 2 1/2 BB) with the idea of NOT calling a re-raise.
We are making this raise vs very tight players when we think
our FE by itself is enough to raise any two,(players are too tight)
but do NOT want to risk running into a big hand that calls
and puts us out.
I guess my question really asking is, how tight would the opponents need to be to make this a +EV play?
thoughts?

yes that can certainly happen. I suppose any time you have the read of say, particularly tight blinds that you know won't shove over without a very specific range, then you can use this play in that stack size range. Basically if you feel that a 2.5x raise=a shove for fold equity purposes, then you can do it as long as not risking too much of your stack. This would definitely be vs the opponents you describe and not vs just one of them in the blinds/not against villains of other descriptions. good question.

The QTs fold on the button with 12bb stacks and 8 people left seems pretty bad even with your description of the blinds. With that hand in a cash game with those stacks sizes its almost profitable to push there with QTs and then show your cards allowing your opponents to play perfectly against you. So when your opponents will still fold most Kx hands and may call with a Q9s or JTs it seems like your missing out on a ton of value in that spot. I cant imagine it being that different in a STT with 8 players left considering how far from the bubble we are.

I look forward to next episode since I dont have any experience doing ICM calculations.

If you watched the first episode, you'd have seen why an STT does not =a cash game, and it's not quite as simple as cEV not equaling $EV.

In this hand, it's not a terrible push, but it is definitely definitely thin at low buy ins when facing looser calling ranges. That combined with the fact that it gets worse when considering future opening up of the calling ranges from bad players that think you push too much. The bias against confrontation really does tell us in a structure without antes in this type of spot against even semi loose calling ranges that we should definitely fold the QTs with these stacks, and it not being at all the same as in a cash game (which, being the basis of your argument, is important to eliminate about your assumptions of sng push/fold scenarios as to most accurately asses them).

I mentioned in the video about other very similar scenarios where QTs would be a good push, but one of the important things about SNGs is recognizing the incredibly subtle differences that go into very similar push/fold decisions. I tried to use this hand in the replayer and my description of this hand as an illustration of that, and I will also be running this hand in the ICM program simulations that are going to be done in next week's episode to show some of these ideas. The other thing is that, a lot of spots where you think you might have some idea of calling ranges with 'deep' stacks (deep meaning deep for push/fold zone) quickly become absolutely terrible if you're *at all* wrong about how tight or loose the calling ranges are (aka if you think he's not calling Q6o but then does, you've just thrown a lot more equity out the window with the push than you would have if you had a better read). All of this equates to the readless situations with a deeper pushing stack against randoms at low buy ins having fairly tight pushing requirments. These situations put the 'fold' in push/fold

It's probably correct to fold some Ace-X hands in addition to the QTs with 12bb effective stacks in the particular hand in question. Chew on that Seriously though thank you for the comments, and I hope my answer has begun to at least sort it out.

With that hand in a cash game with those stacks sizes its almost profitable to push there with QTs and then show your cards allowing your opponents to play perfectly against you.

lol, well I'm not going to argue with that, but I will say that if you do that in a SNG you might as well have pulled out the buy in from your wallet, found a lighter, and lit those bills on fire just before urinating on the ashes. The idea of what this is going to do later when you don't adjust to pushing tight enough once the blinds start calling way way looser than equilibrium is horrifying.

Great job as always AMT. The (first) Q3o with 4 people left blew me away, I would have auto-mucked that, wow.

Great vid AMT! Wish I would've shoved that Q3o now that you explained things! hehe. It ended up folding around.

When you talk about pushing that hand, in that situation of course, would you actually shove all-in or just make a standard raise there? Seems very risky to be shoving with Q3o when the BB has almost 90% of your stack and would put you down to 3BB if you get caught and are beat.

Great vid AMT! Wish I would've shoved that Q3o now that you explained things! hehe. It ended up folding around.

When you talk about pushing that hand, in that situation of course, would you actually shove all-in or just make a standard raise there? Seems very risky to be shoving with Q3o when the BB has almost 90% of your stack and would put you down to 3BB if you get caught and are beat.

if he's predictable and won't react differently to an open raise, you can consider this, but thinking players know that they have a ton of fold equity if you make a standard open here with close stack sizes, and while its kind of suicidal for them with their particular stack to try and resteal by raising all in, it's still generally a bad idea to do so when you have them covered.....but they will still do it So the short answer is, it takes away any power that they may have in doing so, because if you shove all in, they'd be hard pressed to call with basically any hand even if they knew what you were doing(the shorter the short stack is the more this is true on the bubble in general in a big stack/2nd stack situation, but as I said in the vid, a big 2nd stack maintains great but delicate equity on the bubble). Again, against loose, non thinking players it'd suck to shove a huge range all the time even with the "ownage" stacks simply because of the nature and game flow of the lower buy ins, but many opponents even that play very poorly are inherently almost as tight as they should be, which is very beneficial when making plays like this, but it still is very exploitable to open yourself up with a small open raise and risk a resteal by someone who won't care. If you flip the stacks and villain had hero's stack aka the 2nd big stack, if hero raised the btn, the big stack would be correct to reshove pretty much any two cards against any thinking solid low buy in player (someone who would think enough to steal blinds but not think enough to know that this would be correct of the big stack in the BB...if that makes sense ). Hope this helped a bit.

I would love to see this situation come up in one of your videos and see how you pull it off and explain it as you're going along. I understand it now, but I am more of a visual learner. Are you planning on playing a STT or two in any of your future vids in this series?