‘Ask a Pro’ – Annie Duke Answers Last Weeks Question
Thursday, November 27, 2008 - smokin_aces
Last week we began our ‘Ask a Pro’ series, where you can submit your questions to a UB pro. For a complete run down on how this works, check last weeks post.
Annie Duke was gracious enough to answer last weeks question. The winner of last week’s submissions was ‘Paul’ with this well thought out inquiry.
“I’ve got a question for Annie: what recommendations do you have for borderline hands in tournament situations? I’m thinking of hands like suited connectors, ace rag/x-suited, small pocket pairs. How do things like stack size, position, other players in the pot, and stage of tournament guide your decision making with these hands. I know that’s a lot to answer, but those are the hands I have the toughest time playing.”
Here is Annie’s response.
“Wow. This is a question I could write a whole book on so I am going to cherry pick my answer to try to keep it shorter and more to the point. I am not so much going to discuss the suited connector issue as the stage of the tournament part of the question. Generally, early in a tournament you want to play tight. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) There are no antes so the pot odds are poor in comparison to later in the tournament. The worse the pot odds, the more pressure on your hand to win which means you have to play tighter 2) Players cannot be bluffed so you need to show over the best hand more often.
To go deeper into point (1) let’s take a 100-200 blind situation with no antes. You raise 3X to 600. 200 is the call and 400 is the raise so on the raise portion of the bet the pot is laying you 5 to 4 (400 raise to the 100 small blind, 200 big blind and your 200 call). This means that you can lose 5 times for every 4 times you win in order to break even. That means you must win the pot about 45% of the time to break even on the initial raise.
Now when the antes kick in there is now 250 more in chips in the pot (25 ante from 10 players). That means the pot is now laying you 750 to 400 on your 400 raise. What this means is that the pot is laying you nearly 2 to 1. In order to break even on this bet you only have to win around 35% of the time. 45% vs 35% is a huge difference in the pressure on your hand so after the antes kick in you get to play looser because your hand doesn’t have to be as good to be profitable (you can lose more often and be profitable).
Now for point (2). In the beginning stages of a tournament your opponents tend to be playing quite loose. One of the main reason we play weak hands (like small suited connectors) is so that our opponents won’t know that we always have a good hand when we play and stop giving us action. So, we are willing to play some bad hands, hands that might be small long run losers, in order to generate action on our big hands.
But when opponents are already playing super loose, that means they are already going to be paying off our big hands. In that case, there is no reason to play a bad hand because you don’t need to do anything to generate action.you are already getting it.
So, you can see in early stages of the tournament there is no reason to get involved with crappy hands like small suited connectors. Save those for later when you can bully the table!”
Thanks Paul for such a great question! We look forward to your involvement with this blog.
Be sure to check back tomorrow to find out which pro will answer the question next week. If you want to submit a question, enter it in the comments section of tomorrows ‘Ask a Pro’!!
GL
Aces
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Tags: Annie Duke, Ask A Pro
November 27th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for answering Annie… that’s great!
December 19th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
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