[stormswa]

I was on MSN with one of my horses today railing him at a final table, in our MSN room was also a friend of mine. A reall good player but not one that I would call consistant, he gets deep a fair number of times but he is either a huge stack or a micro stack he never has a average stack. Ok well when my friend busted out in 5th he was kinda upset but I assured him he played everything correctly but my other friend we will call Mr.Sm for shove monkey disagreed.

here is the question I would like to ask you guys, now I understand with like 5-8 big blind stack we are just in total shove/fold mode because that is the only way we have any fold equity but say we have like 10bb to maybe like 13 do we really need to just shove our hands. For instance my horse had QQ on the button I believe and had about 11bb and just made a normal 3x raise and got called by the blind. The flop was AKx and the blind bet into him, this to me is a clear cut fold, the blinds calling range is Ax and Kx hands so I dont see how we are ahead and if we shove we have zero fold equity.

Mr.Sm argued that we should of never been in that situation and just shoved preflop because we dont want to give our opponents a chance to hit with crap. This just makes no sense to me, I want calls from weak hands here. I dont want to just take the blinds with hands like QQ, AK, KK, JJ etc, I want to get value from them right? Now I undersand the reasoning behind shoving hands like 6-7 with 9bb stacks thinking that if we take blinds great and if we are called we usually will be 40/60 to double through. But shouldnt we be trying to gain value, dont we gain very little by shoving QQ into the blinds here. This is assuming no reads and we dont think they will overcall weak hands of course.

Now also I kinda like just betting 3x and being very willing to call shoves, and it seems to me if we bet 3x with 10bb stack the other stacks are more willing to play back at us then if we were just to shove. For instance someone with AJ is more willing to reraise us if we bet 3x then if we just shove right? and this also means we are going to be moving in on the flop on most flops also. Just wanted to bounce this around with you guys and get your opinions on it.