Pushing Vs Calling In Poker

I'm writing this to help explain the vast difference between calling all-in on the bubble of a SnG Tournament vs. Pushing all-in when the action is folded to you.  To simplify things, the examples used here will be Small Blind vs. Big Blind, without antes, and will assume all identical stacks.  The math used to calculate this stuff is otherwise the same, but becomes a little more complicated.

 

Since my specialty is 18-man (two table) SnG's at PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, I'm going to use the payout structure of 40/30/20/10 where 1st place gets 40% of the prize pool and so on, however for this example I'm just going to be speaking of % of equity of the whole prize pool and not how you stand to finish within the top 4 places.  So the important thing to know here is that the top 4 places get paid, and 5th place goes home with nothing.

 

Let's set up a scenario:

 

We're in the BB & on the bubble (5 handed) of an 18-Man SnG with all players having 5400 chips.  The blinds are 400/800 which means the relative stacks are less than 10bbs (standard push/fold mode).   The action gets folded around to the SB who pushes all-in.  You look down and see that you're holding an above average hand of ATs.  You're options are a) to call all-in, or b) fold.  What do you do?

 

You don't recognize the player, but he hasn't done anything out of the ordinary, so you're pretty sure he's going to be pushing rather wide in this spot, maybe even in the neighborhood of the top 50% of hands which includes 33+, Ax, K5o, etc.  You take another look at your cards and think you have most of his range crushed and push all-in.  So is that the right or wrong move?

 

The fact of the matter is, although yours is probably the best hand right now, mathematically, calling all-in would be a rather large mistake.  Keep reading to find out why.

 

The whole decision of whether it's right or wrong to call in this spot is based on something called ICM (independent chip model).  Basically, what this means in a nutshell is all chips in a tournament are not created equal.  A chip lost is worth more than a chip won.  The reason for this is that the payout structure for a tournament like this is top-heavy.  1st place wins 4 times the amount of 4th place and 5th place goes home with nothing.

 

This is very much different from a cash game.  In our scenario, if we had ATs and we knew that the SB was pushing 50%, it'd be an easy call all-in.  This is because $1 = $1, period.  But let's get back to our game...

 

To figure out the math for this example we need to look at some numbers and use a couple of free tools that are available on the Internet.  ICM is calculated by taking the equity you have before and after a decision is made.  It takes what chips & equity you have before you call this all-in (for example) and after, win or lose and it compares them.

 

The math involved gets pretty complicated, so lucky for us there are free online ICM calculators all over the Internet.  The other free tool that's helpful to figure out the strength of our hands is called PokerStove; just Google it.

So let's take a look at the example mentioned...

 

Here are the stacks and Equities (using an ICM calculator) Before:

 

Player       Chips          Equity

UTG           5400          21.60%

CO             5400          21.60%

BTN           5400          21.60%

SB             5400          21.60%

BB             5400          21.60%

 

If we call & lose, it's easy; we have nothing and go home.  But if we win, here are the adjusted equities:

Player     Chips       Equity

UTG        5400        23.33%

CO          5400        23.33%

BTN        5400        23.33%

SB          0                0%

BB          10800      30.00%

 

A couple of perhaps surprising things you NEED to know about what happened here... 1) although our chip stack doubled, our equity only went up by 8.4 (from 21.60 to 30.00) for a 38.8% increase.  And 2) the other players didn't do anything but fold and their equities have gone up a little without risking anything.

 

To take a closer look at the math here... You would need to risk the 21.60 equity you already have to gain just 8.4.  You would be putting up odds of 2.57/1 against yourself.  There are not many cards your opponent could hold that your ATs would beat by 2.57/1.  In fact there are NONE.

 

Using Poker Stove, we can calculate the precise chances vs. your opponents range or even specific holdings.

 

• ATs vs. 50% = 61/39 or 1.56/1
• ATs vs. 72o = 70/30 or 2.33/1

 

So if our estimate is accurate that the SB will push 50% of hands, we cannot make the call.  Even if your opponent was holding 72o (the worst hand imaginable) & could somehow turn his cards face up before you were to act, you cannot mathematically make the call because the risk is not worth the reward.

 

If you were to take anything away from reading this today, make it this...  You want to be the player that pushes all-in on the bubble & under most circumstances NOT the player that calls all-in.

 

I feel it necessary to point out that some good regular players will pick up on the fact that you’re aware you shouldn’t be calling without premium hands and will look to exploit that by pushing super wide.  If at all possible, try to resist the urge of calling too wide and push all-in yourself instead, if given the opportunity.