10-2 on the Money Bubble -- What Do You Do Here?
DECISION POINT: You are the chip leader on the money bubble of a tournament. A middle position player raises and it folds to you on the button with 10?2?. The action is on you...
PRO ANSWER: We're the chip leader at our table on the money bubble of a ~300 person multi-table tournament. In general, this is an excellent time to accumulate chips by aggressively stealing and restealing.
In this hand, it folds around to a player in middle position who makes a minimum raise. This is a GREAT spot to resteal against our opponent, regardless of our cards. If we make a 2.5x raise to 4,000, this puts the original raiser in a very tight spot.
Our opponent knows that if he chooses to continue in the hand, it will likely mean playing for all of his chips on the tournament bubble. Our reraise represents a direct threat to our opponent's tournament life, but does not risk our own tournament life.
We expect our opponent to fold to this raise a relatively high percentage of the time. There is 3,700 in the middle and we risk 4,000 with this play. Without taking into account times we win with a continuation bet, this preflop raise has to work just over half the time to be profitable. Given that we are on the direct money bubble, we would expect this raise to work far more often than that.
Reraises such as this one are crucial part of a tournament player's move-making toolkit.
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