Ten-Eight Suited With 13 Left -- Fold, Call or Shove?
DECISION POINT: It is the final two tables of a tournament with 13 players left. The player in the cutoff raises and it folds to you on the button. You have just under 18 big blinds and have been dealt 10?8?.
The action is on you...
PRO ANSWER: We have just under 18 big blinds at the final two tables of a tournament. With this awkward stack size, we are often risking our tournament life when we choose to enter pots.
When action folds around to us in late position, stealing with a high frequency (raising with a wide range of hands) is problematic with these stack sizes. The big-stacked player to our left can often reraise, threatening our tournament life and forcing us to fold much of the time.
However, in this hand, the action did not fold around to us. The player in the cutoff seat raised preflop. As a default we would assign this player a relatively wide hand range.
This presents us with an opportunity to execute a reshove (a reraise shove all in). If we choose to reshove, we can often take down the pot uncontested preflop. Reshoving allows us to use our specific stack size to maximize fold equity while still giving ourselves a good risk-reward ratio.
The player in the cutoff seat has around 40 big blinds, which means our all-in shove can make a significant dent in that player's stack. This should further increase our already significant fold equity.
When we move all in, we can expect the player in the cutoff seat to fold the majority of the time. When our opponent does call our shove, we can still win that confrontation a fair portion of the time. In total between these two cases, we are winning this pot a high percentage of the time.
Reraising all in is the best play in this situation and gives us the best chance of accumulating chips to make a deep run at the upcoming final table.
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