Jacks Under The Gun Again

So I have about 75K and we're on the "bubble table", there are about 33 players left (paying 27), when this hand comes up. I raise it up to 4200 (blinds 800-1600 with 200 ante) with JJ UTG (sounds like an interview question) and a very aggressive, big winning Scandinavian player makes it 10600 in middle position. He has me covered. Now there are various ways to play this hand; we can flat call and re-assess on the flop or we can "click 4-bet" which means making a small "teaser" re-raise to say 22-25K with the intention of snap calling if he jams all in (please don't make this kind of 4-bet and then fold with a hand as strong as Jacks!). These options are discussed (in quite a lot of detail) on my blog, www.secretsoftheamateurs.blogspot.com, but here I just want to look at how we go about deciding whether the all-in is a profitable play. If it is, then it's a good, safe option out of position against a dangerous opponent.

First of all we have to make some educated guesses about what he'll do with various hands. A good starting point in this spot is to assume that our opponent will play "perfectly", that is do whatever he would do if he could see our hand. If a jam is profitable in that case, then in real life it must be more profitable because he could make a "mistake" and (in this case) call with a worse hand. So let's say he calls AA-QQ and folds TT and below, which sounds pretty reasonable anyway. If he has overcards it's not a big deal what he does either way, because we'll be a small favourite anyway. We can assume that he'll call AK and fold everything else to start with.

Now we can start doing the sums. If he folds, we win the pot right now, which is 10600+4200+4000 = 19K. If he calls, we turn to an online tool that you might be familiar with - Pokerstove. Check out www.pokerstove.com if you're not and have a play with it. Pokerstove enables us to work out our winning chances when we hold a specific hand and our opponent has a range of hands. In this case, JJ vs. [JJ+, AK], which means any pair Jacks or better plus AK. When we plug that in, we find that we win the hand 36% of the time. Now, the final pot will be 154K (two stacks of 75K plus the 4K in the middle at the start of the hand), so 36% * 154 = 55K (it's OK, I used a calculator :-)). At our decision point, when we had already put 4K in the pot, we had 71K left so getting called has an EV of -16K (55-71) compared to folding.

So we make 19K if our opponent folds, but lose 16K if he calls. Even though if he folds that's 19K in our stack and if he calls we either bust out or double up, you can trust the numbers and view it as a 16K loss. To make our final decision on the play, we need to estimate (or "guess" in non-math terms :-)) how often he's raising with a hand less than [JJ, AK]. That's where the "feel" comes in, but we do know that if he calls and folds to the all-in equally as often, 50/50, then our play is +EV. That's good enough for me, because in this very aggressive game I'm sure he's bluffing with at least as many hands (and in truth perhaps up to 3 or 4 times more).

Once you've got Pokerstove set up, you can then play around with it. Note how our winning chances go up if you add AQ or TT to his calling range. Change our JJ to some different hands and see how they match up. Also remember that you're not expected to do this "on the fly". Take some time after the tournament to review hands like this and this will really help your game to progress.

What we actually do with JJ here isn't really the point of this blog. Give a man a fish and he'll eat tonight, teach a man how to fish and he'll eat every night. As you move up to bigger tournaments, you can be sure that many of your opponents have done this kind of analysis. Don't get left behind!