Been rethinking this hand.

SirWatts

Final table, 5 players remain. The play has been aggressive, lots of stealing and a decent amount of reraising/restealing. The villian here seems to be fairly solid but aggressive. I have of course been playing aggressive, but I have played several coin flips all-in preflop already and come out on top, they should think I'll gamble. I have also turned down a deal when I was chipleader earlier.

The full story is in this thread: http://www.pokerforum.ca/forum/index.php?topic=5712.0

PokerStars Game #2456862247: Tournament #11805443, Hold'em No Limit - Level XIV (2000/4000) - 2005/08/30 - 04:51:22 (ET)
Seat 3: $NaUd$ (18180 in chips)
Seat 4: JBOCCO (69226 in chips)
Seat 5: gthumb (131334 in chips)
Seat 6: SirWatts (75663 in chips)
Seat 9: tonyplo (107597 in chips)
JBOCCO: posts small blind 2000
gthumb: posts big blind 4000
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to SirWatts [Jh Jd]
SirWatts: raises 8000 to 12000
tonyplo: folds
$NaUd$: folds
JBOCCO: raises 57026 to 69026 and is all-in
gthumb: folds
SirWatts: ?

pkrfce9

Easy call to me. You are getting about 1.5 to 1 on your money. There are 3 hands in better shape, 2 (or 3) others that would be in a race with you (unlikely KQ makes this bet but...) and many others that would make this call and be in much worse shape. I call without hesitation.

ScottyZ

Easy call.

Don't let KrazyKanuck's CPT commentary1 talk you out of folding a hand as strong as JJ when you're 5-handed.

If the pre-flop table texture has been chock full of stealing and re-stealing, I'm not even convinced that the opponent has to have at least 2 overcards here.

ScottyZ

1Excellent on the whole I think, but I found his particular comment on the JJ laydown to be a tad bizzare.

PokerKai

5 handed...JJ is dominant...call.

SirWatts

OK no more rethinking, thanks.

pkrfce9

SirWatts wrote:

OK no more rethinking, thanks.

For sure. A lot of these final tables where the stacks are all pretty short, I don't think there's any thinking going on at all. It seems like the first one all-in takes the blinds the vast majority of the time. Unless he runs into a brick wall or a lucky fool.

Dave Scharf

Prima facie, this is NOT an easy call.

I have not seen any CPT, so I am not all all certain what Jim's comment was.

If I know *nothing* about my opponent then I will call. Against a totally unknown players I will probably assign him a default range of A-A - 5-5, A-K to A-J. Against this range J-J is about 3-2.

But, you don't have to narrow his range much to make this into a hard decision.

SirWatts

OK. My problem when I was rethinking this is assigning the range. The play had been generally aggressive at the table, thus i put him on a very wide range. However that was the general play at the table and not of this particular player. This player in particular seemed to still be playing pretty solid as far as I could tell (very limited observation since I had not played with him before the FT). Thus I think I need to shrink the range a bit. However when rethinking I really can't cut 99-TT out of his range, given my aggressiveness. 88 I can see him playing carefully and just calling and looking for a good flop. So if I put him on AA-99 and AK-AQ then it's a little close but definitely a call. I think this is as tight as i can reasonably make his range. Thus my conclusion is that this is not an easy call, but it has to be a call. If I had a tight image this would likely be a fold, ie if we were playing at a full table earlier in the tournament I can probably make this fold pretty safely.