Double-Up Object Lesson

Today I'm going to yet again ram home the point made in Secret #1a. Don't risk chips when there's nothing to gain. This happened on the last hand of a tournament I just finished.

Here's the scenario. Six players left. Blinds are 125/250/25. The SB has 180 left after posting the blind. Proceeding to the left, the BB has 6235, UTG has 1960, I'm UTG+1 with 3140, the cutoff has 1580, and the button has 1380. If you've been reading this series, you know I consider this to be the entire table vs the SB.

UTG folds. I've got AJo. I wanted to force the SB all-in, so I made a min-raise to 500. In hindsight, I should have just called. The raise was more likely to scare him away. Here's where the larger mistake occurred. The cutoff raises to 1000, leaving 580 behind. Huh? The whole point here was to get the SB to push in with his last chips. Okay, again, I should have just called, but this guy has now compounded my error and clearly violated Secret #1a. All he has to do is stay alive a few more hands, one round at most, and he's in the money. But now he's trying to add chips for no good reason. And he's made it clear to the SB that unless he's holding AA, his correct move is to fold.

Of course, it folds around to me. The correct action would have been for me to fold. But I knew the SB was about 95% to go out in the next couple hands and even if I went all-in against this guy and lost, I'd still have enough chips to survive. And I wanted an opportunity to punish this guy for his stupidity improper play. I know that probably sounds horrible, but his action annoyed the hell out of me. Plus, I could always end it on this hand. I call.

The flop comes AT7 with two spades. I check, knowing the other guy is going to push in and that I'm going to make the call, hoping he doesn't have me outkicked. Naturally, he pushes, which turns out to be an even dumber less optimal move than his pre-flop raise. I call. He turns over KK. The turn and river bring him no salvation.

I know it's hard not to take aggressive action with KK, but you still have to take the overall situation into account. If he'd just called pre-flop I wouldn't be writing this. Absolutely couldn't fault him for that. If he'd checked it down I wouldn't be writing this. He'd have still lost, but he'd be left with enough chips that he might outlast the SB. Re-raising pre-flop was risking chips he didn't need to and pushing all-in with an ace on the board is risking the whole tournament for unneeded chips. And he paid the price.

One can only hope the guy with KK learned something here.

Thus ends today's object lesson.