If you're short stacked in a tournament
Hi Antonio,
You're the dude man! I am proud of you as a persian. You are really my inspiration.
I have two poker questions:
Here is what happened in one of the home tournaments I was playing: I have pocket 3's on the BB and I am on short stack. Everybody folds except one who raises to 2 times BB. I call. The flop comes 4,6,K rainbow. He checks, I figure he probably doesn't have a K so I go all in pretending that I have a piece of the flop. He thinks for 5 minutes and eventually calls and turns out that he has A,6 and he wins. I was wondering whether I played it right or wrong.
Here is another hand from the same tournament: I have pocket 5's. Somebody raises and I call, everybody else folds. The flop comes 6,8,9 all spades. I looked at my cards and one of my 5's is spade. The other person bets almost the pot. I think for too long but fold in the end thinking that he might have a better flush draw or a pocket pair bigger than 9. But after the tournament when I was thinking of my play, I realized that I played this hand awfully bad because I should have gone all in right away due to having straight flush draw. I just wanted to ask you the question what I should have done in this situation.
Thanks a lot Antonio,
Good luck man!
Reza
Dear Reza,
Can't know for sure what's right and what's wrong, since I don't know your table image, the way the other guys play, etc., but still I can take a stab, so here goes.
First of all, if you're short stacked in a tournament, you should be either folding those pocket threes or going all in. You want to use your whole stack and not chop it up into pieces. If you raise all in with 3-3, you'll go into the flop a slight favorite. After the flop, you're kinda stuck. If the other guy hit, you'll go broke. If he didn't he won't call and you don't get paid off. So with that small stack either push all in before the flop or get away from the hand. Just calling the other guy's small raise is trouble, man.
On the second hand, I don't think your fold was terrible. You can't call just for the sake of a straight-flush draw -- that's just one card in the deck. If you think the other guy had a better draw, or a better hand, you're done with the hand. I don't know how big your stack was, but if you had him covered, or close to it, maybe you could have raised him off the hand. But that's a bluff move, and it has nothing to do with what cards you actually have. And not for nothing, what if the guy has the ten of spades? Then if your straight flush hits, you still lose! No, I think you made a good fold there.
· Antonio
