How to adjust when Villain is shoving any two
The player acting after you is clearly drunk and shoving any two cards, how do you adjust? The answer might surprise you.
My next book project is on solver-approved exploits. This week I looked at a very common spot online, which is when a player is open shoving any two cards. It's usually a gambler, a guy on tilt, or somebody who regged for the wrong tournament, but it happens.
The adjustments were mainly that you can call these players quite wide and pray that the deck is kind to you. However, one adjustment really surprised me.
At a 40BB effective six max table, the HJ was the guy who was shoving 100% of their range. The UTG player before them widened their opening range from 22.7% of hands to 34.4% of hands. This was the range, using Holdem Resources Calculator:
If the HJ shoved and it's folded back to UTG, they call 100% of these hands, why open them if not? I then looked at the exact same spot, but for 100BBs. Can you guess what the UTG opening range was? It was this:
Yes, the deeper the stacks, the wider UTG can open. Most people would assume that when we risk more, we have to be tighter, and that is true for the players acting after the HJ shoves (though the ranges are very similar). So why can the UTG player open wider?
Stealing fold equity
If UTG was the Big Blind and a maniac shoved any two cards, with nobody else in the hand, they can call very wide, as much as 50% of hands in some cases, because they close the action. The only reason that UTG doesn’t open even wider is that they are concerned about the players acting after the HJ.
When UTG opens and HJ shoves any two, it’s actually harder for the rest of the table to call, because they are calling for their tournament life and they have to worry about UTG having a hand that can call. UTG, however, still has the option to fold when it comes around to them after somebody else has called, and they only lose two blinds.
There are two opposing forces at play here. When somebody shoves any two cards, the more blinds the better. However, when a second player with a tighter range is in the pot, losing 100BBs is worse than losing 40BBs.
This makes acting before the maniac the best seat at the table, you can play more hands, use the threat of your own stack as leverage to get other players to call, call for 100BBs when its folded to you, but only continue with a strong range when another player calls. What has essentially happened is the UTG player gets to be the defacto BB in this spot, closing the action. If you are familiar with my first three books, this is an example of ‘stealing fold equity’ where you can expect more people to fold ahead of you because of the threat posed by a third party in the hand.
With this new book we have seen this adjustment again and again when a player is playing too loose and aggressive, the response is actually to play more hands, not fewer hands against them. They are making a mistake, so we let them make the mistake against more of our range.
Were you surprised at this finding? Let us know in the comments:
