Is this a fold Aces spot?

We look at a chip leader vs chip leader spot in a satellite and ask, should we be folding 100% of hands?

I got sent this spot last week and thought it was worthy of a proper review:

Hey @Barry_Carter and @daraokearney - satellite spot for @mark_foresta - what are we doing here?

$25 buy-in, final table, 5 get $250 tickets, 6th and 7th get $50 back. pic.twitter.com/JENTG02ETy

— Keith Becker (@whoopsboom) September 5, 2024

Nine players remain, five get a seat, two players get a small prize, we massively cover everyone except for the player who shoved on our big blind. 

Hero had Ace King and before running the spot I knew that was a snap fold. In high ICM spots like this, unpaired hands go straight into the muck. Yes, Ace King performs well against all the Ace-x hands and flips against pairs, but it also will often have barely 60% equity against random hands. That's almost a flip and is the last thing you want to do near the money in a satellite. 

The other confusing nugget was the smaller payouts. I have studied this a lot and found that when the non-ticket payouts are close in value to a ticket, treat them like a ticket. However, when they are not close in value, ignore them. Even though the technical bubble is at eight players, really treat it like it's at six players. 

How tight do we go?

Therefore we have in practice four players left till the money. My suspicion was that QQ was at best breakeven, but I ran the hand in Holdem Resources Calculator and the answer was clear cut:

The HJ chip leader is supposed to fold almost everything and we should fold 100% of hands. Yes, this is a fold Aces spot, even though we are four off the money. This is the profitability of all our hands as calls:

What you can see above is table equity, it translates to AA losing is $2.63 as a call, which is a 10th of a buy-in. AKo, the Hero's hand, loses $48.80 in equity as a call, which is two buy-ins. 

Here are the Bubble Factors:

The one dark red box at the bottom is the situation we are in. A Bubble Factor of 6.6 means we need 87% equity to call a shove. Spoiler alert, no hand has that, not even Aces. 

In practical terms, look back at the table set-up. We have double the chips of six players at the table and we only need to outlast four of them. If we fold everything and continue to do so, all of them will be forced all-in at some point before we are. We can also profitably call shoves from these players with hands like AKo, because we still have a survivable stack if we lose, but to be honest I would still fold it to the earlier position shoves. A habit of simply not calling when we have a seat locked up is never going to be terrible in these spots. 

Before looking at the review, would you have called? Let us know in the comments: