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I bubbled a WCOOP event yesterday. At the time, I was perfectly happy with it and felt I'd made the best play, but this morning I reviewed the hand and found out that not only was I wrong, but my underlying assumptions were way off.

I was the Small Blind on the bubble with 10bbs and had won five bounties, which meant the bounty on my head was significant. The CO opened, and he was the covering stack with 60bbs. He was a very loose player hunting for bounties. But perhaps the most important piece of information in this hand is that the BB was even looser. He had around 50 bbs and had won seven bounties. He had a habit of overcalling re-raises to see a flop to try and win bounties.

I had AQo and figured that I was getting called 100% of the time by the CO and would often be in a multi-way pot. I also felt that I had an opportunity to triple up where one of the two opponents may have blasted the other one out of the pot after I had gone all in. I figured that my hand was way ahead of both opponents, so the question was: is it good enough to risk elimination with? I felt it was. I got my money in well ahead and was unfortunate on the river. I went to bed perfectly content with the hand.

Zero fold equity

However, it was still top of mind this morning, so I ran the hand, and used the GTO Wizard custom player profiles to reflect my opponents. They both got the maniac tag, meaning their opening ranges and their calling ranges would be wider.

When I did that, this was the reshove range it gave me.

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So it appears that my reshove was a mistake. This didn't actually surprise me in a large field tournament. When you are the short stack in a big field, all of your equity is in the min-cash, so you need a very strong hand to get it in. I just felt that the tendencies of the two opponents in the hand meant that it was good enough to get in for value, even under ICM pressure.

I assumed, therefore, if I ran the hand again in GTO world, the range would be even tighter. I was wrong.

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My hand was a re-shove if I knew nothing about the tendencies of my opponents. Under ICM pressure, we can actually get in wider against unknown opponents than we can against maniacs.

What I had fundamentally forgotten was that I had zero fold equity in the hand. The reason the GTO range is as it is is in part to generate folds. A hand like AQo it's powerful because it has blockers that would make our opponent give up some of their range. When we get it in against a maniac, we are essentially doing the same as calling a shove, which, it turns out, in this instance, is a mistake under ICM pressure.

When the ranges are so wide, it goes against every instinct to play tighter, but that is what ICM pressure can do. We often have to go against every instinct that we have.