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I believe it was Dan Harrington who gave the advice that you should never fold Kings pre-flop, in part because you can always suck out on the guy if you happen to run into Aces. Does the same advice hold true for Pocket Queens?

That's what I was wondering on Sunday when this hand went down. No reads at the table, and I obviously start the hand incredibly happy with what I've been dealt, but ended up folding, having only lost 2bbs. I was very happy when I saw the initial reraise, and I was over the moon when I saw the shove, but it was the cold call from the BB that had me second-guessing my hand.

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Opinion divided

In an interesting example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who are not experts on a topic tend to have the most conviction in their opinions, I posted this hand on social media. Opinion was divided, but the people who opted to call were way more certain than the people who thought it was a fold. However, when I ran this by professional poker players that I know privately, they all overwhelmingly came out on the side of fold. They all largely had the same opinion I did, which is that the best we are hoping for is that everybody has Ace King, but realistically, we are going to be running into Aces or Kings, or both, too often.

This is thankfully something that you can solve quite precisely these days using the pre-flop ICM feature at GTO Wizard. While ICM was not a significant factor at this stage of the tournament, it was a small factor nonetheless.

In GTO World, we obviously open with QQ and below are the three ranges that GTO Wizard would give to the three positions as they played out in the hand above. On the left, we have the BTN's raising range. In the middle, we have the SB's shove range. On the right, we have the BB's cold call range.

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I was pleasantly surprised to see that QQ is mostly a fold for the BB before it even gets back to me. That made me feel a lot better about the fold, even more so when I saw what my solver-approved calling range should be:

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QQ is obviously a snap fold because of the action that came before it, but as you can see, KK is mostly a fold too.

I got a lot of pushback on social media suggesting that, because this was a low-stakes tournament, we can go wider with QQ (because we are likely to be up against all manner of trash, compared to a tournament played at more "serious" stakes). That's not my perception of the population tendencies in the games that I play. I actually think players are overly nitty in these spots, and I was originally going to node lock this hand so that the BTN had a much tighter raising range and the SB had a much more value-centric shoving range with few bluffs. The only range I was going to widen would be the BB, who I believe would probably call with JJ+ and AK. So I didn't need to node lock to know to feel good about the fold, as I'm very confident in my assessment of the player population.

Having said all that, when I did fold, the BTN called, and it was JJ vs JJ vs 88, and my hand would have held to give me the most ridiculous chip lead of all time.