WSOP Tournament Hand Analysis: Folding Ace-Queen Preflop?
Today I wanted to share an interesting spot from a $1,500 World Series of Poker event, one where I was ready to play a big pot with a big hand, but circumstances changed before I could put my chips in the middle.
We were at the 150/300 level and it folded around to a tight-aggressive player on the button who from a stack of about 15,000 raised to 750. I was in the small blind with about 15,000 myself and looked down at A♠Q♣.
As I discuss below, I could either call or reraise to about 2,700 here. Reraising small wouldn't be a good idea when out of position like this. In fact I did reraise to 2,700, and just as I had begun mentally preparing myself to play a big pot the big blind cold-called my three-bet.
The big blind was a splashy player with a short stack — in fact the call meant he'd put in more than half what he had left. It was a pretty unusual situation and hard one to figure out without player-specific reads.
The action moved back to the player on the button, and he reraised all in for his entire stack of 15,000. Now I had been planning to play for all the money, but circumstances had obviously changed.
Take a look at how I describe the situation and the factors I considered when deciding whether or not to let my hand go.
I am presuming I made the right play as in most cases calling the shove would not have a good option, even though we didn't get to see the button's hand. What would you have done with ace-queen here?
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $6,900,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. Sign up to learn poker from Jonathan for free at PokerCoaching.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.
