Runner-Runner-Rebuy

Rakebrain is hooking some of us bloggers up tonight with a little $1000 freeroll on FT. Should be fun. The LeCheese Challenge II is goin' off at 6PM tonight Hold Em/Omaha Hi game.

Looks like there will be some tough competition now that I can see which other bloggers are in it. I look to avenge myself tonight on BuddyDank for his bad call that knocked me out of the BoDonkey on Tuesday. With AA and a few limpers, I pop it to 4x BB and it folds around to Buddy who calls with 77. He of course flops the set and checks. With around $1000 in the pot, I push my last 1K and get insta-called. He sort of admitted on BDR that it was a questionable call but that he got lucky and it paid off. I think it was close, but with 300 to call and 7.5:1 chances of flopping the set, he needs to get paid $2250 for it to be a good call. I simply didn't have enough behind to give him the payoff he needed if he hits.

I often wonder about this kind of situation. In a cash game, if I limp with a small pocket pair, and I am raised by a small stack that can't offer me the right odds, I will almost always through away the hand. In a tourney I sometimes wonder if it is ok to make a call like Buddy's. He was a big stack at the time and the call could pay off 6:1. Now, this isn't the 7.5:1 you would want, but there is the added value of eliminating someone from the tourney. Late in a tourney, I can see that you might want to do this because eliminating one player while you have a big stack can have a large effect on the average chip stack.

For example, there are 7 players left, the average chip stack is T10000, and the blinds are 200-400, and a player in the BB with T5000 makes a raise to T1600. You have a stack of T20000, and have limped with a small pocket pair, out of position. It folds around to you and you have to call T800. Your odds of hitting the set are 7.5:1, so you need to get paid T6000 on your T800 call. With T2200 in the pot already, and the raiser having only T3400 behind, he most you could make if all the money goes in is T5600.

Suppose you hit and all the money gets in, your stack is now T25600, and the average stack is now T10833. I'm not going to brake out the ICM calculator, but this most certainly has a measurable effect on your ICM equity.

But the same exact situation with say, 30-40 players left, just doesn't seem to justify making a call that cannot pay you off directly with T$. It has almost no effect on your ICM equity.

In essence, I say it was a bad call by Buddy. Forgive me if I have the numbers slightly wrong and it was a good call. More important to me than this particular hand is what people think about making calls that can't be paid off directly in T$ but potentially have some other kind of chip equity depending on the stage of the tourney. Any other opinions out there?