Crazy Pineapple MTT endgame

Badprimerib

I found myself at the end of a crazy pineapple tournament and the average stack was roughly 10BBs (I was the lead at about 25BBs). It occurred to me that with the extra card even AAK wasn’t likely an 80/20 favorite over anything decent (like in Holdem) so provided my opponents were even remotely tight, I could shove ATC (any THREE cards) almost every hand and show an easy profit since I would never be a huge dog when called. Am I right in this thought process? I did ship the tourney FWIW.

TheGameKat

Against even remotely tight opponents that's a strategy that works in most variants. The equity match-ups make it better in CP than NLHE, as you say.

Doug Hull

Basically, the hands run closer together in CP.

This makes sense. It is common wisdom that in PLO the starting hands run together. On some continuum, pre-flop values differences look something like this:

HE > CP > PLO
Given the number of cards

2 > (3 then 2) > 4

So the Pre-flop math of shoving is

(pot * (1-getCalled%) )
+ (getThereEQ * getCalled%)

in CP what changes vs HE?

GetThereEquity is more likely close to 50% than it is in HE

What about getCalled%?

Lets take the extremes in CP:

getCalled% = 0
We always get the pot.

What if we always get called?
getCalled% = 100

We basically break even, with huge variance.
Ignoring ICM.

So, if you think the other guy folds too much, the pillow of breaking even certainly cushions this a lot more than in HE where the chance that when you get called you are crushed.

This is all very hand wavy math, but the general trend and ignoring ICM is reasonable.