I guess you can. I had a very short life in a tournament last night, and yet I KNEW that opponent had AA to my KK. Obviously I hoped he had AK, but no such luck. After all I held blockers to his AK, but none to AA.
I guess I COULD have gotten away from it, except that I had already decided that I would play aggressively for a big stack early on, and did not mind going to bed early and reading a book.
With a Q and a J on the flop, I was losing to AA, QQ, and JJ, so my shove was futile. On the other hand, if you were the player with AA, would you call my shove knowing that QQ and JJ, which were both plausible hands, were beating you?
I guess that in small stack poker, you mostly just have to go for it and take your licks when it doesn’t work out. Sometimes I am a little bit cautious, because there are a limited number of MTTs on RP at an appropriate entry level, and you can’t always go out of a MTT and straight into another good game.
Plus in the other tournament I played yesterday I was knocked out in the second hour when my JJ was rivered by 88 against an larger sized stack–but one that I could badly hurt–when a different river would have put me in a potentially winning position. I could have gone out an hour earlier in the same way and saved myself some time!
I can’t say I like my opponents calls either preflop or on the flop here, but, hey, he had a bigger stack than me and he won the hand, so what can I say?
. I don’t know what he thought he was beating on the flop, though. Not beating AK, AK, A anything, not beating any pocket pair except 7s downwards. I guess he just reckoned that if he lost the hand, he still had a playable stack size. Or maybe he just thought he was calling a complete bluff. I would change my name, except that I am already on my second name and not allowed to change again. Of course I was very happy if he thought I was bluffing. Until the river.