AK button shove

[Watson]

AK suited, on the button, blinds 1000,2000,2000. 31 players left everyone playing very tight. One limper and I shove 30BB stack hoping to buy the blinds and the limper. Big blind has me covered by 200 calls with QQ and they hold knocking me out. I’ve been knocked out twice in this exact scenario. any opinions? Should I be more conservative with AK?

[Jordan Bailey]

Why not just raise on the bigger side 4-6x to make the blinds behind you think hard before entering and forcing the limper to fold? I think in most instances, a larger raise that isn’t all in would force folks to fold but hedge yourself against times like this where an opponent wakes up with a hand. You’ve got 30 big blinds. That’s not super deep, but still way more than plenty to work with that late into the tournament. If you were 15BB, I say, yes, for sure rip it in there, but with 30, you can afford to see a flop and feel out the callers/raiser.

[Chuck M]

Can’t really regret that hand, you actually were in a good spot, flipping here (would’ve been way worse had villain had AA or KK).

That being said, as Jordan said, I think with 30bigs we still have room to maneuver, you could’ve raise like 8-10k or so.

Now BB would probably have 3b pre, I think the results would’ve been the same.

Nh, it’s just too bad that you lost it

[Raging Reporter]

In this specific case, the chips are going in almost all of the time I think. If you raise the AK pre, the QQ will probably 3bet and you are inclined to 4bet jam, since there’s no point of calling the 3bet and having to fold to any non A or K flop facing a jam.

That being said, I think you will be losing an enormous amount of value most of the time here.
Like Watson said, raising is enough here. Especially at a tight table, a 3,5-4x raise should do the trick already. By ripping 30 bigs in straight away you force hands like AT+ that are to act behind you (and might even 3bet) to fold. You obviously want hands like these to call you preflop, for you to be able to extract more value or force them out of the hand when you and them miss the flop.

The limper will probably call a raise even more often, since he’s already put chips in the pot and you are of course far ahead of his range.

In summary, I understand you do not have a pair and might not be willing to bluff postflop since you already play only 30bb, but AK is just too good of a hand to openjam 30 bigs and make opponents fold hands that your AK does very well against.

[Author]

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