Hot Hand #4 (Updated With Results)

On Memorial Day earlier this week, full tilt ran a 5k guaranteed special tournament in the evening East Coast time. This was a $5 buyin tournament, lower than full tilt's usual lowest buyins for MTTs, but with the holiday and all, they had little trouble attracting more than 1000 entrants trying to take their shot at the $1000+ first prize, and when I saw it sitting there, I decided to take the plunge as well.

About 45 minutes into the 5k guaranteed Memorial Day tournament, I look down to find KQo in middle-late position. The player in 3rd position, who bet first preflop following the SB and the BB, had limped already, after which everyone folded to me.

Question 1: What's your play here? Do you fold KQo preflop in 6th position after the guy in first betting position limped in, and everyone else folds to you? Or do you limp along? Or do you raise, attempting to isolate given that KQo is the kind of hand that tends to do better against just one opponent, and not so well in a multiway pot?

In the end, I elected to raise it up to 3x the big blind, for isolation purposes. Unfortunately, my isolation attempt failed miserably, and we saw a flop with four players including myself, with the pot containing 390 chips before the flop hit the felt. Here was the flop:



A few things to notice about this situation:

1. Check out the guy in the big blind on this hand. It is none other than on_thg, a fellow poker blogger even though I didn't realize that was him until just now as I wrote this post. On_thg even has another hand from this same tournament, same table posted on his blog, I just noticed today, and there is me across the table from him. Hard to believe I sat at thg's table for this long and didn't notice him nor acknowledge his presence. Ahh, maybe he took it as intimidation from me and donked me some chips as a result. Who knows.

2. You can see from the action on the flop, first on_thg moved all in on this three-spade flop. Then, the guy to his immediate left reraised allin as well.

3. Lastly, also please note that I am actually holding the nut flush draw in my hand with the King of spades, with two cards to come. So you know neither of those two guys has the nut flush draw (or the nut flush itself) in his hand.

Question 2: What are these two people holding here? Are we looking at TPTK, two pairs or trips, some kind of a draw, or maybe a made flush? Both called as the third and fourth players in on a 3x preflop raise, and now on the flop one of them moves in and the second one raises allin. What are they holding?

Question 3: What is my move here? Presumably I am behind at least one of these two allin bettors at this point, but what are my realistic outs? Should I consider calling these two allin bets? What is the money move here?

I will tell you that this ended up, in my opinion, being a very interesting hand, and one with a result that is not often seen at the holdem tables. I am interested in hearing everyone's thoughts, in particular on the last two questions, and I will post the results, including what I decided to do with my nut flush draw and what the hand ended up looking like when all was said and done.

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UPDATED with hand results:

Well, no one got the opponents' hands exactly right here, but I would think it was pretty weird if anyone had, because it turned out that they both were on the same kind of made hand:



Yes, I did call this bet, and yes the spade on the river gave me a huge chipup early on in the Memorial Day 5k event. What I liked about the hand is that the pot odds actually did dictate that I call allin in a situation where I knew going in that I was behind. I just love that two players had flopped flushes on the same hand, which you hardly ever see, and then to top it off, they both lost to a higher flush when a fourth suited card hit the river. Let that be a lesson to everyone on why you should pay attention to pot odds. I made a call that I would typically never make in a tournament, because once the second played had moved in as well, it suddenly became mathematically correct for me to put my entire stack on the line when I knew I was behind at that point in the hand. You won't find my chasing draws very much in large MTTs, but that's generally because the pot odds aren't there. Almost any time someone fails to bet enough to make the pot odds dictate a fold, I am likely to take a card and see if I can put a move on somebody to scarf that pot away regardless of what the next card is.