[chris]

Limit Omaha/8 MTT. There are 69 Players left and 63 places get paid. I'm currently in 63rd place with 3100 chips. I'm in MP with AKQJ no suits. A big stack in early position makes it 2400 to go (blinds are 600/1200) and it's folded to me in middle position. What do you do?

[pritz]

Either Push or fold, but I'd probably prefer the fold option. Find a better hand. (The hand is great but without the suited cards it does lose value.) Was the player TAG? LAG? If he was a pushy player then I might be inclined to go for the reraise all in. Usually when people are raising in these stages it means they have the goods. AAxx (or could just mean they have doubled suited cards). Personally I would fold.

[razor]

I like fold, wait on a few idiots to go out, wont take long.

[ballen]

Fold. If you go all-in, you price in a bigger stack in LP to call and you're lookin at a "check it down" situation for the bigger stacks. Going all-in preflop in Omaha (as I'm sure you know) is a coin flip and in this particular hand you have 0 outs towards the potential low and are sort of out of position. I'd raise this one on the button or cutoff if I was first in, but not in MP.

[johnf]

Interesting that everyone says fold. I went all in and ended up getting called by both blinds and losing when I missed the board.

Here's why I called: I had 3000 chips left and about three more hands before I saw the blinds which would cost me 900 chips. Six more players also needed to drop out before I made the money. If I fold, there's a good chance I can make the money, but to me it seems very unlikely that I could do better than the lowest payout. If I remember correctly 46th-63rd got the same payout which wasn't even twice the buy-in. I have to finish 45th place or better in order to make more, and with 2000 chips (after posting blinds) I need a miracle to get there. I made the decision that the lowest payouts really weren't worthwhile, even though busting out now means spending three hours in this tournament for nothing. But if I do go all in here and get lucky, my stack goes up to at least 7K and I can stick around a bit longer and maybe move out the payout structure. I also have a hand that if I get lucky with it I will scoop the pot if there is no low. I don't feel like I want to get in with a hand that is going to end up splitting.

In a SNG I think tightening up with a short stack on the bubble is probably correct, but in an MTT I really think it is a waste. This is due to the payout structure, especially in a big MTT where the payout is definitely top heavy. This was a $5 buy0in,700 player MTT. The lowest payouts were $8.80 and I think 1st place was somewhere around $750 (nearly 100X the lowest payout). Folding here pretty much guarantees me a $3.80 payout, while I think pushing, while risking getting nothing on the bubble, gives me a better shot at moving up the payout ladder.

To summarize: In an SNG my feeling is that if I'm short (but not shortest) on the bubble, then my goal is to try and outlast the other short stacks and make the money. This is because the difference between 3rd and 2nd, or even 3rd and 1st isn't very great-in a 10 player SNG 1st typically only pays 2.5 times 3rd. In an MTT 1st may pay 100X the lowest payout, so playing just to make the money doesn't make sense to me.