No Limit Poker - Calling the all-in bet preflop

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It's late in a no limit tournament. The blinds are 150/300 and you've got a stack of about 1500 chips. There's three players left and you're on the big blind. The button, who is a solid player and raises all-in for 1500 more. You look down at your hand and see pocket sixes. What do you do and why?

This crtitical situation comes up many times, so let's try to break this down into pieces and try to look at each part in detail. If you need a primer in pot odds, visit the poker odds page first.

So, the point here is to show that you aren't just getting a 1:1 call for your chips if you go up against your opponent here. Because the big blind (you) and small blinds have contributed to the pot, this is regarded as dead money and helps your pot odds (if not by much) should you decide to call.

However, pot odds are only useful if you are getting correct odds to call however. We thus need to try and figure out if our hand is better than a 43.5% favorite to win the pot, as it needs to win at least that amount of time to break even. Let's try to list what type of hands our opponents would be raising with pre-flop.

Now that we have an idea of all the possible hands that our opponent may be holding, let's categorize our opponent. In the scenario, it said he was a 'solid' opponent, which means he's not too aggressive but not too tight at the same time, so we will place him in the 'Tight' category. In this case, let's compare our hand of pocket Sixes vs. each possible hand the solid player can be holding.

(Percentage represents the chance for 66 to win)

Pocket sixes win 48% of the time vs push by Tight player

Since our opponent is a tight player, we can assume he is playing one of the hands from the Tight player chart. While we cannot accurately predict which hand is holding, we can figure that on average, 66 will be a 48% favorite to win vs any random hand from the Tight group. Since the pot odds only require us to win 44% of the time, this is a correct call when only taking pot odds into consideration.

In a tournament, there are other important features such as fold equity and getting knocked and indepenent chip modeling that you need to take into account, but this article is a general primer on how to analyze the strength of your hand vs the strength of an opponent who you have a read on.

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