[frob23]

I have a question about your advice to fold to a 4 bet pre-flop if it gets that far after we played it like this. If we assume your opponent will only bet 4 hands like that (assume he plays AK like AA -- which can be a smart play in a tournament because it really puts pressure on big pairs) and a lot of players do play like this with AK. The following lists the combinations of ways he can hold those hands.

AK - 9 ways
AA - 3 ways
KK - 3 ways
QQ - 6 ways

Edit: As you can see, even if we limit the hands to AA, KK, and QQ... it's not most of the time he'll have AA or KK... but half the time. Our holding AK makes it much harder for them to have AA or KK.

If it's the first hand of a tournament (on PS just to have a benchmark). I raise 4xBB UTG with AK. The pot is 110 when it gets to him and 190 after his call, so he raises pot back at me and bets 270. It's now 380, and I want to raise the pot... it's 650 after my call... so I make it 920 to go. You should already see the problem developing here. At this point his only option is to raise all-in. We've run out of chips. The pot is now 2,450 and it costs me 580 to call. Do I have the equity to call here?

Fold: has an equity of 580
Call: against AK has an equity of about 1515 * (9/21) [649]
Call: against AA has an equity of about 225 * (3/21) [32]
Call: against KK has an equity of about 909 * (3/21) [130]
Call: against QQ has an equity of about 1298 * (6/21) [371]
**Call: against JJ has an equity of about 1295 [this is for a later calculation but fits best here]

Or a total equity of about 1182 from calling. Since this is larger than 580, calling should be right here. If we remove AK from the list we still have an equity of about 933 from making the call... and it's still better than folding. Against players where we can add JJ to the mix (with AK)... calling becomes even more clear as our equity from calling climbs to 1207.

Basically, after having played the hand this way... 4 betting pot sized bets... even at the deeper stack levels in a tournament... have we put ourselves in a position where we are pot committed? Are we likely behind and in a bad spot? Oh yes. We're in a very ugly spot here and will probably be kicking ourselves for this later. But can we possibly fold?

Edit: I see now that we are talking about a 3 bet here... which I do not believe is enough to limit them to exactly those three big pairs but it's possible. Still, outside of the earliest stages of the tournament or when two large stacks collide with these specific hands, even a 3 bet is likely to be an all-in pre-flop decision.