Dealt QQ in first position first hand of a 15$ 9 person sit and go.
Standard raise is about 8xbb to push out mediocre junk so I make it 160 to go.
Villian reraises to 400, everyone else is out the way hero does what ?

Primarily I have found that a reraise the very first hand indicates 3 things ... AK, AA or KK sometimes even QQ but this is unlikely as I have QQ so I am disregarding this. THere is also something to be said for donks who come hard determined to win the first hand no matter what but this is not very likely but still possible.
If we assign a 10% chance that he is bluffing and distribute the AA as 30%, the KK as 30% and the Ak as 30 % which is somewhat reasonable it just makes sense that pushing here is going to be a somewhat -Ev situation for me. The pot odds dont matter to me because folding will still leave me with 1340 and chips and still very much alive. The three options here are 1) Fold.. not unreasonable 2) Push.. clearly not a good play based on my assesment 3) Call and push a flop which is void of a A or a K which could potentially push AK off the hand or get a calll from a marginal hand which I beat..but this still does not help when I am beaten by AA or KK.
The essential question then remains in whether or not I play the hand from this point on. If I do I will use option 3... and hopefully I can get away from it or push AK off because there is not much I can do about AA or KK. Who folds here, who pushes and who simply calls ?

Interesting. My opinion may come under fire, but I say pushing is the right play. The numeber of times I've seen $10/$20 buy-in players reraising and pushing with total trash in the early rounds is staggering vs. the number of times they've actually got a worthy hand. Example - I'm in LP, one limper in MP, I raise with KK (obviously) - folds around to limper who reraises all-in with a stack that covers mine - he flips over A9o and gets no ace.

IMO, this is an +EV push in terms of wins and losses but leaves out one very important concept of freezeout play:

I agree with EP because doubling up early does little to nothing for your chances of making the money.

I don't go broke here.

Crunk,
I hate this situation as well. I actually posted a variation of this same question a little over a year ago and got some very good advice.


I prefer to open for 5XBB or 100 in this case, in fact getting QQ the first hand of a SnG has happened so often that it is a standard play for me. I would call the re-raise and push a non A or K flop. It's possible villian has AA or KK but I try to resist looking for monsters under the bed. Pray he has AK and you are going to double up.