bentax1978
4 of a Kind
Oddly, that was one of the factors that made this a shove in my opinion. Bubble play tends to get players to tighten up. While a big stack would still call you with small pairs, players with 24 or so BB are less likely to be willing to swap places with you at this point. Big Slick is going to play a little stronger here than it would after the bubble bursts.
Let's look at it another way, for argument sake. Let's say that only premium hands (like middle to high pairs) are going to call a bubble shove from UTG in this situation, hands that are effectively going to be a coin flip for me.
Here are the possible outcomes given the above assumption:
I shove and steal the blinds. 90% of the time I pick up 2.5BB.
I shove and get called by a pocket pair. 5% of the time I pick up 14BB and 5% of the time I lose 12 BB and get knocked out of the tournament.
So if this were a cash game, shoving might be considered a +EV move (with an EV of +2.35BB).
However given the parameters of the tournament, and the fact that even with 26BB my chances of cashing for significantly more than the minimum cash of $581 are somewhat slim (given the payout structure), shoving in this case could actually be considered a very low EV move. Let's use the same percentages as above. In order for a shove to be +EV in the tournament, I'd basically have to justify that doubling up would yield an average expected tournament cash of almost $1200 (top 27 finishers) and assume that not doubling up (or just picking up the blinds) will result in a min cash.
Of course it's possible that a shove gets called by hands like AQ/AJ/KQ, which obviously increased my chances of a positive outcome. But even taking that into considering, if we are talking purely in terms of maximizing the monetary EV, a strong case could be made against shoving in this situation.