Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Tournament

Now to start the tournament he had about 80 big blinds in chips. Many people may point to the fact that with 80 big blinds, a 5 big blind raise is still only 6.25% of your stack, while hitting a set with a small pair gives the player a better than 12% of hitting. This means that if the player who calls with a small pair can get you to stack off all your chips, that he would actually gain equity by flat calling your large raise with a small pair due to the implied odds. However, this assumes you are only playing a big pair. In reality you may also be playing AK. In this case, your opponent would be making a huge mistake by calling with a small pair because only about 24% of the time that your opponent hits would you ALSO pair your ace or king. This means that your opponent would likely not get paid off when you have ace king, and

The other problem is very few people do have the same number of chips as Schluman as he was 4th in chips. The player 5th in chips had about 50 big blinds. So really even if he only raised with high pocket pair, then only 3 players could even have the correct implied odds to call him with lower pairs. However, even then, with AK in the mix, that makes things more interesting.

If Schluman played pocket tens or higher pocket pair and ace king suited and non, then he basically would have a 66% chance to have a pair and a 33% chance to have AK. So lets say someone else who also has 80 big blinds (or more) does decide to call him…

Lets say that if Schluman has AK and he hits an ace or king, he isn’t even able to fold. Lets say that his opponents only bet if they have a set, and they move all in. If schluman has a pair he isn’t able to fold. Now the reality is that there would certainly be situations in which schluman would fold TT and JJ and QQ, but we are just trying to figure out if anyone has an edge over Schluman by doing this.

So out of 100 times, the person with a small pair calls, (we’ll call him Carl) hits a set about 12% of the time. Now 66% of the time Schluman will have a pocket pair and call. 66% of 12 is about 8% of the time.  However, the 8% of the time that Schluman calls and is up against a set, about 17% Schluman will either have a set already, or hit one by the river. So about 1.4% of the time Schluman will actually win 80 big blinds.So 6.6% of the time Carl gets 80 big blinds, 1.4% of the time Schluman gets 80 big blinds

If 12% of the time Carl hits a set he’s up against a pair 8% of the time, then there is 4% of the time that Carl will also hit a set when Schluman has AK.

Additionally, of the 33% of the time that Schluman has AK, Schluman will hit a pair 24%. However, his opponent will only hit a set 12% of the time. So 12% of 24 is 2.88%. However, 1/3rd of the time that Carl plays he will be up against AK so really only 2.88/3 or .96% of the time will Carl win 80 big blinds. When Carl is against Schluman, he will win 80 big blinds about 2.88% of the time.

All the other times Schluman will win 5 big blinds.

So is it worth it for a bigger stack to call with a small pair?

Strictly by the math of a single hand, yes. I haven’t checked my math, but Carl should gain just under 0.4 big blinds by playing the strategy of calling and folding if he doesn’t hit a set. I ommitted a lot of small details such as the chance of hitting a straight or AK winning by catching runner runner as well, but it should be relatively insignificant.

Does that mean that it’s a bad strategy for Schluman, or that Phil was wrong to say it will discourage small pairs from calling?

Nope!

Here’s why.

First of all, GIVEN that one of his opponent calls, Schluman wins at least 5 big blinds about 90% of the time. Additionally, most of the time he will pick up the blinds. This could be big blind and small blind plus antes, but there could also be a call and/or a raise already in the pot. Now I don’t know Schlumans exact range of hands, I assume he would open up more in late position, and play tighter in early position. However, I could guess that he might play TT+ and AKs and AK. This is 3.5% of hands. Now Schluman is in this case playing 3.5% of all hands. Schluman will be playing about 1 hand every 28 hands he’s dealt. So he will pay for 2.8 rotations, and then he will likely win the blinds and antes that will pay for maybe 1 rotation, maybe 2. While his chips may be expected to decay by this strategy, his chance of advancing and thus making money actually goes up. This strategy will be enough to keep him afloat. Additionally, should his opponents decide to play, he will likely be expected to gain chips.

The fact is that Schluman has a strategy that will give him a LOT of equity since he has such a high probability of continuing on. Sure you can talk about expected value all you want, but the fact is that chips do not equal cash, and Schluman has a high probability of lasting a very long time.

Additionally the blinds will go up and this strategy will get better, and calling with small pairs will become less and less profitable.

Not to mention, we did no work on the Kelly Criterion, which might show that our opponents will be unable to handle the varience of an implied odds strategy at this stage of the tournament. If that’s the case, basically what will happen is, our opponent is expected to have to fold a few times, and soon our opponent will not have enough chips for the strategy to work.

What would the Kelly have to be? Our opponent calls 5 to win 80. Our opponent will win 16 times the amount he risks, or win 16 to 1 odds. He will hit a set and actually be able to win 16:1 about 7.75% of the time. This results in Carl having a Kelly of about 1.72% to make the call. This means that our opponent would have to have about 290 big blinds to be able to safely make the call. This ignores the fact that there is a small percentage of the time that our opponent will hit a set and win the 5 big blinds, and that there MAY be a small percentage of the time that our opponent will be able to check it down when up against AK and pick up a set, but if Schluman just plays like the above and bets, he is certainly going to give himself a great chance at gaining a lot of money as the other players knock themselves out. He is also going to be very likely to get his money in good and he could very well end up with a 80% probability to double up. As it turned out, that was exactly the way it played out, as Schluman held on, and eventually got it in with AK vs AJ and won, and then JJ vs 33 which he lost. Schluman STILL had enough chips afterwards to get himself in another coinflip. His chance of elimination was something like 35% which means he gave himself a very good chance at being in a position to win.

Late in a tournament, you have a choice of how you want to play. You can either go for the win, or go for second. Generally in either case you are aiming at limiting the Kelly of your opponents to make the call. If you play to win, you can violate the kelly, getting your money all in when you are a favorite. If you play for second, you simply wish to hang on, while denying your opponents the Kelly to call when you play, and simultanously making sure that your play has a good cash expected value.

However, the tournament structure the prize structure and so many other things are going to be variables.

If you want to win tournaments you have to figure out what works best for you. I use tournament poker software. There are tons available, but I like speed so I can first do the initial test phase quickly.

However, the way to determine what strategy works best for you is to test TONS of things.

It’s best to define a hand range if you are going to test it. It’s best that you keep your action very simple after the flop. It’s best to keep evrything as similar nd consistent as possible so you can get accurate results. Then change one small thing. perhaps it’s testing raising 3 big blinds, vs raising 5 big blinds. Perhaps it’s raising 5 big blinds early, then gradually decreasing down to 2 big blinds late, vs raising 3 big blinds early and progressing to 5 big blinds late. Perhaps you compare your all in range of hands based on your number of big blinds or based on the stage of the tournament.

The point is, in order for you to really come up with any REAL conclusions, you should test it. Some people love the N-up modeling. This is based on doubling up and independent chip models that will tell you how strong of hand you can be all in with. Personally I don’t like this model because I would prefer to believe that I will not get it al in until I have a significant stack, which is more important than having a significant edge in many cases in my opinion. But notice I said “opinion”. That’s the problem, most poker theorys are based on opinions. While they do use math, they make bold assumptions that may be true with their way of playing but not neccesarily yours or mine.

Some math guys miss the big picture, some survivalists miss the math. It’s easy to have bias. It’s not really until thousands of tournaments of testing various methods that you can really draw any conclusions. That could take forever to test, and it could be very costly! Which is why I love using DD poker tournament software. I cusotomize the blindstructure to suit my needs. I use my spreadsheets and charts and formulas, nd I plan on testing a lot.

I have not yet done any real testing but this is how it’s donw.

row 1:Control strategy

row 2 Testin strategy 1

row 3 Testin strategy 2

Columnn 1-10: chipstack average at end of blind levels 1-10

Columnn 11-20: chipstack average at end of bling levels 11-20

Columnn 21-30: chipstack average at end of bling levels 11-20

etc

Next Column: Average Finish

Next Column: Average Winnings

Now you may wish to make invisible cells that you can hide to track all that math you might do. Or you may just want to insert about 50 rows for 50 tournaments so you can track the numbers for every tournament within each test. Then you can average them at the end.

Personally What I like to do is make 50 rows for 50 tournaments and those first 50 will be my “control” This is generally where I am neutral between the two strategies, or uninfluenced by the factor that I am testing.  If you have previous results from your real money tournaments, you can compare your control to this and see if the software is accurate.

Then I make 50 more for “test A” and 50 more for “Test B” If I am not satisfied with the results I will continue and add “test C” or simply play moer tournaments in each until I get distinguishable results.

Although it’s a pain to keep track of my chipstack at the end of each blind level, it’s important. What if a strategy works the best up until a certain point? That doesn’t mean that I won’t have any use out of that strategy, but in fact, it may even mean that I SHOULD use that strategy up until that certain point, and then make an adjustment. Perhaps I get short stacked and the strategy isn’t effective, or perhaps the antes become involved and that requires the strategy to change. The point is you will not know if you don’t track everything.

You should track everything. start out playing a hand range in each position and test out more hand s in late positionvs less. Then do the same for middle position. Then go on and test very specific hand ranges. Test being all in after the flop vs before the flop. Test semibluffing all in vs not. Test EVERYTHING until you figure out the best of every individual decision that you make. This is how you PROVE to yourself what the best strategy is that works best for YOU.

You always hear people talking about various ideas and concepts, but if you cant make it work for you better than what you’re already doing, forget about it.

Now upon testing one strategy, I believe you need to test on different software. To confirm results I may run 10 tournaments on stacked for each strategy. If I don’t see conclusions, I will do 15 more. If I still don’t then 25 more.

If I can confirm my results, I then must try it live at freerolls and low staked tournaments. If that does work, then I can move on to higher staked tournaments. I can play and then go back and test some more.

Right now I am going to be committed towardss testing a whole lot of stuff Only after thousands of tournaments will I truely be ready to actually be confident that my IRC method works. I speculate a lot about it, and have a lot of good theories that have been somewhat tested, but I really don’t play enough to know.With tournament software I can also save so If I misclick I can simply load and start over. 

Anothr thing you may wish to keep track about is “chance of survival”. So if you hve gotten all in with aces it’s an 80% chance. If you get it in with aces twice, it’s a 64% chance. This way if you get a bad beat and get knocked out early when you have an 80% chance of winning, you can use it as evidence if the results are too close to tell. You can also make sure that if you win it wasn’t just because you were extremely lucky. Tracking this sort of thing will save you from having to do a lot more tournaments before you can draw any conclusions.

So the next time someone argues that small ball doesn’t work, or that a certain play should never be done, you can actually go out and test it out, track the results, and see if it does have a place in certain parts of the tournament or not.

Tournaments require a whole different mindset and perspective, and an entirely different way of adjusting. However, with nough practice you can become dominant at the game, and if you do it in a scientific way, you can draw conclusions about how to maximize your ROI, and actually prove it.

To tell you the truth, in the lower stakes, I have a much better record when I just stick to the basic fundimental approach. It may not help that I’m just testing out moves and not really sticking to any method, but it’s valuable for me to track what sort of win rate each move has, and how best to use it. It’s worth a losing record to improve my game. If I can figure out certain “moves” that I can use that will allow me to improve my skill over the course of every tournament I play in, it was worth all the losing pots.

Testing methods aren’t bad, however, at some point you just want to win. Keep it simple. Stick to the plan. If your preflop game is rooted in sound fundimentals, and based on starting with statistically what should be the best hand, and you don’t get carried away with bluffs after the flop, you will be able to be a consistent winner. If you’re getting outplayed after the flop, simply raise larger and play tighter.

I may do some really weak plays such as checking and calling when there’s potential draws out there when I have a decent hand. I do a lot more bluff catching, but I still will lay down a fairly strong hand even with decent pot odds if I think I’m beat. Although the river bets are possibly the smallest in relationship to the pot, they’re often the largest in terms of overall chips. So there’s huge value in being able to make a good fold on the river, as well as being able to keep your opponent in one more street.

At an advanced level, it may be important to know the moves, but unless you’re at a crutial point of the tournament, or a certain player is really a threat to you, you generally will stay away from moves. The more forgiving the blind structure and table, the fewer the moves are needed.

I have found better results when I focus less on making moves and winning big pots, and more on extracting the maximum value with my hands, and doing so by minimizing risk to my tournament life.

It’s a much different game if you play at a blind structure with 12 or 15 minute intervals (online), than an 8 or 10 minute interval. You can actually find yourself keeping up with the blind structure by playing tight.

There are a lot of “plays” that good players do that’s simply done for the purpose of being less predictable. However, unpredctability matters very little in these smaller tournaments, especially earlier on.

Suited connectors for the most part can just be folded. They aren’t as good as people think. They only have marginal value. Against sophisticated players who know how you play they’re good because you can represent hands. Against multiway action with a lot of players involved when you’re in late position and it’s early enough where you have a very deep stack and can get paid off they may be worth it. Generally they’re not worth the varience in your chipstack. If you lose 20% of your chipstack, a 25% gain is needed to make up for it. making too many higher varience plays will result in you having to make bolder and bolder plays until you have to risk all your chips just to get back to where you were before you started with the high variance plays. Let your opponents take those risks even if it’s profitable for them. If you were to flip a coin 100 times and you would get paid $3 for heads and you would only lose $1 for tails of course you would do it. However, if you had to risk half of your lifetime savings as a minimum bet, although you expect to win in the long run with every bet, if you continue to risk half of your lifetime savings, it will take only a few losses to put you so far behind that you will lose it all. SO you might win the first and your .5 lifetime savings becomes 1.5 giving you twice the lifetime savings you started with. Then you flip it again and you lose 3 times in a row. Now you’re down to your last half lifetime savings bet. You win and you’re back to 1.5 your lifetime savings. Then you lose 3 in a row and you have nothing. This is not unusual, and in fact, varience is expected. The higher the varience, the more likely to go broke even with a “profitable bet”. Even if you knew a coin was weighted 60/40 if you bet everything you simply would lose money in the long run by mathematical law. It’s most definately possible that something with a positive expected value will actually have an expectation of making you go broke before you have enough chips to safely manage that risk, just like in the coinflip example. In fact, it is never “safe” to put all your money on the line unless you have the absolute best hand on the river. That doesn’t mean that it’s safe not to, and essentially you will want to take the “lesser of two evils” and take on some risk because without taking any you will blind down, however, risk management is THE most important thing once a poker tournament is started, just as bankroll management is the most important factor in cash games and tournaments in determining whether or not you give yourself a chance to win.

Playing tight to develop an image probably won’t do much at lower stakes and unsophisticated players. However, playing super tight is still good, simply so you have the better hand. Limping in with a hand like AJ in late position after several limpers is perfectly fine. I used to try to power the table with AJ by making a big isolation raise and potentially a steal raise. But I would occasionsally get caught in a coinflip or fall for a trap, plus, my other moves are les effective. So I would just limp and try to hit an ace, and maybe make one bet to scare out the field, but potentially just check it down and maybe get 1 bet out of it.

It’s better that you always keep in mind your overall chip stack and protecting your tournament life, even if it means giving free cards rather than maximizing value by betting. This means that on the flop, you may have to anticipate bets on the turn and river. So it’s okay to be tight after the flop without a hand, cautious with a pretty big hand, and trap with a monster until the turn and river.

You can cerainly use certain hands to make plays, but if you’re making a big play, you can also try it with nothing at all.

You may happen to find the perfect situation to make a move, but you should generally try to take the big all in moves out of your game. Replace them with the “leave some behind moves” that commit you to the hand and that no sane person would move in on unless they thought they had a monster and had you beat. This may mean making moves should be done earlier on. Try to see more flops. Before you get under 35 big blinds, you may decide to call on the big blind then check raise most of your stack, or check call and lead out with most of your stack. Or you might flat call a raise and reraise most of your stack. You want to do it when you have 0 chance of winning in a spot where your opponent is going to do an “all in or fold. So if you have 56 and the flop is K83 and if it goes to the turn maybe the turn is another king. Put in most of your stack, leave yourself 9-16 big blinds betting a potsized bet, and be willing to fold. But this is not something you will have to do, it is only a move that you may do if someone isn’t allowing you to have control. Maybe a player 2 to your right is ALWAYS raising just about every hand and he’s preventing you from playing in position. He either needs to be dealt with while you still have chips to see some flops, or your move fails and you’re forced to wait for a spot when you can move all in and steal a blind and or double up annd get back in the game. If the move works of course, you’ll be winning quite a few big blinds, and you’ll give yourself much more room to play.

In a lot of situations, moves just aren’t really needed, or at least the major moves. You should be able to have a chance to get until the antes without really making “moves” or getting all in. You may need to make a few blind steals followed by continuation bets, or stealing some dead money after some limpers, or making an isolation raise with a playable hand in position, but generally you should be able to do very well without many “moves”.

I believe that there are times when it’s better to take an all in risk then not, and sometimes it’s worth risking elimination knowing that if you win you’ll be in control and commanding position and you’ll have a psychologicaledge. In addition, your opponents will not be able to handle the varience that you are capable of dishing out to them if you have enough chips and they do not.

Before you start a hold em tournament, you need to actually take some time to prepare. First understand the blind structure, and know how many blinds per rotation you need to gain on average to maintain your number of big blinds on average. In addition, you need to know how to convert that into a strategy. There will be several posts about this, start with the IRC method series. You also will want to have a basic patient strategy to fall back on to protect your stack.

In addition, you should know what you are playing for. Sure winning is great, but if you’re playing a super satellite where everyone who finishes in the top 10% wins the same exact prize, a buy in for a larger tournament, it doesn’t make sense for you to try to get 100% of the chips when theoretically you would just have to not lose all of your chips to win the same prize. If first only receives 15% of the prize pool, there is still probably is a lot of value in finishing in the final table, or even just cashing.

We all want to win, but be reasonable about it. If someone else can do all the work of knocking everyone else out, and you just need to protect your stack, don’t go with some crazy aggressive strategy just yet. Wait until you get into the big part of the payout then you can start going for the win.

Another very important thing is how many players? With only 30 players, a double up early means grabbing an additional 3% of the chips in play a total of 6.67%. If you can use those chips early to intimidate, you can quickly become a force and then just hang on to the chip lead, on your way to victory. But with 5,000 players, you could double up 7 times and still only have a total of 2.5% of all the chips in play. The more players in a tournament, the less valuable a double up is. With 5,000 players left, you have a LOT of time to get a LOT of chips just by picking up a few small pots. Although a double up might give you an advantage for awhile, the patient player who passes up the option to double up can continue to exploit his edge over this large field. Since he will survive so much more, he actually gains a lot of FUTURE value by folding. If someone offered you a 55% to flip a coin for $1 now, or you could pass up that $1 in order to have a 60% chance of winning $50 tomorrow, even though it’s profitable to take the bet, it’s more profitable to pass on the bet to ensure you have the money to take the more profitable bet. That would be true even if you could have a 62% chance to win $54 if you took the first bet and won. The longer a tournament is, the more time you have to get as much money as possible for when you finally do have the chance to take the very profitable bet.

When you start a tournament, you should have an idea ahead of time of what kind of a hand you need in order to risk an all in. Early on generally you have a full arsenal of moves, and it will stay that way for awhile, so doubling up doesn’t give much of an advantage. If you start out with only 30 big blinds in a tournament it’s a different story, but most tournaments start out giving you a LOT of big blinds. It’s only when people start making information bets and reraising and giving each other good implied odds and you can’t afford to make those types of moves or call someone down that getting chips is a concern.

Right away, notice the players around you. You want to be ready to make a quick judgment so you know how you can quickly take control.

Start out tight until you know otherwise.
Identify players that you can attack.
Identify the proper strategy for your table.
Early on there are a lot of really interesting options on how you can play. Generally in a tournament, the average stack is as small as it will ever be in terms of overall chips, and quickly peaks in terms of it’s average number of big blinds and decays from the early part of a tournament and on. So You don’t want to risk your tournament life to win a very small percentage of the overall chips in play, but you can raise much larger and play much more hands and take on more risks since the pots are as small as they will ever be compared to the starting stack. It wouldn’t make sense to risk a 40% chance of elimination just for 0.1% of the overall chips, just as it wouldn’t make sense to risk only 0.01% of the average chipstack with a normal sized raise when in the future, that same 3 big blind raise likely will be nearly 10% of the average stack late in the tournament.
There are a few very good strategies if the opponents are right.

1) Raise and reraise the same number of hands as usual or perhaps tighter than usual, just raise a LARGE amount like 6 big blinds. At very bad tables you can get carried away with your raises because they will call regardless. Don’t risk too large of a percentage of your stack or you will end up taking on more risk then you need to. You take advantage of the looseness of your opponents before the flop and hopefully can either take down the pot and take advantage of their looseness after the flop, or take advantage of their passiveness and just make value bets that they’ll call after the flop without risking too large of your stack. There’s no real good books on this strategy. There’s “kill phil” but that’s more of an all in or fold.  I’m talking about playing fundimentally solid, but just having your raises much larger in size. Play using game theory before the flop only raise larger amounts. This will help you get more chips out of the hands where your opponents call early.

2) Raise the same amount of chips as usual or less(3x the big blind), but raise with more hands and flat call raises with more hands. This strategy is best for good post flop players. Negreanu loves to do this, only he likes to raise even smaller amounts to exploit post flop play. Anytime you have players who get carried away after the flop, and who can’t fold a single pair in a small pot, especially if the players are loose passive after the flop, this strategy is perfect.
Read Negreanu’s Power Hold ‘em strategy to understand how to use this strategy. Basically with a lot of big blinds, you have much better implied odds. Strategy one aims at narrowing your opponents implied odds and trys to take down the pots that your opponents miss. This strategy seeks to exploit your opponents by looking to flop big and win a huge pot. If you think you will get paid off big time when you hit, then you can be willing to play a lot more hands.

3)Play tighter, and raise the same amount or less – This one is the minimum risk early strategy, and is only reserved for people like Phil Helmuth who can get away from their big hands as well as trap, and in addition, can make up for the value they might be giving up later in the tournament with aggression and good reads. Actually, if you can finish strong in the other phases of the tournament, the early stages really don’t make THAT much of a difference. However, you have to be good enough not to let the Negreanu-types of the poker world get the implied odds they need on your big hands. So that means that if you do play like this you may need to make big folds. This works more in live tournaments when you can use your physical reads to make even better decisions. Several books, will have this type of strategy as a recommendation, but it takes a pro to actually make it work, and it takes a real pro to know when to deviate significantly from that strategy.

4) Not only play looser But ALSO raise a lot more chips in terms of big blinds. John Phan might use this strategy and when he does, look out. This strategy looks to run over people and take control and never let up. I saw him raise 6 times the big blind virtually every hand, and no one wanted to mess with him. He soon dominated the table and used that momentum so he actually didn’t have to take on a whole lot of risk simply because when he did, he had a lot of chips. John is not a guy who likes to be short stacked. He’s a “go big or go home” theorist. Other top players may employ similar strategies at times. I suggest you read Poker tournament Formula II for this type of strategy to understand it better.

That’s a starting point and it depends on the table you’re at. A table that is loose after the flop and pays off implied odds is best for small pots more hands.

Table that is fairly loose preflop, and loose after the flop, but that isn’t going to give you great implied odds, (maybe someone that likes to bluff or value bet weak but will give up on a scare card) raise large with tight range of hands.

Table that is loose preflop, tight after the flop and is the raise large with more hands looking to take it down.

Table that is easy to read and make big laydowns with big hands that you know you can exploit later because the tournament structure is slow enough, you can MAYBE consider small bets tight range of hands that you play. You certainly could succeed by plying more of Negreanus strategy, however, that may make it slightly more difficult to get away from a big hand because you know your opponents know you play a lot of hands.

As the tournament progresses, it will become more and more difficult to continue to make large raises and big plays. You cannot play large pots, because every pot you play will soon represent a large percentage of your stack. Hopefully you can proglong this time period and by keeping the raises large in size or by keeping them slmall preflop and large after the flop, you can win a whole lot of chips and those extra chips can continue to be used to gain more chips. Eventually your raise sizes will have to decrease as the blinds go up. a 5 big blind raise used to represent 5% of your stack, but eventually it will represent 10%. So eventually you will reduce the size of the raise until it’s essentially reduced to a 2.5 or less raise, and then a 2.25 raise or less.

As the percentage of your stack you risk with each hand you play goes up, you will be reduced to playing fewer hands for postflop value, and more hands for preflop steal value. This means if the table calls a lot, you must tighten up and play only the big hands that have a good chance of bein the best. You stop playing suited connectors and hands like that. If on the other hand, you have opponents folding before the flop a lot, and reraising, your hand is much less relevent so it’s best to raise with hands tht you can get away from if you’re reraised.

Eventually if your chips dip below maybe 30 big blinds, you may consider limping in with slightly better than your normal range of hands, and maybe try a steal attempt while you can.  As it dips below 18, you probably don’t want to raise unless you have a good chance at stealing, and instead you are just waiting for a spot to resteal or get your money in.

You must fight to the bittr end for chips, and that means clinging on with whatever chips you have left. If a small call may likely result in losing chips, but those chips have little impact on your results anyways, it may be better off to call off there, even when you have maybe 12 big blinds and have to call 3 big blinds, simply because if you hit even a flop that you can semibluff, or if you hit the best hand, you can give yourself a chance to pick up a big pot, and that will allow your next all in to be much better than had you just folded there. You may do the same with a raise maybe under the gun with a complete garbage hand that appears to commit you to the pot in a way against the opponents that will think there’s no way you would bet like that without a monster hand. If you get caught however, you know that even with tremendous pot odds, your hand is trash and it’s not enough pot odds. Then on the big blind you can call, otherwise on the small blind you can maybe move in, or complete the blind and move in or minraise then move in on the flop, and so on.

If you can cling to a huge stack of chips and hang in there and double up, you may just give yourself the room you need to have a good chance at winning. It’s more likely that with a short stack that you will get better pot odds and possibly triple up plus the antes and blinds, plus you may have someone try a squeeze play to isolate you the desperate player heads up. If this happens, you could possibly go from 7 big blinds to maybe 24 big blinds, or possibly more if there’s raisers and callers before you push nd then there’s a caller and a reraise and a push and everyone folds. Regardless, getting back to 24 big blinds from 7 isn’t going to be that much different than if you have 14 big blinds, and everyone folds and you just pick up the blinds, or one person calls and you go to like 30 big blinds. Really 24 big blinds and 30 big blinds is usually fairly insignificant towards your chance of placing in the top 3… So why not give yourself the best chance of hanging on, and giving yourself a chance at getting it all in as a much larger favorite? Sure maybe you only survive an extra 3 rotations, but on average in those 30 hands or so, you can expect to get a pocket pair in the AA-88 range at least once, and also AK or AQ or AJs at least once. More importantly, you may be more likely to find a spot where someone raises 2 people call and a loose aggressive player goes all in on a bluff. You call, everyone else folds, and now because of all the dead money in the pot you nearly quadruple up if you win.

Sure, that spot may never come, and you may have to move in with the same and a few rotations later ith only 7 big blinds, and you may only get back to 14, instead of 20 something, but once the blinds go up, either hand would have essentially been put back into the all in or fold range again anyways, and again you’ll need a big hand to get back in it, and at least you give yourself some more time to get a big hand in a big pot.

Of course, generally the trick is to not get into that spot, and if you play well enough, you might not unless you get a big hand cracked. Generally you will need to try to get your money in before that so you can still accumulate chips. However, if you cannot find a good situation to get your money in, you will just have to wait until you can, and you certainly may go card dead, but at lest give yourself a chance to pick up a hand.