by Andrew Brokos
Originally published in the May 2007 issue of Two Plus Two Magazine
After my last two articles for 2+2 Magazine, readers may have gotten the impression that I consider all smart tournament players to be maniacs, constantly stealing and re-stealing, bluffing and re-bluffing, and making borderline psychotic pot odds calls with what look to the untrained eye like garbage hands. This isn’t entirely false: escalating blinds and antes and the average player’s fear of losing the last of his chips combine to reward aggressive play.
But tournament poker is about more than firing chips with both hands and hoping your opponent blinks first. The best players know how to recognize both situations where an opponent’s hand is likely to be weaker than it seems and situations where it is likely to be stronger than it seems. They also know better than to put themselves in situations where they will be forced to play for a lot of chips with weak holdings.
This month, I want to discuss how stack sizes and bet sizes can provide important hand reading clues that may enable you to make some big folds. It’s important to note from the outset that most of the information you can glean is useful only for making marginal decisions. However, the ability to fold correctly with a few more hands than a less knowledgeable player can make a big difference, as these situations tend to arise most often in the late stages of a tournament, where even small edges translate into substantial real money equity relative to the buy-in amount.
Bets That Are Bigger Than They Seem
When a player’s stack is short enough relative to the size of the pot that pot odds will dictate a call for the last of his chips with any two cards, he is said to be pot committed. In No Limit Hold ‘Em tournaments, it is rarely correct to fold pre-flop in a heads up pot if you are getting better than 2:1 on a call for either all of your chips or all of your opponent’s chips. Even against a very strong range of {KK, AA, AKo, AKs}, a hand as weak as 98s has 31.7% equity, and it is rarely possible to put an opponent on such a strong and narrow range. As a rule of thumb, then, I will assume in my arguments and examples that any player who will be closing the action pre-flop getting better than 2:1 on an all-in call is pot committed.
It follows that some calls or raises are larger than they appear. A player who opens for 150 chips but has only 300 chips left in his stack is effectively betting 450 chips, and you must consider this when estimating his hand range and calculating your pot odds. In other words, a thinking opponent will raise a stronger and tighter range of hands for 150 chips when he knows that he’s essentially committing 300 more than he will when he has room to fold. Similarly, once you call the 150, you should generally not be planning to fold at any time. Therefore you should only play hands that you are willing play for 450 chips rather than for 150.
There’s more to it than being pot committed. A player with 1000 chips would certainly have room to open for a raise of 150 and fold to a re-raise, but he’d rather not put himself in that situation. Losing 15% of an already short stack can severely restrict a player’s options. Without those chips, he may not be able to re-raise or continuation bet with substantial fold equity in future hands.
What all this boils down to is that a player with 1000 chips is less likely to fold after raising to 150 than is a player with 5000 chips. Since he is going to felt a larger percentage of the hands he is raising, the player with the shorter stack needs to be raising a tighter, stronger range in the first place, and you need a stronger holding to get involved with him.
The last thing to consider is the stack sizes of players left to act. Before open raising pre-flop, a smart tournament player will consider how to respond if called or raised. If his raise prices him in to call an all in from any of several short stacks behind him, then you can assume his hand is stronger than it otherwise would be and adapt accordingly.
Some Examples
You are at a nine-handed tournament table with 25/50 blinds. A smart, aggressive player opens the action UTG+1 with a raise to 150, leaving 600 chips behind. The action folds to you in the SB, holding AQo. I recommend folding.
Fold Ace-Queen?! But he’s an aggressive player! What if he’s stealing?
I did say he was aggressive, but I also said he was smart, and smart players don’t often invest 20% of their stacks in early position with hands that can’t stand some action. In fact, it would be reasonable to put him on a range of {AQo+, AJs+, 88+} and assume that he won’t fold any of these hands pre-flop. Given that your AQ has less than 40% equity against this range of hands, your best play is to fold.
A similar situation arises if the same player makes the same raise UTG+1 to 150 with 2000 chips behind, but there are 4 or 5 players left to act with 500 chips or fewer. These players are getting desperate and may jam a somewhat wide range even against an early position raiser. Thus, a strong player opening the action must realize that if any of these short stacks wakes up with something halfway decent, he will be playing for 500 chips rather than for 150. Once again, you should proceed with caution and possibly just fold hands like AQ, even if your read is that the raiser is generally loose and aggressive with his opening requirements.
When You’re Called or Re-Raised
This analysis can also help you with your hand reading and decision making when your open raise pre-flop gets called or re-raised. Suppose that with blinds of 100/200, you open raise to 600 from middle position with 98s. The button calls your raise, leaving 2000 chips in his stack.
Alarm bells should be going off. Although he only put 600 chips in the pot, he is really committing 2600, which means his range must be much stronger than what it might be if he had a deeper stack. No competent player is putting in more than 20% of his stack pre-flop without a strong hand, and the fact that the button chose voluntarily to sacrifice fold equity by just calling is also suspicious. I would not continuation bet any flop unless I had reason to think this player was less than competent, and I might even check and fold top pair.
When you get re-raised, you need to consider what kind of odds your opponent is leaving for himself if you four-bet all in. Suppose that you are in the CO and that you have some history with the player on the button. The two of you see each other regularly in online tournaments, and each of you knows that the other is a smart, aggressive tournament player.
With blinds of 250/500, you open for 1500 with ATo, and the button re-raises to 4500. This is a tough spot, as the button would usually play AK and big pairs like this, but is also capable of re-stealing in a situation where he knows you’ll be opening a very wide range. AT is probably in the top third of hands that you could have when opening from the CO, but it’s far from the best.
Making a good decision here is going to be tough, so you need to marshal all the information available, and one thing to look at is how many chips your opponent is actually committing. If either you or he has only about 12,000 chips, he is much more likely to have a strong hand than if you both have 16,000 or more.
The crucial difference is that if you do move in on him for 12,000, he’ll be pot committed, as he’ll be getting better than 2:1 odds to call 7500 more into a pot of 17,250. When you move in for 16,000, he has room to fold, as a call of 11,500 into a pot of 21,250 lays him worse than 2:1. With the shorter stacks, he is actually risking 12,000 chips to win the 2250 in the pot, whereas with deeper stacks, he is risking only 4500, since he can fold his bluffs if you move in on him.
In the latter situation, his move must succeed much less frequently to show a profit, which means that he can make it with a wider range of hands. Consequently, you should be more inclined to fold your AT when stacks are shorter but to move all in when they are larger.
Conclusion
This analysis illustrates the importance of looking at factors such as stack sizes and how the rest of the hand is likely to play out before making pre-flop decisions. It is generally true in Texas Hold ‘Em that the decision to play a hand pre-flop is one of the most important you’ll make, but it is even more true in tournament play, where shallow stacks often guarantee that most of the action takes place pre-flop. Practicing better hand selection than your opponents in tough situations can make a big difference to your bottom line, especially deep in a tournament, where even small mistakes can be very costly.