Playing often in a poker room that spreads only low limit hold’em and offers just two no limit poker tournaments a week can be tough for an aspiring professional poker player. Players who normally play 15-20 hours of low limit hold’em a week tend to play NL tournaments the same way as the limit cash games. They take a lot of flops with any two suited cards, a range of connectors and dry aces and kings (aces and kings with unplayable kickers such as K-3).
This can make for a tough situation for players who are trying to use advanced plays in a tournament situation. The players you are up against are players who do not understand the advanced play and will often do the opposite of what you are trying to influence them to do. In addition,“local’s rooms” tournaments tend to have short blind levels – typically 10-20 minutes – which further handcuffs an advanced player, as that player can ill afford a misstep early in the tournament.
What novice poker players and cash-game only players do not always understand is that tournament poker play is as different from cash game poker play as basketball is from baseball. In a cash game, you can always get more money out of your pocket and keep playing. This allows players with deeper pockets to go three streets on straight and flush draws, and to play weaker starting hands hoping to flop a monster.
The main goal of tournament play is to gather chips as others go broke and work your way toward the highest possible payout. Taking a turn and a river on a draw can cost you significant chips in a situation where you can reload your stack.
Table position, individual stacks compared to the other stacks on the table and tournament structure/payouts are all significant factors in tournament play compared to cash game play.
In cash game play, when a player is short stacked they will wait for an opportunity to get all in to try to double up. If they go broke, they can choose to leave the game or buy more chips.
In tournament play when their chip stack is dwindling, novice tournament players try to avoid going broke by waiting for a huge hand rather than the best possible hand. They don’t care that the likelihood of getting dealt pocket aces is once every 220 hands. They believe those aces are coming in the next hand or two. The novice players lets their chip stack dwindle so low that by the time they put all of their chips in the pot it is very easy for a much bigger stack to call the all-in. In the old days of poker they called this getting “blinded off like Broomcorn’s uncle.” It’s a term Doyle Brunson first introduced in his bible of poker, “SuperSystem.” It meant a player that was playing so tight he ran out of money waiting for a good hand.
In low buy-in tourneys, you may start with just 2,000 or 3,000 chips, which probably equals 40-60 big blinds. As the blinds go up and the chip stacks start to diminish you will inevitably find yourself in the 10 big blind range at some point.
When you get to the 10x big blind range you only have two moves left – fold or “shove” (go all-in). Ten big blinds is a chip stack on life support. There is no reason to limp or call a raise. You either have a hand good enough to go all-in or bad enough to fold. There is no in between.
It amazes me when I see a player just call in a 10x big blinds situation. For example, the blinds in the tournament are now 100-200. This is probably just the third level of the tournament. If you have 1,800 chips left you only have nine big blinds. Novice players tend to think that having 1,800 of their starting 3,000 gives them opportunities to fish around preflop. It does not. If another player makes a standard raise of 600 and you just call, you have committed one third of your remaining stack to the pot preflop. In this situation you are heads up. There are 1,500 chips in the pot with the raise, your call and the two folded blinds (600+600+100+200=1500). You have 1,200 chips remaining in your stack.
Regardless of whether or not you connect with the flop you probably cannot fold. If you fold you have reduced your stack to just six big blinds.
The bigger question is what hand did you call the raise with in the first place. Was it a pocket pair, A-K, A-Q, A-J or A-10? If they answer is yes, you should not have called but rather put your whole stack in the pot preflop. The 1,800 raise would have been 3x of the original raise. Now you are putting the pressure on the original raiser. He can’t outplay you on the flop because all of your chips are in the middle. He also has to decide if his starting hand is worth 9x big blinds since that is what you made it preflop.
Was your starting hand Q-J, K-10, 10-9, 9-8, A-2, A-3 or worse? Then you should fold. Don’t flat call and take a flop with a marginal hand and low chips. You are risking elimination with a weak hand. If you call a preflop raise with K-10 or A-3 and flop the king or the ace it is actually the worst card for you. More often than not, you are beat by a better king or a better ace. In a situation like that you are actually hoping to hit the under card, not the big card.
All-in or fold is the best move for a couple of reasons. The all-in puts pressure on every player after you. They know they can’t outplay you after the flop because you will have committed all your chips already. Secondly, you might pick up both blinds unchallenged, which will add significantly to your stack.
Good luck on the felt!
Chad Harberts is the poker room supervisor at Club Fortune Casino and co-founder of Wasted Aces Poker.com. If you have poker-related questions email Chad at charberts@gamingventuresinc.com. You can follow Chad’s poker adventures on Twitter @chadharberts or @wastedacespoker, and follow the Club Fortune Poker Room on Twitter @CFCPoker.
