Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Playing Short Stacked (less than 40BB)
Playing Short Stacked (less than 40BB) Surely you have heard that you should avoid playing trouble hands, such as A-10 and K-J. Well, there is actually a stack I refer to as the trouble stack. If I had to pick a stack that is the toughest to play, it would be between 27 and 40 big blinds, a size for which most of the deep-stacked plays discussed in this book become much less useful. Also, with this stack, you have too many chips to use many of the powerful short-stack strategies that we will discuss later. I try to avoid having a stack of this size. I will show you how I navigate with this trouble stack when I can’t avoid it.
Gamble to Get a Better Stack
Gamble to Get a Better Stack When you have between 40 and 27 big blinds, your primary focus should be on getting a larger stack with which you can play your standard, deep-stacked game. To accomplish this, you should be slightly more willing to gamble with parts of your stack. In general, playing when you have less than 25 big blinds is fairly simple. I use any chips in my stack over 25BBs but less than 40BBs to gamble. In fact, I would say the value of a 25BB stack isn’t much different than that of a 35BB stack. However, the value of a 35BB stack is vastly different to that of a 50BB stack. Note that if all your opponents have around 40BB stacks, you should be less prone to gamble to get away from your 40BB stack because the effective stack will still be 40BBs. If everyone else has around 50BBs, you should be much more willing to gamble to get out of this stack range.