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
The All-In Squeeze
The All-In Squeeze When you have between 40 and 27 big blinds, you have a perfect stack to go all-in after a raiser and caller before the flop. For the squeeze to make sense, you need a hand with some equity, and you need the pre-flop raiser to be fairly loose. The caller will usually have a fairly weak hand like a suited connector that he will fold to your push almost every time. For example, if an aggressive player raises to 2.5BBs and another player calls, you should be willing to push for up to 40BBs with a fairly wide range of hands, such as A-10, 6-5, 10-8 and 7-7. In these situations you are risking 40 big blinds to win the 8 big blinds in the pot. There also will be antes (discussed in Volume 2), which slightly bloat the pot. So, if the initial raiser calls 20 percent of the time and you have on average 35-percent equity, the equation for your expectation looks like this: 0.8(8) + 0.2[(0.35)(85) – 40] = 4.4 big blinds profit.
The pot you win before the flop if everyone folds
The pot you win before the flop if everyone folds is 8BB, and when you push, your equity in the 85BB pot is 0.35. Squeezing in this spot is hugely profitable when the pre-flop raiser folds often. It becomes hugely unprofitable if the pre-flop raiser will rarely fold. From time to time the player that called the initial raise will call you. You usually have decent equity in this case because he is probably calling with a small pair. You can subtract a small amount from the win rate to compensate for these rare situations. From time to time, the caller will wake up with a slow-played monster. Take note on who slow-plays in these spots and be sure to not squeeze them.