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.
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Occasionally you will get multiple callers, which I ignored in the above calculation. This tends to happen more often when a number of deep-stacked players limped and you, the pusher, are the only short stack. If 7BBs is not significant to your opponents, then tend not to push over multiple limps with a very wide range because you have no fold equity and there will be little dead money in the pot. Although I just proved that you should shove over limps a lot, you should still fold from time to time, even if you think the limper is loose. If he limps from early position and you are in second position, you should usually fold because someone behind might call. If you push over limps a few times in a row, expect all your fold equity to vanish because players will get fed up with your constant aggression. My advice is to steal pots when you are in late position and the initial limper is loose. Also, it doesn’t hurt to wait for some showdown value. This is another decent way to balance your range, although if you have a lot of fold equity, your hand is irrelevant.
When There Is A Raise When a player raises in front of you, you must determine whether getting all-in with your hand is profitable. In general, unless your opponent is bad, you will have little to no fold equity. Because of this, you must have a hand with decent showdown value, especially once your stack dips below 10BBs. Suppose someone raises to 2.5BBs from middle position and it is folded to you, with 10BBs in the big blind. If you push, your opponent is probably going to call between 80 and 100 percent of the time with his entire range. If you always push, assuming your opponent raises 15 percent of hands, your expectation is 0.05(6) + 0.95[23(0.34) - 10] = -1.8BBs, for a clear loss. So, you need fold equity to profitably go all-in with a wide range.