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Big Stack University Tips – Tournament Tips For Advanced Players

You must have come a long way to find that secret ingredient that most experienced players apply in their game as well, right? Big Stack University is not here to disappoint you, however, the secret ingredient is knowing the basics and getting a grip of it well and implementing it with your own style.

Who said that old school strategies do not work anymore? It does, if applied according to the right situation. But the good news is that Big Stack added some more points to help you further in the game. To understand that you need to first read the basics and the intermediate strategies to order to get a grip. If you’ve already, then, let’s dive right into it without further ado.

Bet-Sizing

If you’ve been struggling with bet sizing in tournaments then you have landed just on the right page. Bet-sizing isn’t about how much stronger your hands are, but it’s about how stronger and relevant your range is as compared to our opponent’s. Bet sizes are normally less than 25-35% in the tournaments as your chips are more valuable. When a person bets, there could be two possible reasons. Either they are betting for value or to bluff.

Let’s say you’re betting for value then you have to force your opponent to call so that you get a positive expected value. And if they are on a draw or a river, make them pay negative EV. Let’s explain betting sizing in the middle stages of a tournament with the help of an example.

Your opponent is on a flush draw on the river, pot size being $10,000. The probability of him making his flush is about 20% (4:1). Therefore we should give him below 4:1 pot odds to call which requires a raise of over $3,500 (13,500:3:500 = 3.9:1).

Stack To Pot Ratio

SPR which is stack to pot ratio is defined as the effective stack sizes divided by the size of the pot on the flop. It can also be considered as a risk – reward ratio. The pot is the reward and the size of the effective stacks is the potential risk.

If you’ve control over SPR then you can make post-flop play a lot easier for yourself. How can you get a good SPR? Well, it depends upon the type of hand you hold before the flop. There are two things you can do to get yourself in the ideal situation. Either tailor your pre-flop raises or don’t enter the pot in the first place. But now you’ll be wondering how to tailor the preflop raise? Let’s understand with the help of an example of raising to 3bb.

While you have Ah Kc, you and your opponent have $100 effective stacks in a $1/$2 6max. If you raise to 3bb from MP and your opponent in the CO calls, you will have an SPR of 6.3 ($94: $15) on the flop.

This SPR may well be a little too high for you to justify putting all of your chips in the middle if you hit top pair on the flop, especially so if your opponent is tight as there is a greater likelihood that they are only going to be willing to get all their chips in the middle they will have a better hand than TPTK. If you’ve small pocket pair like 44 and the effective stack sizes are low, then it’s not going to be a profitable situation for you to call or raise as the SPR will also be comparatively low. And you should better fold your hands like suited connectors or small pocket pairs it’s not going to be fruitful at all.

Plan your hands from the very beginning of the play to set yourself a profitable situation.

Fold Equity

To increase the chance of winning and induce your opponents to fold you must understand what Fold Equity is. Fold Equity = (probability opponent will fold) x (opponent’s equity in the hand). If we take a part where we shove a draw, for example, here, when you’ve 5s 4s and the community cards dealt are 6h 10s 3h, we can win the pot one of two ways. Either our opponent calls and we hit our draw sometimes or our opponent folds. The more often our opponent folds against our aggression, the more times we win the pot uncontested which is a very profitable thing while bluffing or semi-bluffing.

Big Stack University has more such lessons for poker enthusiasts! For more such tips and tricks from them, stay tuned to GutshotMagazine.com.

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