What are the most important factors to consider on the bubble of a poker tournament? Many players would be surprised to learn that the answer to this question depends on the size of the field. For the sake of discussion, let’s consider tournaments with less than 200 players small field tournaments and those with more than 200 players large field tournaments. Whether you are approaching the bubble in a large field or a small field, this article will help you keep the correct considerations in mind.
Bubble Play and End Game
As is often the case, this question is best answered by beginning with the end in mind and by looking at extreme cases. Let’s compare two tournaments from the 2019 World Series of Poker - the 10K Main Event and the 50K High Roller. The large field Main Event paid 1,286 spots from a field of over 8,500 entries and the small field High Roller paid 17 spots from a field of 110 entries.
If we define a mincash as any payout less than two buy-ins, then 520 of 1,286, or about 40% of the Main Event cashes, were mincashes and 5 of 17, or about 29% of the High Roller cashes, were mincashes. When a large percentage of the available cashes are mincashes, it is more important to lock one up than would otherwise be the case because ICM pressure is at its heaviest when the payout structure is flat. This means medium stacked players are more incentivized to play tight on the bubble of a large field tournament than on a small field tournament because the extreme ICM pressure exerted on them makes cashing paramount.
At the other end of the spectrum, the opposite is true. Let’s define a big cash as any payout of ten buy-ins or more. In the Main Event, these accounted for 72 of 1,286, or about 6% of the cashes. In the High Roller, they accounted for 3 of 17, or about 18% of the cashes. When a large percentage of the available cashes are big cashes, it is less important to lock up a mincash than would otherwise be the case. This means that even though medium stacked players have to play tight on the bubble in large fields, they should often throw caution to the wind immediately after the bubble because they still have a long way to go to get to the top percentage of the field where the big cashes are awarded. In small field tournaments, medium stacked players are incentivized to try and ladder more cautiously because they don’t have as far to go to get the big cashes. Additionally, the pay jumps available on the way to the big cashes in small field tournaments are usually a bigger percentage of the buy-in than they are in large field tournaments.
Early Game and Pre Bubble Play
Understanding what to expect in the end game and on the bubble of both large and small field tournaments should inform how you play the levels preceding the bubble.
In a large field tournament like the Main Event, you often hear savvy players saying things like you cannot win the tournament on Day 1, but you can certainly lose it. In other words, patience is a virtue at this stage because when you are three days away from the bubble, you have plenty of time to position yourself for a good result. In smaller field tournaments, the bubble comes a lot quicker, which means you have less time to be patient in them. Additionally, smaller fields tend to have tougher players on average, so you have to get the easy chips before the weakest players go broke. This incentivizes players to come out of the gate with guns blazing early in small field tournaments.
In a large field tournament like the Main Event, you should think locally in the levels just before the bubble. The biggest stack, average stack, or smallest stack in the tournament should be of little concern to you. If you understand that medium stacks are severely handcuffed on large field bubbles as discussed in the previous section, your goal at this stage should be to reach and maintain a stack size that can compete for the top stack at your table. If you can accomplish this before the bubble and your opponents understand how tight ICM incentivizes them to play, you can benefit from an extreme amount of fold equity when the bubble pressure starts to weigh heavily on the medium stacks at your table.
In small field tournaments like the High Roller, there are only three tables remaining as you begin to approach the bubble, so in a sense, the entire tournament is local. Metrics like biggest stack, average stack, and smallest stack left in the tournament play a much bigger role in these events. Surprisingly, this leads to the bubble of small field tournaments lasting a lot longer than that of large fields.
In 2015, I was a short stack on the bubble of the WSOP Main Event with around 100 players left until the bubble broke. I was fretting in the Brasilia Room, unnecessarily worried about what was happening in the Amazon room when I should have been thinking locally about what was happening at my table. To my delight, we quickly lost those 100 players in about an orbit. It seemed like a lot of players to lose at the time, but in reality, we only needed to lose about 9% of the remaining field. Paradoxically, it takes a lot longer to lose 2 players needed to burst the bubble of a 22 player field even though the percentages are equal. This is because the short stacks can easily look around the three tables remaining to see how they can slow play to ensure that they maximize their chances of cashing. This is especially true if they can see that there is a medium stack who understands that he may be incentivized to risk bubbling in order to give himself a shot at one of the big cashes as discussed in the previous section. Additionally, it is much more likely that half the at-risk players double-up when there are only two of them as opposed to 100. If this happens in a small field, it can be a disaster for the medium stacks who are being ground down to nothing while trying to fold their way into the money. This is another reason why it is often wise for them to discount ICM a bit in favor of maintaining their stacks to remain competitive in the future game after the bubble bursts.
These differences in the early, mid, and late game dynamics of large and small field tournaments result in an interesting conclusion. Large field tournaments begin as a marathon and become a sprint after the bubble whereas small field tournaments begin as a sprint and become a marathon after the bubble. Understanding these differences will help you play each of these tournament types more effectively.
