Most of us have learned not to play GTO in small stakes tournaments. We’ve heard time and time again that the purpose of studying GTO is to learn how to best deviate from it to maximally exploit our opponents’ mistakes. However, the emphasis on this tends to center around post flop play. The conversation rarely moves to preflop GTO play which I believe should be a last resort as well. As with postflop, we should not play this way against bad players on whom we expect to have a large edge. In small stakes games, I deviate wildly from preflop GTO ranges both when stacks are deep and when they are short. Here are the main adjustments I make.
Deep Stacks
The number one indicator of a soft small stakes tournament is that the majority of the players are too loose-passive. One way this manifests itself is that they do not three-bet as often as they should. This gives us the opportunity to open many more hands than a GTO preflop range would suggest. For example, most GTO preflop charts suggest opening a range of fewer than 20% of hands from early position when stacks are around 100 bbs deep. If antes are in play, I will open closer to 30% of hands, including combos like KJo and 97s, if I do not expect my opponents to three-bet as often as GTO suggests. Most of these players only three-bet about 3% of the time when they should be doing so almost twice as often.
The opposite is true as well. When they are in early position, they tend to raise much tighter than a GTO player would, instead choosing to limp with the worst hands in their range and only raise with their strongest holdings. This mistake causes me to three-bet the tightest among them less often than GTO would suggest. Instead of three-betting 5%-6% of the time, I tend to use the same value heavy 3% three-betting range that they use. This includes hands like JJ+ and AK. Going too much wider than this against these player types essentially results in you making futile bluffs when they are never folding a range that is ahead of your weakest holdings.
The last preflop adjustment I make with deep stacks is I am much more likely to make calls with speculative hands. When I know my opponent is raising with a very strong range and that the other players are unlikely to punish me for flatting too wide, I can call with many more speculative hands than a GTO player would. Calling with a small pair in order to hit a set becomes much more profitable when you do not have to fear a squeeze and when you expect to almost always win a big pot when you hit. The same goes for suited cards when stacks are very deep.
Despite the fact that it is a very high percentage GTO three-bet, calling with a hand like A5s is extremely profitable in these games. The opener is very unlikely to get away from top pair when I make two pair or better and the other players will call with weaker suited cards and lose a big pot the times I flush over flush them. Following GTO and three-betting this hand ruins this opportunity because it often results in you pricing out the weaker suited cards behind only to fold to the four-bet that often comes from the value heavy opening range.
Short Stacks
Many players do not expect to have much of an edge on their opponents when stacks become shorter because many of their opponents are aware of Nash shoving and calling charts. What many fail to realize is that Nash charts are essentially preflop GTO play when stacks are short. Just as before, we should not play this way unless our opponents are playing this way, which often times they won’t be in soft small stakes tournaments in spite of how widely available Nash charts are these days.
When I am short in late position, I usually opt to just raise many hands from the Nash shoving chart when I am facing opponents who do not three-bet often enough. These players tend to call opens very wide, so I do this with big pairs and the best suited or connected Broadway cards that play well postflop. It just feels like such a waste to shove these strong hands against opponents who tend not to call shoves wide enough.
This tendency of calling shoves too tightly makes them exploitable in another way as well. When you look at the GTO calling range when facing a short stack shove from late position, you quickly realize that very few people in small stakes tournaments are capable of calling that wide. What this means is that not only does the GTO shoving range become more profitable, but you can actually shove even wider than GTO. In fact, the blind vs. blind calling range is so absurd when stacks get down to around 5 bbs that I will shove 100% of hands in this spot where GTO would only shove 80%. In either case, my opponent should call very close to the same range that I am shoving. Very few small stakes players will look down at 72o and make the call when it is appropriate to do so. Shoving the GTO range leaves a ton of money on the table against these players.
Again, the opposite is also true. These players tend not to shove as wide as GTO suggests until their stacks get down to the bare minimum. In particular, I’ve noticed that with more than 10 bbs, they shove a much tighter range than GTO suggests. For example, a GTO shoving range from the button is close to 40% of hands with 12 bbs. Many small stakes players shove around half of that range, often choosing to limp or fold the worst hands like suited connectors. If you ignore this and call with the nearly 30% of hands from the BB that GTO suggests, you will be losing a lot of money on that decision in the long run.
If you want to maximize your edge in soft small stakes tournaments, you must deviate from GTO play in order to exploit the mistakes that your opponents make. This is just as true preflop as it is postflop. In fact, these preflop adjustments may be even more important in tournaments since a large portion of the game is played with short stacks, especially when the big money is on the line. I hope this article helps you make these adjustments that others miss and improve your winrate in these games.
