Let me guess: you’re a pretty good tournament player. Not great, but pretty good. You cash frequently, but it feels like forever since you made a final table. You often run up a stack early, sometimes even getting up among the chip leaders, and then somehow it seems to just evaporate. Suddenly you’re in push-fold mode, the blinds and antes are gobbling up your chips, and you’ve got to make a move. You shove all-in with A9, get called by a pair of Jacks, and it’s game over, another min-cash for you.
Nearly every week, a coaching student or podcast listener comes to me with this problem, wondering where they’re going wrong and what they need to do to fix it. In this article, I’ll offer a few possible solutions to consider.
Nothing
It’s entirely possible that there is no error here. That doesn’t mean you’re playing perfectly, but the scenario described in the opening paragraph, where things are going well and you’re accumulating chips and then eventually you find yourself short-stacked, is kind of just what a poker tournament is. You keep playing and raising the stakes until you get unlucky and get eliminated.
Every once in a while, that final stroke of bad luck never comes and you win the damn thing. But that’s rare, especially if you’re a good but not great player. If you routinely enter tournaments with 500 runners, you should expect to win roughly 1 out of every 500 you play. Maybe 2, if you’re better than average, or 3 if you’re great. But for a low volume player, which includes pretty much every live tournament player, you could easily go a few years without winning one and not be running all that badly.
Consider that when you make the top 10% of the field and have a min-cash locked up, you probably feel like you’ve come really far and are practically at the final table. It seems like if you can just hold it together and keep from doing something stupid, you’ll make the top nine.
Now consider that the other 49 players in the top 10% all feel the same way. They’ve all come just as far as you have, played just about as well and accumulated about as many chips. You all feel like you’re close, but less than one in five will actually make the final table. Most of you will be eliminated, often through little or no fault of your own.
Don’t be a Bully
Admittedly, the above is not a satisfying answer. It’s good to check your expectations, but there may be more than variance involved, so let’s consider some other explanations.
There’s a common misconception that having a lot of chips gives you a license to play more pots in an attempt to “bully” the shorter stacks. At specific stages of the tournament, mostly on the bubble, this is true. But in general, it’s a myth.
If you have 50 big blinds and everyone else at your table has 25, your play should be very similar to what it would be if you also had 25 big blinds. At the margins, you can take a few risks your opponents can’t, because getting stacked won’t cost you your tournament life, but don’t go raising A6o under-the-gun in some misguided attempt to pressure the short stacks.
If anything, it’s the short stacks who have the advantage. That’s not to say their stacks are worth more than yours, but they can move all-in, which is a powerful play. It guarantees they won’t get pushed off their hand and so will realize all their equity.
Consider a scenario where you raise, another player with 50 big blinds calls, and then a short-stacked player goes all in. He risks only 25 big blinds to make this play. If you call his shove, however, you will be committed to call if the other big stack shoves behind you. Your risk, when you call, is therefore greater than 25 big blinds.
If you fold, the other big stack doesn’t have that same worry. However, he’s also less likely to have a strong hand. When he chose to call, he may have been thinking a bit about the short stacks behind him, but mostly he was thinking about you. He may have called with some hands he wanted to play post-flop with 48 big blinds behind but did not want to get all in pre-flop for 25 big blinds. And he probably didn’t just call with AA, because he would have wanted to get more money in against you, so he’s caught a bit off-guard by the shove and won’t often have a strong hand.
If you both fold, that short stack picks up 6.5 big blinds or so without a showdown. That’s the power of the short stack.
Mostly, you should treat a big stack as an insurance policy. If something goes wrong—and it probably will, because this is poker, after all—you have some room to recover. Those extra chips shouldn’t dramatically change your play. They’re just in reserve until the blinds get bigger or something unfortunate happens.
Don’t be a Nit
This relates to the point about how everyone feels like they’re close to the final table even when they aren’t. If you over-estimate your chances of making the final table, you may end up failing to take the appropriate risks and thus cost yourself a shot at the final table.
Be honest: you probably ran kind of well to get this far in the tournament already. And when you’re running well, poker feels easy. It may feel like there’s no need to get all-in with AQ because chips have come to you so easily thus far. But run good doesn’t last forever, and you can’t count on it. In such high-pressure situations, you can’t trust your gut; you must know the math.
Gut feelings about risk are especially unreliable for low volume players. If you only play a few tournaments a month, then you only get deep a few times a year. Each time, it feels special and you don’t want to blow it.
That’s understandable but trying not to blow it is a sure-fire way to blow it. If you become reluctant to three-bet or reluctant to defend your big blind because every pot feels like an existential threat, then you won’t accumulate the chips you need to make the final table.
Don’t get me wrong—every pot isan existential threat. But that’s poker. That’s what you signed up for when you entered the tournament. Not playing pots is also existential threat. The simple fact is that you probably won’t make the final table no matter what you do. You must take risks to give yourself the best possible chance of getting there, so you can’t afford to be in a “don’t blow it” mindset. There’s no “it” to blow; you’re still a long way from first place, and it’s going to be a tough fight to get there. You’ll need every tool at your disposal.
It’s tricky, because at this stage of the tournament, every bet seems large. What would have been an entire stack earlier in the tournament is now just a standard pre-flop raise. And you must think of it that way.
A million chips sounds like, a lot but at the 25K/50K level, it’s 20 big blinds. It may be all your chips, it may be an above average stack, but it’s still just 20 big blinds, about 7.5 times the pre-flop pot. If you get 88 or AJ, it will probably be correct to put those million chips at risk, so you can’t afford to be anchored to how big a bet one million chips would have been several hours ago. The only way to win a tournament is to play the cards and the situation in front of you.
You also can’t afford to make arbitrary rules like, “I don’t want to take a coin flip for my tournament life.” No one wantsto, but poker doesn’t care what you want. The spots commonly referred to as “flips” are often too good to pass up.
Suppose you are in the big blind with 77 and the Button goes all in for a million chips—which, again, is just 20 big blinds. The Small Blind folds. I see people fold here because they don’t want to take a flip.
First of all, how do you know it’s a flip? Probably the button has two cards bigger than a 7, but sometimes she has 22 or A6s or 87s and you’re a big favorite.
Secondly, even if you are up against KJo, it’s not really a flip. You’re about a 54-46 favorite, which combined with the fact that you only need 46% equity to break even given the overlay from the blinds antes means you’d have an Expected Value of nearly 2.5 big blinds or 125K chips from “flipping” vs. KJo. No matter how good you are, your win rate is nowhere near 2.5 big blinds per hand, which makes this a well-above-average opportunity, far too good to pass up.
Remember, accumulating chips is the best insurance you can get against bad luck. Win this flip and you can afford to lose one later. Folding may increase your chance of surviving this orbit, but it decreases your chances of surviving a few orbits down the road. Those 125K chips you don’t win here are 125K chips you can’t invest in more profitable opportunities later. They are 2.5 big blinds you don’t have to spare later, when you hit a cold streak and don’t get a good hand for a few orbits.
That’s another common question: what am I supposed to do when I’m getting nothing but bad cards? You’re supposed to fold. You can’t force +EV opportunities to materialize just because you’re frustrated. You’ll have more room to fold and more time to be patient if you’ve taken the appropriate risks earlier in the tournament and accumulated chips accordingly.
Besides, bad cards turn into good ones eventually... if you’re willing to take the appropriate risks. Sure, K7o is a garbage hand, not worth your stack when you have 20 big blinds. After folding for a while, it isworth a shove for 8 big blinds on the button.
As your stack gets shorter, more hands become playable. The +EV opportunities come eventually, but again, you can’t be locked into an arbitrary rule about “I don’t want to risk all my chips on K7”. EV isn’t just about good cards. It comes from many different places, and you must be open to all of them or else you don’t have much chance in a tournament.
