Poker Tournament Strategy: Slowing Down

In a previous entry I talked about the early stages of poker tournaments and the numerous opportunities these stages present for savvy poker players. In this installment I’m going to explain what happens when the early stages of a poker tournament ends, and the adjustments you’ll need to make in order to stay afloat.

The best example I can think of for the slow-stage of a poker tournament occurs in Sit and Go tournaments, and the change happens when the typical 3x-4x the big blind raise reaches about 10% of your starting chip stack.

Take the Full Tilt Poker structure for example: players begin with 1,500 chips and blinds at 15/30. This structure almost completely eliminates the early stage play I spoke about in my previous article, since a typical raise is between 90 and 120 chips; almost 10% of your stack in level 1! If there is a re-raise you can forget about implied odds, since you’re calling 300+ chips.

On the other hand you have a structure like UB Poker where players begin with 1,500 chips, but the starting blinds are 5/10. In this case a raise to 30 or 40 chips represents less than 3% of your stack -even a re-raise only brings the call to 120 chips; the same as the first raise on Full Tilt.

But, back to the slow-stage: Once you are faced with a raise that is around 10% of your starting chip-stack all of your implied odds are diminished -basically you would have to stack the person almost every time to get the right implied odds to call with a pocket pair. During these stages of the tournament it’s best to sit back and wait, since the blinds aren’t really worth attacking yet, and your implied odds have been drastically reduced.

I like to call this the donkey stage, because it’s the donkeys that are making standard raises to 150 with 25/50 blinds, or worse, calling these raises. Stealing the blinds only adds 75 chips to your stack of 1,500, which is 5% –not exactly peanuts, but nothing to write home about either. The difference between a 1,500 chip-stack and 1,575 is pretty infinitesimal. Like I said, your best course of action is to sit back and wait while players knock each other out, and at the same time you cultivate a tight image that can be used during the next stage of the tournament, when the blinds and antes have reached a point where they are worth fighting for.

So, what should you do if you get a premium hand during this phase? What I like to do with a standard stack is over-bet pre-flop by making it 250-300 to go in the 25/50 level. This effectively eliminates my opponents’ implied odds, and also makes the pot worth fighting for post-flop, increasing the likelihood of your opponent calling with a hand like TPWK or middle-pair.

In the next installment of this series I’ll look at the phase when the blinds and antes reach a point that blind-stealing becomes a relevant strategy.