Common tournament mistakes and the Professional Fold

Sorry for the lack of posts, haven't been playing any poker at all, that will hopefully change soon though. So since I have no poker playing of my own to report on, I thought I'd point out a couple of the biggest mistakes I see small stakes tournament players make:

Not having a plan

This is by far the most common mistake I see. Way way too many players will put in significant chunks of their stack without having any idea what they'll do if they get raised. To illustrate what I mean, here's a hypothetical example:

Huge field Stars tournament with about 800 players left, 500 get paid. You are in the cutoff on a stack of 17,000 chips. Blinds are 500/1000 with a 100 ante. You are dealt KQ of clubs. The other stacks are:

Button: 75,000
SB: 11,000
BB: 22,000

Any decent player knows KQ suited in the cutoff is strong enough to raise for value, so they raise. But if theres a re-raise, they have no idea what they should do.

This is a problem for several reasons. One, the amount of chips you're raising is a significant portion of your stack, so you have to make sure you're investing it wisely when you do choose to raise. Two, you've yet to consider reads on your opponents. In a 100 BB deep cash game, it's pretty much always going to be right to make your standard raise, so you don't have to be so careful before raising. But your reads on your opponents are hugely hugely important with this high a % of your stack on the line.

Here are a few examples of what you should be thinking, based on differing opponent tendencies:

1. the button has been playing his big stack highly aggressively, the small blind seems decent but just lost a big pot to get short stacked, and the big blind has been very tight. so I'll make my standard 2.5x the blind raise, get it in vs the button if he re-raises, call the short stacked small blind since he'll pushing a fairly wide range for value and I'll be getting good odds, and fold to a raise from the big blind.

2. all three players are very aggressive, plus i've been playing a lot of hands and have a loose, wild image. so if i raise, i'll be forced to call an all-in from all 3 of them. therefore it might be a better option to open shove and force my opponents to fold small pairs and weak aces and take the play away from them.

3. all 3 players are extremely tight and seem to be waiting for big pairs and AK. they also don't like to call raises even when getting good odds, so I'll make a tiny raise thats barely more than the minimum and fold if anyone shoves. that way my steal doesnt have to work as often to be profitable, and i can steal with pretty much any two against my weak opponents.

Planning things out allows you to make the most of your opponents weaknesses, as it will help you easily see good spots to steal and spots where you should never be raise-folding. This way, you'll be able to adjust your opening range depending on table conditions, and you won't make the mistake of having the same opening range for every position like many strategy books advise. If you're not sure whether or not you should be raise-calling or raise-folding in a spot, save the hand history, then after your session use pokerstove to assign an approximate range to your opponent. The more you do this, the easier your decisions will become, allowing you to play more tables at once and make more money.

Overestimating your own edge

Another huge mistake I see many poker players make is passing up too many +EV spots because they think they can find better spots in the future. In a cash game that you're properly bankrolled for, this is a mistake 100% of the time. In tournaments though, there are some situations that can be +chipEV but -$EV. These effects are most pronounced on satellite bubbles, tournaments in which your goal is not to get all the chips but merely to go broke the slowest. And good SNG players of course know that because of the flat payout structures in SNGs, its often right to fold the best hand on or near the bubble.

But in big field MTTs where most of the money is in the top 5 spots, its almost never going to be right to pass up a +chipEV spot. Situations like this could arise at or near the final table if there are a bunch of very short stacks, but such spots are very rare, and they're pretty much non-existant early in the tournament. The illusion of time fools many poker players; they believe that the longer they stay in the tournament, the better their chances are of winning. Assuming you are equally as skilled as your opponents, this is completely false, as your chances of winning are directly proportional to the the percentage of chips in play you currently have. In big field MTTs just trying to survive is not going to be a winning strategy; you may make the money more often but you won't finish in the top five nearly enough to be profitable.

I constantly see tournament players saying they folded in a close spot because they felt they were better than their opponents. And in ~neutral EV spots, there's some merit to that. However, what you very rarely see is a player who decided to gamble with slightly the worst of it because he felt his opponents were better than him and that this was his best chance. I understand most poker players have big egos and are very confident in themselves, but in tournaments you can't table select like you can in cash games, so you're sometimes going to end up at tough tables with very good players on your left, or heads up against someone who you'd swear can see your cards.

We've all been in that spot, but I can only think of one occasion where I've seen a player recognize he was outclassed at the time and adjust accordingly, and that was Shaun Deeb in an FTOPS tournament last year. It was a $500 heads up shootout, and Deeb was matched up with Annette_15. Annette was reading him like an open book and getting the best of him, so Deeb decided his best chance was to play big pots preflop and neutralize her post flop skill advantage. Using this strategy, he went on to win the match and eventually the whole tournament. Deeb has won well over a million dollars in online tournaments, so when I read his post on Two Plus Two after the tournament where he said he felt he was being outplayed and switched to playing huge pots preflop, I was impressed to say the least. To me it takes a great poker player to swallow their pride and change their gameplan to give themselves the best chance.

In conclusion, I leave you with one of my all time favorite televised hands, as a precaution for what can happen when you bet without a plan and overestimate your edge:



Thanks for reading,

George