Big Stack Strategy: Avoiding Confrontations with Other Big Stacks
by
Jojobinks
This is a hand that took place on Sunday at a local cardroom. 2-table tournament, $30 buy-in, with $200 added by the room. Sweet!
5k stacks to start with 25/50 blinds. I get active early and work my stack up to 16000 with 11 players left and 250/500 blinds. Average stack is around 8k.
I'm in the big blind with
. The cutoff, a very bad, loose aggressive player, limps in, the small blind completes, and i make it 2400. He started the hand with about 12.5k. The cutoff calls. I strongly suspect the cutoff would raise with any pair any ace in that spot, so put him on two big cards or a smaller drawing hand.
Flop comes
. He has 10k left. I bet 4k with the assumption that I have the best hand. He pushes pretty quickly. 19k in the pot and 6k for me to call so I do.
He rolls
. He has 6 overcard outs and 8 flush outs (we don't double count the
). This makes him a slight favorite:
Board: Jc 6c 4c
equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 46.667% 46.67% 00.00% 462 0.00 { 8d8h }
Hand 1: 53.333% 53.33% 00.00% 528 0.00 { KcTs }
To recap: I thought my hand was strongest preflop so I raised it up. I suspected my hand was still best on the flop so I bet it for value. Then I called his raise getting 3:1 as a very small dog.
When put that way, the hand seems fairly well played on my part,
but IMO I misplayed it horribly.
Here's why:
- I'm a big chip leader at the table, and with the quickly rising blinds we'll be getting to the bubble in the next level or two.
- This guy is basically the only player at the table that can hurt me
- I'm gambling it up with a weakish hand, even if it is in the lead. If he has a jack I'm nearly drawing dead, and obviously there are all sorts of combination hands that put me at risk for most of my stack.
- Winning this 2 card race gives me a HUGE stack, but losing it puts me in grave danger with 7 spots 'til the money. The benefit (huge stack) is less good than the risk (no cash at all) is bad. With this stack I'm a pretty good favorite to cash in any event.
I lost the race, of course. Much worse than getting "unlucky" there was that I know better. Being a big stack doesn't mean that it's your duty to bust everyone out (Jamie Gold and Jerry Yang notwithstanding
). Much more important is to pick your spots, protect your stack, and FINISH with all the chips at the end.
Addendum: the villain in this hand didn't learn the same lesson. At the final table with 6 left and 4 paid, he and the player to his left had massive stacks and no one else had much at all. The blinds were 500/1000. I was sitting on 10k and dreams of stealthing my way into the top 2. A shortstack moved in preflop for 2.5k, and the big-stacked villain called from the sb. The other big stack called in the bb. Flop comes AK4 rainbow. With a dry sidepot and just K6o, our poor-playing lag friend shoves for 20-something thousand into the only player that can hurt him. She insta-calls with AK, and the Lag's day is over, out of the money. His bone-headedness cost me 13k earlier, but got me into the money. Yay!
Learn more about bigstack play, bubble play and more. PM me or visit my forum for NLHE tournament coaching.
More advice from Jojobinks (Matt Feldman):
Poker Coaching by Jojobinks and Themightyjim2k
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