formats · multi table tournament
Tournament.
You cannot buy more chips and the blinds keep rising, so your stack shrinks even on the evenings you do nothing wrong. Almost every decision in a tournament comes down to one number, and it is not your cards. It is how many big blinds you have left, and it changes all night.
the only number that matters
The same twenty thousand chips, three completely different games.
A chip count tells you nothing on its own. Divide it by the big blind and it tells you everything, because that is the number that decides whether you get to see a flop at all.
| Level | Your chips | In big blinds | What you can do |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 / 400 | 20,000 | 50 bb | Ordinary poker |
| 500 / 1,000 | 20,000 | 20 bb | Transition |
| 1,000 / 2,000 | 20,000 | 10 bb | All in or fold |
Nothing happened to that stack except the clock. Folding does not protect it either: one orbit costs one and a half big blinds, so at a nine handed table a twenty big blind stack that plays no hands at all is gone in about thirteen orbits, roughly a hundred and twenty hands, and faster once antes are added. Waiting is a strategy with a running meter attached, and a blind structure you can watch rising makes that easier to believe than any paragraph will.
Above 25 big blinds
You have room to raise, get called and still play a flop, a turn and a river. Everything that is true in a cash game is true here, allowing for the fact that busting ends your evening.
15 to 25 big blinds
Some post flop play survives, but going all in enters the picture from late position and against anybody trying to take your blinds. Raising and folding to a re raise starts to be a real loss.
8 to 15 big blinds
Mostly all in or fold. A small raise commits you to the pot anyway and hands your opponent a cheap price to call, which throws away the one advantage a short stack has.
Below 8 big blinds
All in or fold, and sooner rather than later. Waiting for a hand worth the risk costs you the blinds you are waiting through, and once you are small enough everybody calls anyway.
The boundaries are guidelines rather than rules. Your seat, the players behind you and the stacks around the table all move them, which is what the push fold calculator works out per depth.
the flip you will meet a thousand times
Short stack tournament poker keeps producing the same confrontation: a big unpaired hand against a small pair. Put all in before the flop against and count every board the deck can still produce, all 1,712,304 of them. Ace king wins 44.3 percent and the nines win 55.7 percent. It is not a coin flip, and ace king is the side that is behind.
That does not make the shove wrong. Getting called by a pair is the worst case, and most of the time you are called by something considerably weaker or not called at all, which is where the profit lives. It does mean an evening can end on a hand where you did nothing wrong, four times out of nine. Tournaments are built out of moments like that, which is why the variance in this format is larger than anywhere else in poker and why a run of results tells you much less than it feels like it should.
The second thing that separates a tournament from a cash table arrives with the prize money. Once payouts are in sight, a chip you win is worth less than a chip you lose costs, because busting takes you to zero while surviving moves you up a rung. That conversion is ICM, and it is the same effect that governs the bubble of a single table sit and go, only with hundreds of players and a much longer bubble. Before the money is in sight it barely bends, and the ordinary opening ranges on the preflop chart apply as they would in a cash game.
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Find out what your stack is worth in money.
Everything about the last two tables of a tournament runs on the gap between what your chips say and what your seat is worth. Enter the stacks and the payouts and the calculator prices every player at once. It is the number that should be driving your calls on the bubble, and it almost never matches the chip count. Free, no account.
questions about tournaments
What is an MTT in poker?
A multi table tournament. Hundreds or thousands of players start with the same stack across many tables, tables are broken up as players bust, and the last survivors share a prize pool. It ends when one player has every chip.
How do you count your stack in a tournament?
In big blinds, not in chips. Twenty thousand chips is fifty big blinds at 200 and 400, twenty at 500 and 1,000, and ten at 1,000 and 2,000. The pile in front of you never changed; what you can do with it changed completely. Recount after every level.
When should you go all in in a tournament?
Below roughly fifteen big blinds, all in or fold becomes the standard choice, and below eight it is almost the only one. The point is not desperation. It is that a smaller raise commits your stack anyway while giving your opponent a price that makes calling easy.
What is the bubble in a tournament?
The stretch just before the prize money starts. Whoever busts there gets nothing while the next player to survive gets paid, which makes short stacks play far tighter than the chips alone justify and hands anyone with a big stack a lot of nearly free pressure.
Is ace king a good hand in a tournament?
It is strong, and it is also not the certainty people treat it as. All in before the flop against a pair of nines, ace king offsuit wins about 44 percent of the time, so you are the underdog in the single most common all in confrontation there is. Good enough to shove with, not good enough to be surprised when it loses.
Why do tournaments have so much variance?
Because almost everybody finishes with nothing. Even a very good player loses most tournaments they enter, and the profit comes from a small number of deep runs. A losing month says nothing about a strategy, which is exactly why judging yourself on results over a short stretch is the wrong instrument.
Back to all five poker formats, or see the same short stack thinking compressed into three players and a few minutes in a spin and go.