In this installment of our poker strategy guides, we are looking at how to build stacks in turbo tournaments.
We will break down two key hands from the Hot $22 turbo played on a recent Sunday, with a huge prize pool and the winner being rewarded over $11,000, not a bad payday for a turbo game that will be completed in around 3-4 hours!
These games are nearly all played with stacks below 20 big blinds, even if you get a good stack in these tournaments 50 big blinds or so can dwindle back down to short stack poker with the blind increases being so fast.
Therefore no fear, aggressive, short stack strategy is key within these games, we are looking to take +EV spots and win some flips to get a big stack and try and win these games.
The first hand takes place with blinds at $350/$700 with a running ante of $90.
We have $15,657 or 21 big blinds (BBs) and are dealt 5♥ 5♦ in early position, pick up the action in the video here…
Short stack all-in
This type of thing is going to be a regular occurrence in tournament poker, a player with not many chips, wagering all-in. Knowing what hands to call these short stack all-ins with is a key part any poker players game.
A good question to ask yourself is, if you were that player what hands would you go all-in with?
So if you had 7BBs in early position, would you go all in with 22, 33, 44, A2, A3, A4, A5?
The answer for nearly all players is Yes. Therefore having these hands in our opponents’ range makes an isolation play with our pocket pair that crushes these holdings a solid play.
Now yes, we aren’t always going to be ahead, sometimes they are just going to turn up coin flips to our hands and occasionally they may have better pairs, but in tournament poker you can’t play scared money, these are the times when you see an opportunity to pick up a stack and you have to take it.
UTG+1 moves all in for $5,343 chips.
This makes our decision very easy, we cannot flat call this bet as we would risk leaving around one-third of our chips in the middle with our hand not playing well in multiway pots if we get other action, so our only move here is to try and isolate our opponents bet and move all-in.
Domination
We get the hand heads up and our opponent tables 4♦ 4♥ leaving us in great shape with an overpair to our opponents hand.
We will take the pot down here 82.3% of the time.
The run-out
Variance takes the reigns with this one as it will just over 17% of the time with the board coming down
8♠ K♣ T♠ 4♠ 3♣
sadly our opponent hits their two outer and drags the $12,546 chips.
Tight Fold
The next key hand we will analyse takes place just a few moments later, pick up the action at 4:07 in the video here…
This hand will mean that we will happily want to wager all of our chips, usually being able to re-raise all in from the blinds to a late position open, hoping to have lesser hands like QJ, KJ, AT, A9, A8, A5s, A4s, A3s, etc all in bad shape.
Aggressive action
After just being moved to the table, we have no reads on our opponents this action unfolds…
A player in late position with 20bbs effective opens for a 2.2x raise making it $2,270 with blinds at $500/$1000.
The button with a huge stack at this point having $52,720 behind (around 53bbs) 3bets to $5,000.
Our options
We are limited in our options here, as having fold equity in poker when making an all-in like this is very important, as we want to have the chance of winning the pot without a showdown.
Due to our stack size here we are in a bad spot, if we had a little more chips we could push our opponents off the pot and possibly off better hands like small pairs and AQo. However, with our opponent putting in $5,000, it’s almost impossible for them to now fold if we went all-in for another $7,000.
Bad lay down?
With all these considerations in place of no fold equity and possibly being beaten by one of the two other hands in this pot, we do decide to make the tight fold.
Being results based, there are two ways of looking at the outcome as one of our opponents in the pot ends up having KQo and would have beaten us by hitting the King high board.
The other way to look at the spot is that we could have possibly got both our opponents to fold their hands with an all-in. However, I still think the chances of this working are very, very slim.
Overall in this spot, many times we will be beaten by simply better hands looking to 3bet call. However, we learned that our opponent 3bet the button with K♠ 2♠ and is very aggressive, we were then able to use this read to play back at them in the pots that followed.
These are just a couple of key hands from the video, make sure you watch it in full and any questions just add to the comments!
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