Hello Steemit!
Today I am going to be writing about one of my other passions- Poker! Most of the time I play poker tournaments on Sundays, and sometimes Fridays and Saturdays as well. I spent about 15 months playing poker full-time, and prior to that I played NLHE poker tournaments on the side for several years. My posts are generally going to be about either software engineering, cryptography, blockchain, or poker.
Push/Fold Strategy
Today we are going to be talking about push/fold strategy in poker tournaments. Often times in the mid to late stages of a tournament, you can find yourself with a very short stack. When you get to a stack of 10bb (big blinds) or less, it is almost always correct to just go all-in or fold with every hand you can be dealt. This is commonly referred to as push/fold strategy. Today we are going to be reviewing one of these situations. Here's the spot:
We are 8-handed in UTG + 1 with a very short stack of 6bb. We are dealt Q7s. The first player to act folds, and we decide to go all-in. I think that during this particular session I was not playing my best, and that this is a mistake. We are shoving too many hands here. My guess before running simulations is that we should be shoving Q9s all-in as the worst suited queen in our range. We will be using Holdem Resources Calculator (HRC) to analyze this situation. If you are unfamiliar with HRC, it is a great tool that makes it very easy to analyze hands like this. It calculates the Nash Equilibrium of a short stack push/fold situation to give you optimal strategies. I would recommend that any serious poker player should use this tool for studying.
After we enter all of the stack sizes and blinds into HRC and run a simulation, we get this optimal jamming range:
As we can see, getting our stack in with Q7s here is clearly a mistake and we are losing money with this play.
Personally, I would adjust just slightly from the optimal calling range in this situation and fold the very worst hands. Hands like Q8s, K6s and A3o would be folds for me. These hands are almost neutral EV and if any of our opponents (such as the player in the big blind who has a massive stack) decide to call slightly wider than optimally, we start to lose money with these hands. My ideal shoving range in this situation looks like this:
Great, so today I learned that I am sometimes having a tendency to shove too many hands when extremely short-stacked. Knowing this, I hope to adjust by only jamming the correct hands next time a situation like this comes up.
Thanks for reading!
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS