Card Player Pro

The "Gap Concept," coined by poker author David Sklansky, refers to the idea that it takes a stronger hand to call a raise preflop than it does to make the original raise. Like most other paradigms in poker, the Gap Concept took the poker world by storm through its relative ease of understanding. In simple terms, the Gap Concept told players to reraise with a tighter range of hands than they would open-raise. This significantly tightened most players' preflop three-betting ranges. However, in today's high-stakes online poker tournaments, the Gap Concept has undergone a noticeable metamorphosis. Preflop strategy has evolved significantly over the past few years.

Every day on the biggest poker sites, you can open up a tournament table and invariably see players raise and reraise with seemingly reckless abandon. This is where the game has gone since the Gap Concept was introduced in full force. Once the overall tightening of players' calling ranges to preflop and post-flop raises occurred, the natural progression was for a select few players to begin abusing this trend. Through a few of these players' successes, we then experienced the modern-day popularization of what we now see at the tables - hyperaggressive tournament strategy.

Through the spread of this hyperaggressiveness, ranges for even the tight players have since been skewed dramatically. It has gotten to the point where in many scenarios within a high-stakes online tournament, one's open-raising range has paradoxically become the same or tighter than one's reraising range. Through the spread of this one simple concept, we have seen an incredible change in the way seemingly all online players play their hands. Rather than opening a very large range of hands, players have found themselves finding better spots to play hands as a preflop raiser. They are opening only big hands and allowing their hyperaggressive opponents to reraise them.

A good example of the changes in dynamics over the past several months was a hand I played a while back in the PokerStars Super Tuesday event. A very loose player opened from early position and the small blind reraised. I was sitting in the big blind with pocket tens. Even a few years ago, against most players this would be a fairly easy fold. However, with the transformation of high-limit tournaments into veritable games of chicken involving many hyperaggressive regulars, the Gap Concept did not apply in nearly the same context as it would have back then. Both players were aggressive and aware of the table setting.

So, what does this all mean, and, more importantly, where is the poker world going next? The first half of the question is obviously much easier to answer than the second half. In general, there is an interesting phenomenon that takes place whenever a strategy becomes extremely popular, in that its polar opposite becomes instantly more profitable. For every tight player in a field, it becomes more advantageous to play loosely, and vice versa.

Strategies, specifically those that I consider to be "not fluid" (namely, poker texts), are vulnerable to becoming very stale very quickly. However, it is through reading these texts that we get to an answer to the question of where the poker world is heading. Players should attempt to digest all of the strategy they can. If for nothing else, they should do it to know what the masses will be doing next and to adjust their games to combat it in the most profitable way possible.

A great example of a current paradigm sweeping the online world is over-shoving from late position, as it is seen as not exploitable. However, if you can identify the players doing this and can adjust your ranges accordingly, you can put yourself in a position to profit. In the end, theories like the Gap Concept come into the poker world in waves, and you need to fight your way to the top and stay ahead of the pack to maximize your expectation.

To watch tournament training videos by Justin "WPThero" Rollo, point your browser to Card Player Pro, the complete online poker training site, at www.CardPlayer.com/pro.