Tournament Trends

Just as Hollywood comedies turn from saccharine to raunchy as a group, just as people collectively decide that corduroys are no longer acceptable, and just as rock bands start imitating each other, resulting in movements like grunge or disasters like electronica, so too do poker tournaments go through stylistic trends. Reraising becomes more and less popular, table-talk becomes fashionable until people watch an expert like Phil Ivey, and then everyone clams up, or players simply become more aggressive (or more passive) as a group.

I’ve noticed a lot of trends come and go over the course of my playing career, and the end result is usually that the good players tend to get better, having experienced these trends together. As I wrote in my last column, I believe strongly that poker players now are better than they’ve ever been, and will continue to get better over the coming years. A big reason for this is that the good players experience different playing styles as trends pass through the circuit. The best poker professionals end up taking the best aspects of each style and moving on, accumulating more and more plays and becoming tougher and tougher to deal with.

I’d like to look at some of the trends among today’s tournament players, and discuss their ramifications, for both the players employing them and poker at large.

Trend No. 1: Smaller Opening Raises

Game theorist extraordinaire Chris Ferguson has been discussing opening for smaller than the standard three times the big blind for at least 10 years, but only relatively recently has this caught on as a popular practice. Players are still reluctant to execute the strategy in the way Ferguson suggests — opening for minimum raises from early position and more standard-sized raises from late position — but they have found particular situations in which they like using the small raise. In the middle to late stages of a tournament, especially near the bubble when play tightens up, it’s become commonplace for good players to open for 2.5 times the big blind, even from the button, and even with sizeable antes in the pot. Players have discovered that if the blinds don’t loosen up appropriately, these miniscule raises have an enormous rate of return as their opponents constantly fold away their money to them.

While this trend has proven to be a great weapon for players in the short term, I don’t see it lasting very long. When the players in the blinds realize how much they’re being exploited by these small raise sizes, they’ll start adjusting and causing the small-raise strategy to backfire. (I defend my blind very loosely when the button opens for a small raise and there are antes in the pot.) But the players who have experimented with the small-raise strategy will realize just how and when they can get away with it, and they’ll be better equipped to steal more blinds in the future. Meanwhile, the good players will start defending their blinds more often, making it harder to steal from them. As is the case with most trends, I see the net result of this one being a much tougher player pool in tournament poker.

Trend No. 2: Bigger All-Ins

This trend may seem to be the polar opposite of trend No. 1, but it applies to a completely different situation, and in some ways complements the first trend. It used to be that good players would wait until they got down to a stack size of about 10 big blinds before they started taking the “move all in or fold” approach. Nowadays, more and more players adopt this strategy with stack sizes of 15 and even 20 big blinds. This trend has come about, in part, thanks to Dan Harrington’s monumentally successful books, which got players thinking in terms of how much it cost them to go one orbit around the table, instead of how many blinds they had in front of them. Players are also naturally disinclined to open for a significant fraction of their stack and then fold to a reraise. They’d rather just move in from the get-go.

The broader all-in standards of players have already made tournaments tougher. In the days before this trend, players would routinely make folds with short stacks that couldn’t possibly have been correct. Then, poker-math people pointed out that you could profitably shove in 20 big blinds with K-8 offsuit as the small blind against the big blind with antes in the pot, even if you turned your hand faceup. (Go ahead and do the math if you don’t believe me or the other poker-math people.) This proved, at the very least, that folding such a hand couldn’t be correct. And as players gained more mathematical understanding, they applied such concepts to their play. So now players are finding more +EV [positive expected value] all-ins, and my guess is that this trend will stay with us, and of course make for tougher tournament fields.

Trend No. 3: Willingness to Call a Big Bet

The old mottoes of tournament poker were: “Anyone who can’t fold the best hand can’t play,” and, “You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle,” and, “It takes a better hand to call than it does to raise.” As a result, players were extremely reluctant to call big all-in bets and raises, even with very strong hands. Their attitude was that they’d rather be the aggressor, even if it meant folding in a situation in which they were likely ahead.

Now, players have a better understanding of pot odds, and they know what a catastrophic mistake it is to fold the best hand when they need to win a showdown only one time in three to show a profit. This understanding has, in turn, led to a lot more calls of big bets with medium-strength and even minimal holdings, like bottom pair or ace high. This play has become so popular that it has even acquired a name: The Hero Call. In my opinion, players have become carried away with this trend at the moment, and are willing to call the biggest of bets with some of the weakest hands in their ranges. But my prediction is that players eventually will be making big calls with the appropriate frequency — less often than they’re making them now, but far more often than they did in the recent past. And guess what? Poker tournaments will be much tougher in the long run.

Knowing the current trends of the tournament poker world can be a valuable asset on the tournament trail. That’s why, even though I play a significantly reduced schedule now compared to my earlier days, I still try to get to major events five to 10 times a year. If you fall off the map completely, you’ll miss what’s going on, and the rest of the field will improve without you.

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com. He is also a featured coach for stoxpoker.com.