Tournament Bubbles

I am writing this upon my return home from one of the $1,500 buy-in no-limit hold’em events at the World Series. Certain mistakes are so ubiquitous that I shouldn’t be surprised to see them. Yet, it always astonishes me to see a player who seems to have had some experience and know a lot about poker make them. One major mistake that I see repeated in tournament after tournament occurs near the bubble. This particular tournament had begun with 2,563 entrants. The final 270 would receive payouts ranging from $2,802 to $614,248. You would think it was a no-brainer to play to maximize your chance of winning one of the top prizes, even if it meant increasing your chance of finishing just out of the money.

What Not to Do: If you reach this stage in a tournament, you should not become super tight, especially when you have a chance to be the first one to take aggressive action. Some of the other players, generally those with shorter stacks, will tighten up to try to make the money. This means that you can run over them. Even a medium stack may not want to get involved in a pot that could leave him crippled. Chips represent cash equity in the prize pool. In this tournament, where players started with 4,500 in chips, you can think of winning a pot of 5,000 as adding $1,500 cash to your equity. (The reason that I pick 5,000, not 4,500, is that some money is taken out by the house.) This means that it is very expensive in the long run to cost yourself a few pots to get to the money.

How Not to Do It: I don’t know if I’ve convinced you that playing extremely tight to guarantee making the money is a mistake. I don’t know how much that first tiny payout means to you and your bankroll. Let’s suppose that it means a lot, and you are willing to give up a lot of equity to make the money. (This is often the case for players who have won a cheap satellite into the main event, and feel that a $20,000 payout on their $200 investment is worth sacrificing some of their chance for a monster win.) What you shouldn’t do is let everyone at the table know that this is your strategy. Don’t let them know that you’re throwing away A-K to avoid disaster or that you are playing only aces and kings. Once your opponents, especially the aggressive ones, realize this, they will steal from you every hand. You will never get a few limpers and see a free flop from the big blind. You have alerted all of the other players that they can steal from you.

What to Do and How to Do It: Close to the bubble, play your normal game. If someone makes it clear that he is folding every hand to make the money, steal! If you are faced with a very close decision in a situation in which you might lose your entire stack, it’s OK to fold. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is that making the money does matter. The other is that your opponents also want to make the money, and since you haven’t started to play extremely tight, your opponents will tend to have a real hand when they get involved.

If you can mislead your opponents, do so. If you plan to steal a lot of pots on the bubble, try to make them think that you really want to make the money and will play only premium hands. If you decide to sacrifice equity to make the money, don’t let them know it. In fact, try to convince them that you don’t care about anything except the first few places, so you are willing to gamble. This may lead to your getting a walk in the big blind or someone trying a misguided bluff when you have the nuts.

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s and The Library near Houston, and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.