10 X The Big Blind Rule

Short Stack Poker Tournament Strategy

10 X The Big Blind Here is what it comes down to for me. A free online poker tournament is not an epic confrontations between two premium hands in the later rounds when it all is decided. They are generally 60/40 or closer confrontations, which ultimately decides the outcome of a free online poker game.

With 10 times the big blind or less, you have options I suppose. You could raise the min with steal hands, but I think this stinks. For one, you are inviting people to come over the top with many hands (if you frequently steal this way). If you are the type to min raise with the goods as well, then you are also risking being busted by people who take advantage of the good price you have offered and see a flop from the blinds.

Min raising with big blinds and a 10 x bb stack generally means you will steal blinds at a less frequent rate, but also risk less to do so. It also provides the chance for opponents to outplay you on the flop (which you will miss more than not). Frankly, I don't min raise because it always seems to put me in difficult situations. I know that difficult doesn't necessarily mean bad, but I prefer to avoid these kinds of spots in a poker tournament.

So if you don't min raise, you are going to be raising 2.5-3 x BB with 10 x bb stack. Now the problem arises here. You must raise 2.5-3xbb with all your hands, right? If you raise 2.5x-3bb when u are stealing, and do anything differently when u have the goods, then I think we could agree that this makes no sense. You must keep your opponents off balance in an online poker tournament.

If you raise 2.5-3bb with a stealing hand, and someone goes over the top for your stack, you are going to fold getting 13:7, or roughly 2:1 (usually 2+:1 because of the presence of blinds). Most stealing hands, on average, are worth this price.

The bottom line is this: If you steal enough using the 10 x big blind rule (you will have a higher rate of success than using any other method), then more often than not you will be doing enough work to keep your stack growing, or to at least keep it where it is. When you do get called, it won't always be by aces or kings, and it will often be an OK situation, one better than raising to 3xbb and then folding to a reraise.

The issue becomes a lot more clear with 8 x BB. It should all be pushing and folding. I suppose 10 x bb is kind of arbitrary, and I guess I would agree that maybe 9.5 is a better mark or so, but I really do not think raising less than all-in and folding is going to be a more +EV move than raising all-in to begin with. That is what it comes down to for me in free poker games.

The 10 x BB rule is a little bit of a simplification. I really believe that 9 x BB works for me better, but 10x is fine too. The idea is that you can only move all in or fold when you are this short stacked or if all the people to act after you have less than 9 or 10 x BB.

Anyways, so we have this 'rule'. The real trick is deciding what to push, and what to not push. When you have 11 x BB, you can afford to fold marginal hands like K8s from the CO, but if you had 6xBB, this fold would be a crime. So obviously as you lose your stack relative to the blinds, you get more desperate.

This is all simple stuff so far. The thing I wanted to say was that I think that most people think that this is a linear regression. So that at 11-14xBB you can afford to fold marginal hands (instead of opening for 3xBB), and at 8-10xBB you get more desperate, and at 6-8xBB you get even more desperate, etc.

I think that at 5-6xBB you should be the most desperate. What exactly this range of hands is, depends. But for the most part, this should be the height of your looseness. Why? Because you have folding equity, but not for long. When the blinds go up, or when you get blinded, or when both happen, you are sure to lose almost all of your folding equity, and you have no chance to survive and build a stack without showdown. If you have less than this, say, 1.5-3xBB, your folding equity is almost gone. You shouldn't be desperate now because you wont be able to make anyone fold with trash hands. So now you should be fairly selective, and worse case scenario just go down with any random two from the BB in a free online poker tournament.

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