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Poker Strategy / How much ? When is it too much or not enough ? Part I

A simple example which often arises in online and live tournaments is when say both opponents have 30BB. Lets say blinds are 500-1000, 100 ante, and both opponents have 30,000 in chips.

Opponent 1 raises to 3300 in medium position. Opponent 2 looks down at a hand such as 10-10 in the big blind. He is faced with a difficult decision. If Opponent 2 decides to re-raise, he will figure out that a re-raise of 10k+ is in effect committing himself. If he does that and his opponent calls he will have a difficult decision after the flop, so the simplest and not necessarily incorrect decision is to in fact re-raise all in.

As Howard Lederer describes this situation, opponent 2 has been negatively leveraged. After all most of the hands that opponent 1 will call opponent 2's all in with will have him either a coin flip or a 4 to 1 underdog. So opponent 1 has leveraged opponent 2 into risking all his chips when opponent 1 has only risked about 10% of his chips.

Preflop Leveraging ?
What quite a lot of people fall into the trap of, is working out how to vary your bet sizes just marginally so to avoid situations where you may be negatively leveraged or how best to negatively leverage your opponents.

In the current poker climate, especially late on in the tournament, a lot of the play is raise - fold or raise - re-raise - fold. Simply put there is not much post-flop action. A lot of that is to do with the size of the bets. If people make big raises and big re-raises there is no way to avoid committing all your chips in situations where you certainly are negatively leveraged.

Late on in a tournament, there is a general reluctance to call a raise, so if the table you are playing on is quite tight, and people are generally prone to either fold or re-raise then a good size leveraged bet is in fact smaller than perhaps the standard 3x the big blind raise. With antes people often feel that they should re-raise to 3 or more times the big blind. However if they are folding to quite a few re-raises then in fact they are not maximising their potential leverage. Simply you could raise on 4 occasions 2.5x the big blind versus less than 3 occasions to 4x the big blind. If the effect is going to be the same either way, why not keep the bet size as small as possible.

Lederer points out that when you have a big stack, you can open a lot of pots up with small raises, but you have the threat of the mountain of chips behind you. But even with medium and small stacks, making small raises so not to commit yourself can be a good ploy. For one, the smallish raise looks like you want action, thus creating fear in your opponent whilst not risking chips, and when you do have a strong hand you may induce opponents to re-raise you all in with marginal hands that they wouldnt necessarily call your all in with. Good leveraged betting gives your opponent the toughest decision possible.

In the first example the slightly larger raise of 3300, forced opponent 2 to risk all their chips with the re-raise. If opponent 1 raise to 2.5k , then perhaps opponent 2 could have re-raised to 7.5k and perhaps escaped the hand if opponent 1 re-pushed all in. This way opponent 2 has not risked all his chips, but can still try and win the pot with a decent re-raise. It is these subtle variations in bet size that can ultimately make the difference in how far you progress in a tournament. Always keep in mind how the size of your bet, dictates the size of your opponents next bet and how that impacts in relation to their stack.

rk

Poker Strategy / How much ? When is it too much or not enough ? Part I

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Ryan Nathan

Rayan Nathan Eliminated, Lae Leads

A huge hand on table ten has seen Rayan Nathan clash with Quentin Lae.




Lae raised from late position, and Nathan defended his big blind with a re-raise. Lae flat called and both players saw the flop of .



Nathan lead out for 5,000 and Lae re-raised all in. Lae had Nathan covered, and he went into the tank. After several minutes of deep consideration, Nathan eventually made the call for his tournament life with but was going to need some serious help against the of Lae.



The turn and river both bricked eliminiating Rayan Nathan while Quentin Lae is now our tournament chip leader with around 75,000 chips.

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