Tag Archives: stack
The Basics of Deep Stack Poker for German Players
Deep stack poker refers to German poker tournaments that require at least 200 big blinds of the players involved. Most online German players rarely get involved in these situations, but they are available and almost certainly occur in live games, but they are advertised as deep stack tourneys. You wont be caught unaware of the rules of the game. In most cases, each German poker player starts with 5000 chips and the blinds rise every 30 minutes. Those who play a tight game actually prefer them because it does allow them to stay in the game longer.
In a regular German poker tournament, you get chips for the amount of money you pay to buy into the game. In a deep stack tournament, you get far more chips than you pay for ?often double the amount, such as in the World Poker Championship Tour in which you buy in for $25,000 but receive $50,000 worth of chips. The blinds increase slowly and the game takes longer to play. It allows more players to take part in spectacular hands because they are not afraid of losing their money too early in the game. That being said, you still have to be cautious and be cognizant of the pot odds of each hand.
You do have to take the size of your stack into consideration at all times during the game. Along with this you have to take the playing style of your opponents into consideration. It is exceptionally difficult to take a players full stack early in the game, which means that you have more opponents to deal with for a longer period of time. You have to use these two factors into determining the size of your bet. It is also easier to bluff on the river when the pot is higher.
In the early rounds of the German tournament, the blinds are small. It is advantageous to make large raises before the flop in these hands, but you will need to make adjustments to this strategy to adapt to the levels of play by your opponents. This strategy will help you reduce the number of opponents in the hands allowing you to increase your chances of winning so that you can add to your stack. later in the game when there are fewer opponents and the game is tighter, you can take a few losses and still not make a significant cut to your stack. A raise as high as eight times the blind is not uncommon in these situations when you have a good starting hand.
Changing the size of your bet is also important when playing in a deep stack tournament. if you stick to the same bet all the time, you become very predictable for the other players and they will know that when you do place a bet or raise, it means you have a good hand. You do want to place a bet that will make the decision to raise, call or fold a difficult one for your opponents. You can achieve this easier early on when you have a large stack on the table in front of you.
Poker: Playing Turbo Tournaments
Prepare To Gamble- The lure of the turbo tournament is one that many players are beginning to bite down on, as the popularity of a quick tournament becomes more and more appealing to the ADD riddled youth movement in poker. Big buy-in tournaments are even running with turbo structures, like the EPT 10k turbo events. But, one of the primary things that a player has to be aware of when sitting at a turbo tournament is that, in order to win a turbo, you WILL have to gamble at some point in order to survive. The structure is designed to collapse stacks quickly and keep players constantly moving to stay afloat in the tournament. After the first 5 or so levels, don’t be surprised to see the average M hovering around 3-4 and the big stack will still barely be above M10.
Transitioning- At the beginning of the tournament, a super tight, conservative approach to play will keep you in the thick of things and avoiding unnecessary gambles in the early stages, where the value of a double up is not as vital as it would be an hour (or 6-12 levels) from now. So, a neutral equity coin flip (Example: shoving 1010 against an opener whose range runs roughly 50% against your tens) may yield a much greater return when you go from M5 to M10 as opposed to going from M20 to M40; the extra M20 does you little good early, but the extra M5 later allows you to muscle the shorter stacks and expand your game at the critical stages where everyone stays in flux with their stacks. As the tournament progresses, be looking for those spots that may seem marginal to chip up; in a turbo, they may actually be +EV in the long run, not because the actual result is +EV, but the chip position you get to if you win allows you many more +EV scenarios.
Time=Essential Factor- The biggest problem many players struggle with when playing turbo tournaments is understanding the factor in which time moves throughout the tournament. When the blinds start bringing everyone down to short stacks, you need to always be moving. If you double up to an M8 stack and suddenly think you can slow down a bit, you’re not approaching the turbo correctly; let’s say the blinds are t1,000/t2,000/(t200) at a 10 handed table, and you’re at t50,000, an M of 10, not comfortable, but seemingly out of danger for now. The problem is, in a very short amount of time (5-10 minutes) the blinds will increase to something like t1,500/t3,000/(t300), a common increase in turbo tournament increments, and your M10 stack suddenly drops down to M6.66 in a span of 5-8 hands. Once the average stack reaches M8 or less, which will vary depending on the initial stack sizes and blind intervals, no stack is safe from the advancing blinds; stay aggressive and accumulate chips, whether you’re M1 or M30; in 30 minutes, M30 may be M1.