Home
Tournaments - It is all about the Structure (Adv)
I am often asked whether or not you can learn poker through books, and have a clear view about that: if you read the good books, you will improve you game substantially. Harrington on Hold'em Volume 2 is one of these books where Harrington talks a lot about the importance of structure, and brilliantly sums it up under the concept of M. For those of you without the courage or time to read through the few hundreds pages of HOH2, this article will stress quickly how to modify your play depending on the structure.
A Few Definitions
Structure: By this we mean the level of blinds and antes. You will often read about a tournament with a "quick structure" - it simply means a tournament where the blinds and ante go up quickly.
M: your M is the size of your stack divided by the sum of blind and antes. For example, at an 8-handed table with 100-200 blinds and 25 ante, holding a stack of 4000, you would have an M or 8 (4000 divided by 500).
Why Does Structure Matter
The best way to understand why structure can change everything is to take an example hand. It is the end of a tournament, and both you and your opponent have a 3000 stack. Unhappily the blinds are 1000-2000, so you are left with 1000 after posting the big blind. To make matters worse, your opponent raises all-in. You pick-up your cards and discover the disastrous 72o. Well, this is not a good situation, but guess what, you still have to call!
You are getting 5-to-1 odds, and your 72o will do much better than that unless you are certain that he raised with an overpair. As circumstances, rather than hand strength, have probably led him to bet, your read on his cards is close to random, and thus you have a mandatory call. What has happened is that because of the high structure, most of the money is in the pot already, and there is no way you can let it go without a fight. The high structure has effectively forced you to play a very weak hand!
In general things are not that bad. But it is a fact that when the blinds start raising, and your M gets lower, you are under more pressure to make a move and go after the blinds and antes.
When Stacks are Deep - The Complex Game
By deep stacks, we mean Ms greater than 20. More than 50 can be said to be a very deep stack. When most Poker players have deep stacks (typically early round play in WSOP's main event, where people have 10,000 chips for 25/50 blinds), the play is very complex. Because moving all-in preflop is generally not an attractive option, there will be a lot of play on the flop and afterwards, involving large stacks. This will lead to tough decisions, including how to react when a draw hits, whether or not to pay a big overbet with top pair top kicker on a drawish flop, how to play your draws...
The good news for beginners is that they do not really need to get involved at the stage of the tournament. Blinds are small, so playing an excessively tight game will not really hurt you.
The Middle Part
Here we discuss the play of hands for M between 10 and 20. This is the most important area to understand well, because play during it is still quite complex, and it is the zone where you will start most of your online tournaments and SnG. Generally, you are under slightly more pressure than with a deep stack, but without really being in a hurry. You cannot play Poker as tight though, and will have to start fighting a bit. Drawing hands start to be less efficient, because the stacks are not deep enough to make playing them profitable.
M between 10 and 5
This is another tricky zone. You are now definitely under pressure to build your stack back-up. Small pairs and connectors do not have the proper odds to flop a big hand anymore, and will principally be played as blind stealing hands. As Harrington very rightly notes in HOH2, when your M goes lower, play becomes simpler because there is not enough chips to make very intricate bluffs and complex plays. At that point of the tournament, your main edge will be your understanding that you should start looking at steal situations and go for them.
M below 5
Coaching a few players, I realized how bad they treated those situations. Put it this way, doubling up won't do you much good if your M is one or below. So you would better start looking at making a move before. And because your M is so low already, before more or less means as soon as you have an opportunity. Again, the advice given by Harrington in HOH2 is enlightening. He will make a lot of all-in moves in that situation, even with terrible hands, as long as he has the initiative, ie is the first into the pot. This puts maximum pressure on the other players, and maximizes your chance to win blinds without a fight. And even if they call you with what is probably a stronger hand, you still have a chance to win.
Another interesting piece of advice is to be found in the excellent Kill Phil. When heads-up, with a M inferior to 10, they simply advise to go all-in EVERY hand, as long as it is not too obvious to your opponents (that is why you might want to fold one very weak hand at some point, just to camouflage the technique). By now you have understood that with an M inferior to 5, you are not taking prisoners anymore. You will just try to steal their blinds at the first occasion, and keep doing it until you are back above 5.
This contrasts with the technique used by many players, who wait to have some kind of hand they are happy with, and end-up moving in with nearly no chips, get called by the big blind holding J7, just because their raise is so small anyway, and bust out!
M below 1
Not much to discuss here. Harrington calls that the dead zone, for a reason!
Conclusion
This article only scratches the surface of how you should adjust your play, and we will soon dedicate more specific articles to the subject. In the meantime, we advise our pupils to purchase the excellent HOH1 & 2, as well as Kill Phil. The main message in this article is a key to tournament poker, so we repeat it again: when your M gets low, you have to make moves to build your stack back. You have NO excuses not to do so!
Even if all you will remember from this article is that principle, you have improved your tournament poker.
Auch mit Sportwetten kann man gutes Geld verdienen, wenn Sie eine Alternative zu Poker suchen sollten Sie Wetten versuchen oder auch Book of Ra Spielen.