Deep stack poker tournament strategy at 888poker ™ Learn more about the tournament type that plays out much like cash games, involving deep stacks and lots of creative, post-flop play! Deep-stack cash games are more intricate than tournaments and require you to make more difficult decisions because more chips are under threat. Often, in a tournament, you will only have to make a decision preflop and on the flop because the stacks are so short.

• Deep Stack Tournament Strategy In Deep Stack tournaments the number of chips you start with is greater in comparison to regular freezeout MTTs. The blind levels are also twice as long, which makes them preferred by tight/conservative and skilled players who adopt a small ball game.
• Poker Tournament Tip 1: Steal a Lot, But Don’t Go Overboard “Open small and often.” This phrase drove the pre-flop strategy of almost every tournament regular for years, and it still has some merit. With antes in play, a 2.25BB open has to pick up the pot less than half of the time to show an immediate profit. (And that’s not including.
• Bubble and Endgame for Deep Stack MTTs These strategies will serve you well through the first 4-5 hours of the tournament, while the average stack will start to decline for the super deep realm to a more manageable M20-M25 average, at this point.

One of many innovations online poker has introduced and made popular over the years is the “turbo”-styled multi-table tournament featuring short levels and rapidly rising blinds and antes. Many live tournaments also feature fast structures and in some cases even borrow the “turbo” designation as a way of advertising to players they can expect a quick pace.

Pick practically any online poker site and you’ll find no shortage of turbo or fast-structured tournaments from which to choose. On the WSOP Social App, for example, you’ll find a number of tournaments that have a blind structure that wold be consdiered to be turbo or hyper-turbo.

The structures of “Turbo” and “Hyper-Turbo” tourneys might suggest that such tournaments reward luck more than skill, since the format demands more preflop all-ins and thus more dependence on being dealt strong starting hands. But the fact is they also tend to reward the same kinds of skills regular, slower tournaments do. Being smart with your starting hand selection, understanding the power of position, sizing your bets effectively, and being able to read opponents’ tendencies and styles are just as important in fast-structured tourneys, and players who have developed those skills tend to perform better as a result.

It’s just everything is happening faster in turbo tournaments. You have less time to make adjustments, to recover from mistakes, and to wait for the perfect hand or spot from which to make a move. While you may start relatively deep stacked in this turbo games, you can quickly find yourself short-stacked if you do not manage to chip up early in the tournament, so it literally pays to play these tournaments aggressively.

That said, such a progression isn’t all that different from what players experience in tournaments with slower structures — you just get there a lot more quickly.

Here are 10 tips to keep in mind when playing fast-structured tournaments:

1. Don’t change style during early levels (tight is still right)

With such a deep stack with which to start, you can approach the first couple of levels of a turbo tournament the same way you would regular MTTs. The blinds and antes are too small to be worth stealing, and in fact you’ll likely benefit more later on by demonstrating a tight image early. That will earn you folds in later levels when you do open up your range and go for blind steals and bluffs.

2. Develop reads on opponents during early levels

Just as in a regular MTT, you should always be watching the tendencies of your opponents in order to figure out who is loose, who is tight, who seems to be more savvy with their plays, and who appears to be making mistakes. The difference is you have less time to develop these reads, and a smaller sample size of hands in which to do so.

3. Don’t snooze (and lose)

Players accustomed to regular MTTs are used to the slow pace allowing them to register late, to sit out hands, or if online to surf around and let their attention be divided during the early levels. Such is not the case in a turbo, where you’re much better off being present and focused on every hand from the very start.

4. Be ready for the “middle stage”

In the WSOP Social Poker app's tournaments, you’re already edging into what might be considered the “middle stage” of a tournament even before the antes kick after a half-hour. You should still be selective but can start looking to open more often from late position with a wider range, especially after the antes are introduced and there is more dead money to be claimed.

5. Widen your range

Dovetailing on the advice to start looking for spots to steal more often, once you get past the opening levels of a turbo tournament you’ll want to open up your ranges for other actions, too, including reraising others’ preflop opens, calling raises (preferably with position), and making postflop continuation bets/raises. Again, don’t become irrationally loose with your decision-making, but be aware that the rapidly rising blinds and antes necessitate you remain in action frequently. You might well mostly fold through the first couple of levels of a turbo, but after that you can ill afford to do so.

6. Pay attention to changing stack sizes

Players can quickly slip from having comfortable stacks to having 20 BBs or less in turbos, with the change in level sometimes suddenly affecting a player’s status. Understand that players with such stacks will be more likely to push all-in should you raise or reraise them, meaning you’ll want to anticipate that possibility when making such moves.

7. Be aware of impending level changes

Depending on how fast players are acting, you’ll usually only be getting through about an orbit or a little more at a nine-handed table during five minutes of online play. That means that often each level will find you playing from all of the positions at the table just once (the blinds, early position, middle position, late position). If you are getting short yourself, you may find it necessary to reraise-shove or make other aggressive moves before the level changes and your stack becomes less able to elicit folds because your fold equity has decreased.

8. Consider isolating short stacks

As in regular MTTs, players slipping to 10-15 BBs will be looking for spots to double-up in turbos and you’ll see many open-raising all in when given the opportunity. Picking up good hands (medium-to-big pocket pairs, big aces) behind these players may mean reraise-shoving in order to clear the field and set up heads-up showdowns against these short stacks. Weigh the risk carefully and don’t enter into such showdowns without worthwhile hands, but be ready to seize opportunities to gobble up the shorter stacks when they come.

9. Don’t reshove light if short

A big mistake players often make in turbos after slipping down below 15 BBs is to reraise all-in over an opening raise with hands with which they don’t want to be called. Say a player opens for 2x from middle position and you have on the button with 10 big blinds. You reraise-shove and it folds back your opponent. Now he’s facing calling 8 BBs in order to win about 15 BBs in the middle. That’s almost 2-to-1 pot odds you’ve given him, meaning he can call with a wide range of hands, many of which give him more than a 33% chance to win. Don’t feel obligated to reshove ace-rag or similar hands, especially when you can fold and be dealt almost an orbit’s worth of hands from which to find something better.

10. Be smart about open-shoving when short

First off, before entering into “push/fold” mode be aware that having 15 BBs late in a turbo tourney isn’t necessarily bad — in fact, a lot of times that might mean you’re one of the bigger stacks at the table. But when you do fall to short-stacked status and are down only to open-raising all in or folding, pay attention to your position. From early position your range for shoving should be relatively tight, while from the cutoff or button you can open-shove a much wider range of hands as you have fewer players behind you left to act. (Open-pushing your last 10 big blinds with from the button is much better than reraise-shoving.)

Those are some tips to get you started with turbo tourneys. Something else to keep in mind is that the faster-paced tourneys tend to attract a lot of inexperienced and lesser-skilled players. In other words, employing some strategic know-how can give you a significant edge in the turbos, one that over time can overcome the increased variance such tournaments invite.

^{Photo: “Ludicrous Speed Go!” Michael Shaheen. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.}

_{This article was originally published on November 25, 2014. Last update: July 8th, 2019}

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Deep Stack Tournament Strategy

In Deep Stack tournaments the number of chips you start with is greater in comparison to regular freezeout MTTs. The blind levels are also twice as long, which makes them preferred by tight/conservative and skilled players who adopt a small ball game. It also reduces the risks and variance of MTTs by allowing you to play under less pressure.

In a typical deep stack tournament you will receive 5,000 starting chips with 10/20 blinds. Compare this to turbo MTTs structures at PokerStars (which give you 500 or 1,000 chips at 10/20 blinds) and you can see the difference immediately.

Best Site for Deep Stack Tournaments: Titan Poker – $500 Bonus!

The best site for non-US players to play Deep Stack tournaments is Titan Poker. They now run the exciting European Deep-stack Championship III, and have a number of regular deepstack tournaments along with deepstack satellites from $3 – $10 entry fees.

Deep Stack Poker Strategy Tournaments

For US players PokerStars is the site we recommend for deep stack tournaments. Each day PokerStars runs deepstack tournaments with buy-ins of $10 -$30. The biggest deepstack event at PokerStars takes place on Saturdays with a buy-in of $100.

Deep Stack Tournament Strategy

Because deep stack tournaments run differently to regular online tournaments you need to slow down your game

The first thing noticeable in deep stack tournaments (e.g. WSOP) is that aggressive players who are not used to the format will make too many re-raises and all-in moves pre-flop. This won’t be as effective in deep stack tournaments because fewer players will call you. Most of the time any player who calls you will have you beat.

Re-raises are less effective because the stack sizes are much deeper. In the beginning of a regular online tournament a re-raise to 300 chips may represent 30% of your chips (starting on 1,000). However, in deepstack tournament starting on 5,000 chips this will represent only 6% of your chips. Thus making it less likely to call. Players who do this too often tend to become frustrated.

There are 3 basic approaches to accumulating chips in deepstack events:

Deep Stack Poker Tournament Strategy

The first is playing passively. This means limping into many flops and seeing as many as possible. Your aim is to exploit your opponents weaknesses in post-flop play, and this in itself requires excellent post-flop reading ability on your part. Rather than setting a trap, you’re really just waiting to corner a bad player. You’ll make big wins in these pots which compensate for the flops you missed.

The second type of strategy is the small ball approach (utilized by Negreanu and Hansen). In deepstack tournaments small ball poker means seeing as many flops as possible while attempting to limit the size of pots and cost to see the next card. This is to reduce the risks and cost of play. You’re effectively trying to “slow” the play down and continually put pressure on your opponents by making moves first.

The third approach for deepstack tournaments is TAG play (tight aggressive). Under this strategy you’re only playing premium hands or others when in position. The goal is to make as much money in the pot pre-flop as possible, so your post-flop play doesn’t matter as much. This is an easier strategy to adopt for weaker tournament players.

Conclusion on playing Deep Stack Tournaments

Overall, deep stack tournaments are designed for “better” tournament players. Reading opponents and taking advantage of position is more important than blind stealing or being uber aggressive. Deepstack tournaments in many ways are more resembling of cash games than turbo MTTs/SNGs. Patience plays a bigger role than other tournaments.

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Deep Stack Poker Strategy Tournament Schedule

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1. Odd but true… this strategy may work early on in the tournament… but when blinds and antes start getting larger and larger after a couple of hours you must bet more aggressively and play a much wider range of hands. Although ‘small ball’ poker style may help conserve chips and help win smaller pots with not much competition against tight players that fold a lot; adopting a liberal raise and 3 to 4 betting style of play especially post flops are great ways to dramatically increase your chipstacks! That’s the way to play later on in tournaments… but you may find some loose cannon players early on that love donking off many chips around 25%-50% preflop and all of it on the river. Catching them and winning all their chips would be supremely awesome if you knew they are deliberately doing that to combat against ‘small ball betting strategies’… just got to put them on a their polarized hands and call or reraise them all in if you are 100% you have them loose cannons beat.

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