Poker Tournaments: Deep Stack Play

online poker, Tournaments
January 17 2009

Deep stack tournaments are a bit different from most online tournament action. The blinds elevate at a slower rate and players get more chips to play with at the start of the tourney. Strategy for deep stack events has one simple rule to follow. The thing to keep in mind is to continue to play your game with the size of the blinds in mind, not the size of your stack.

Instead of measuring their aggression level against the blind size compared to their stack size, many players think they have to start taking chances just because they’re on the short stack. They may have 20 or 40 times the big blind left, but because they’re the short stack at the table they make overly aggressive moves to force the action.

Deep stack events afford you the luxury of waiting for good situations to get your chips in there. Don’t feel pressured to make moves unless you fall below 10 big blinds. Patience is more important in these events than it is in regular multi-table events, and especially more so than in Sit and Go tournaments.

Novice players will call big bets in these games because they base their choices on their stack size. When you find yourself with a big hand that’s getting action, you can make bigger than average bets because players often call based on the bet compared to their stack size.

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