How well your poker tournament results look in retrospect will in no small way depend on how you handle approaching bubbles, especially with a less than average-sized stack. This is a situation that requires more in the way of situational analysis and less in the way of poker skill. Often you will simply be deciding whether to play or not, and when you do it will often be a pre-flop shove. Whether to fold or shove in marginal spots depends on the nature of the bubble as well as the current mood of your opponents.

The shortest stack at the table is usually the one everyone is watching. Wait for the crippled stacks to double up or bust and do your part in trying to eliminate them if you can spare the chips. But when you get down to just a fairly short stack and then one or two slightly larger stacks, strategy plays a huge rule - especially if you are one of those two slightly larger stacks.

Consider this situation that I found myself in at the final table of the daily $20,000 Guarantee on Poker Stars ($20+2 no rebuys). There were five of us left and I was the second lowest stack at 481,343. The bubbler had 267,743 and there were two stacks at around a million with the largest being 1.2 mil. The blinds were at $10K/20K with $2K antes. The tournament prize structure went like this:

1st: $4798

2nd: $3554

3rd: $2734

4th: $2050

5th: $1435

Not bad for a twenty dollar buy-in, but I really wanted that fourth place finish (which I was appropriately in line for chip-wise). I didn’t really care about trying to win the tournament and just wanted to ease into fourth. So how do you play it? Do you get involved with the bubbler at all, risking changing places with him? Do you get involved in any hands at all with anybody?

I decided not to. I was just going to wait and let him play the big stacks. He did, and he doubled up. Then he got reraised off a hand and ended up on the bubble again, and then doubled up again! I finally got dealt jacks while on the bubble and ran into kings to go out 5th. Sometimes there is nothing you can do no matter how strong your intentions. So you might as well always be willing to risk going out next in pursuit of first!

Technorati Tags: Poker, Poker tournaments, Poker strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 8:09 pm and is filed under cash game results. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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