huge chip lead

[aaronjacobg]

How does one play a huge chip lead early on? I am in a 5+1 on paradise and i was up to 5400 before the blinds reached 10-20. what i have been doing is playing passively and waiting for the blinds to raise. Should i keep playing aggressively or what?

Jake

[holeplug]

Just be patient and wait for your good hands to come while the blinds are low then start stealing when the BB reaches 100 or so. One of the problems I sometimes have when I have such a big stack is becoming to loose and start limping with marginal hands that I normally would throw away.

[ddubois]

One of the problems I sometimes have when I have such a big stack is becoming to loose and start limping with marginal hands that I normally would throw away.

I'm not so sure this is a problem? Isn't it reasonable to take some liberties when the blinds are tiny compared to your stack? You risk little, and you have so much fold equity, why not take the opportunity to bully people? For instance yesterday I more than tripled up with AQ (flopped top pair and a few idiots came along for the ride with bad draw, BP/ace and MPNK) so my stack was insane. Thru level two/three I was limping lots of ATo/QJo/97s type of hands I wouldn't normally, just because I could, and I took a number of pots with flops that hit me. The way I figured it, if someone has to risk busting to get 20% of my stack, I might be playing some marginally chip -EV poker, but I'm hugely stack +EV. Aren't you happy to get, for instance, coin-flips when you have 4x chips than your opponent? Your chips have less value the more of them you have, whereas the chips he has to play with are extremely valuable to him. Am I misunderstanding any tournament theory here?

The big mistake I made with my large chip leads (and I made this same mistake twice) was maintaining my aggression with regards to blind steals when I really didn't need to. I ran some Kx hand in the SB into the BB (the other big stack), and stupidly wouldn't let go when I flopped middle pair. He had hit a set and I ended up giving him most of my stack. Another tournament when I was ITM, I pushed my Ax into the middle stack's BB, when the 3rd player only had like 2bb. The middle stack doubled up with a middle pair, and I ended up going out third when my next coin flip lost.

So I concluded the morale is: When you have a big stack, you can risk small portions of it more liberally against the stacks who can't hurt you, but don't liberally risk large portions of it against the only stack who can hurt you.

[PrayingMantis]

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One of the problems I sometimes have when I have such a big stack is becoming to loose and start limping with marginal hands that I normally would throw away.


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I'm not speaking about you here, but when a big stack starts *limping* all over the place, I can pretty much tell he's a fish. This is a very common mistake, and you should try to avoid it. Sure you can play looser as big stack (in certain situations), and even get manical if you find it right, but always BULLY! DON'T LIMP! Take down the blinds, push people around, intimidate your opponents, especially when they only want to survive. It's amazing how often a big stack becomes a HUGE stack, if the stack is used correctly.

[fnurt]

Right on PM. The thing is that betting big when you hit a flop is not the same thing as bullying, it is more like playing a rush, or something.

When the pros bully with a huge stack, they have garbage more often than not, but the thing is that no one wants to risk their whole stack just to find out if the pro has a real hand this time. Frankly, bullying is easier said than done, if we could all do it then everyone would be Greg Raymer.

Bullying is also tougher in these low buy-in online tournaments because people are more willing to gamble and less concerned about the prospect of being knocked out. Since it's not really worth it for a T5000 stack to run around bullying a bunch of 10/20 blinds, my usual program is to tighten up until the blinds get big enough to mean something.

[PrayingMantis]

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Since it's not really worth it for a T5000 stack to run around bullying a bunch of 10/20 blinds, my usual program is to tighten up until the blinds get big enough to mean something.


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I completely agree. when the blinds don't mean much, there's no sense in bullying, but there's also not much sense in bleeding chips by making too many speculaive moves (i.e, seeing flops "cheaply"), and then not being able to get out in time when you hit some OK hand. Part of the advantage in being a big stack, is that you don't have to take risks in order to survive. Others must.

The appropriate time for getting into the aggressive mode as a big stack is, of course, when the blinds get higher and the players get fewer. And if there are loose callers around, bullying is certainly not a good plan, because bullying is essentially like bluffing, and you can't bluff the unbluffable.

[Roman]

be tight but very aggressive. You shouldn't be throwing chips away with nothing, but make large bets when you have something. Also, once winning blinds will start to affect your stack more, steal very frequently.