Adjusting play for lower buy-ins (blind steals)

[Matt R.]

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I've been watching a lot of Step 5 and Step Higher 5 games over the past few days while waiting for a deposit to clear, trying to study the styles of winning players. It seems rather simple, lay low for the first 4 levels, then push or fold to pick up blinds and if you win a few coinflips you're in the money. I play much lower games (11's hoping to make it to the 33's by the end of summer).


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Your post, and this paragraph in particular, makes me think you still have some large gaps in understanding how to beat sng's. Maybe you oversimplified things immensely when you wrote this, but if not, be ready to start learning a lot. Don't misintepret what I'm saying -- even if you're totally new I think you can probably beat the lower levels modestly right now. But, if you want to beat them for more than a small amount it takes a lot deeper understanding than "push to pick up the blinds or fold".

I still play the $10+1's every once in awhile and typically never play higher than $33 (hey, it pays the rent while I'm in school). The main thing you need to apply to the $11's that doesn't go for the Step 5's you've been watching is to be more patient and don't push your smaller edges when it can bust you. This means you probably will want to pass up on a few blinds steals if you're sitting comfortably in chips, because you will get called by crap a lot from the bad players. If you have a big stack, don't worry about this as much. Think of your extra chips as a "cushion". If you are stealing the blinds, and no one left to act after you can "hurt" your stack that much (obviously this depends on how big your stack is, but you get the idea), go ahead and steal away. Even if the retards pick up a mediocre hand to call you with, you're still okay if you lose the hand and can slow down after that. This leads into the other big difference IMO. The other reason you should pass on small edges or borderline blind steals is because the other players typically will bust out on dumb plays (automatically upping your share of the prize pool). When the tourney is full of bad players (unlike the high buy-ins), you can often sit back and relax as others bust each other -- assuming you're comfortable in chips and aren't going to bust anytime soon. This is still an oversimplification, but I think these are the primary differences you need to think about when playing the lower levels. Good luck building your way up.

I realize that it is a huge oversimplification (the simple push/fold part), but this is part of the game where I have very little experience (push/fold doesn't seem to be standard at this level). I played about 25 11's last week, winning about 10 buy-ins first, then placed 4-6th enough times for me to go broke. I'm not even going to suggest that this is a sample size... but there was definitely a psychological shift/leak when I was up 10 buy-ins. Many of them were bad beats, but I think most of it is my loose calling range as a big stack. I think this is a huge leak for the average player at that level.

I'd like to see what hand ranges everybody recommends for these levels (for both blind-stealing and calling all-ins). I realize this is very situation-dependent and I don't have any good hand history examples, but...

Ex.
You're down to 4 with 3000 chips and the remaining 3 have equal shares of the remaining 5000. Blinds are 75/150 and it's folded to you on the button... what do you push? Or UTG pushes... what do you call with?