Andrew Moreno is a professional poker player with 20+ years of experience. Andrew is a sought-after poker coach, as well as a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, and his primary focus is exploiting players in live tournament poker.
I've been primarily playing live poker for 20 years. And something I see in live poker that I think people tend to often get wrong is that they look at a particular player and think, āthis guy's aggressive' or 'this guy's passive,ā and tailor their strategy around that.
I suggest you take that into consideration but also weigh heavily on the player's stack size and position before making big decisions.
People focus too much on whether someone is a recreational or professional, aggressive or passive. They miss that bluffing frequencies are going to be higher when people have bigger stacks, both preflop and post-flop, and they're going to be lower both preflop and post-flop when they are short.
Watch the video above or read on to learn more.
Letās go deeper
With a lot of poker study, we tend to look at symmetrical stacks, which simply means a 50 big blind stack against a 50 big blind stack or a 100 big blind stack against a 100 big blind stack.
As you progress through tournaments, you will most likely be playing 30 big blinds against 70, or 100 big blinds against 14. These are the real-world scenarios that you'll often see and are more challenging to study for.
For many situations that you haven't studied, you will want to make sure that you're aware that these short stacks are less incentivized to run bluffs against you, during later stages of a tournament specifically, and vice versa.
A very specific example
I want you to imagine a scenario where you open in the cutoff. You have 20 big blinds; the button player is a pro, and they have 45 big blinds. The pro 3-bets you, in position.
We're in the money during the later stages of a tournament. The player in position makes a 4.5 big blind 3-bet against your two big blind open.
That 4.5 big blind bet will threaten your stack immediately. You will tend to feel like you will be shoving a lot if you continue. And when you call, the stack-to-pot ratio will shrink a lot.
In addition, if you flop anything, you might be all in. And all of a sudden, the player in the cutoff has you thinking about playing for your tournament life.
The player on the button has just made a 3-bet for 10% of their stack and put you in a situation where you're feeling the pressure of being all-in. That's the power that you'll see with having a 45 big blind stack, which isn't necessarily even a big stack. But it's a much bigger stack than your 20 big blinds - more than twice as much.
This is just one example preflop where you might see somebody who could be increasing their bluffing frequency. And if it doesn't work out for the pro who's 3-betting you without a good hand, they may lose 10% to 15% of their stack. It doesn't affect their prognosis in the tournament at all.
However, if it goes poorly for you in the cutoff, you're very likely out of the tournament or on life-support. Playing as the cutoff, you must understand that leverage is there for the button, which can lead to you facing more aggression.
Now, letās flip this around. We have the 45 big blind stack in the cutoff, and the 20 big blind stack is on the button. They have the two big blind open from the cutoff, and now the button makes it 4.5 big blinds in position.
The button has to invest nearly 25% of their remaining stack to make this three-bet, whereas the player in the cutoff only has to invest around 5% more of their stack to continue into this pot.
They're not feeling much of that pressure of busting or potentially playing for their tournament life. If they donāt flop much equity and have to fold, it wonāt affect their outlook in the tournament much. If the button misses the flop and has to fold, it will cost them 5x as many chips as the cutoff. They also start with less than half the chips as the cutoff.
What does this all mean?
This situation means that when the player in position is short-stacked, they're way less incentivized to make light 3-bets against you.
When you're playing as this player in late position, and you open, and the short stack 3-bets you, make sure to factor in not only if they're a professional player or recreational player, but also their stack size.
If they're investing a significant portion of their stack and get it wrong, it's very costly. So, we're going to weight them towards value hands, and we could potentially do some over-folding, especially against recreational players.
This scenario doesn't mean that you always fold, and good pros find bluffs off of short stacks, but the population tendency is for these players in possession of these shorter stacks to be weighted more heavily towards really strong hands and not have many bluffs.
Contact Andrew on his coaching site, Amo4sho.com, and follow him on IG and X.
