A hidden gem…
Hey All,
I just wanted to tell you about this great game style they have on PokerStars. It’s called the “Ante Up” tournaments. These games are multi-table tournaments that you may or may not have seen, and they seem to run nightly. Since I’m a bad poker player, I only play the $5.50 games, but I can say that these games are highly exploitable to anyone that has at least some knowledge of pot odds, and how to properly wager based on them as well as your opponents.
The hook to these games, is that start with a 5/5 small blind and big blind, as well as an ante. Now, the blinds remain at 5/5 for the entirety of the game, but the antes continually increase. I believe starting stack is 3000 in chips. Now, considering the fact that everyone at the 9-player table chips in an ante, the pots immediately start higher than a regular blind-based structure would be (the first level, with 5/5/5 would have a starting pot of $55 rather than the $10). However, I’ve played a few of these now, and people playing the game do not account for this, and make continual mistakes. I have literally seen the game get to a point where the pot is $3000+ dollars pre-flop, and someone raise to $25. This allows decent players to realize that your rougly 120:1 odds means you should be calling with literally any two cards. There is nothing more delightful than stacking someone with AA with your 58o after flopping a straight because he didn’t understand betting based on pot sizes.
So, aside from playing a wide variety of hands, and allowing yourself plenty of suckout chances, how else can you exploit this? Well, people see big numbers, and they immediately think that you’re betting too much, and will fold, thinking you’re insane. Playing the other day, I decided that my standard raise pre-flop was going to be (about) 3/4 the pot. My reasoning is that to get a 3k pot pre-flop, normally you would need blinds of 1k / 2k, so a bet of 2250 which was normally an impossible bet, however, the other people at my table were consistently folding, and this was not early in the tourney with all the bad players, but rather with less than 10% of the field remaining (hey, what can I say, even I get lucky!). Basically, I was stealing pots with a raise of roughly 1.12x the BB.
A final thing that I noted was that players were overestimating the health of their stacks. The small blinds are the only thing you see on the table from your own stack. If they showed the antes coming out as well, maybe people would realize that they’re paying $500 per hand, and would realize that their stack of 6000 isn’t going to last quite long enough.
I guess the point of this article is that in this particular tournament, I was able to exploit a weakness in the other players based on what should be a very basic concept that anyone who plays the game should already know. If you do not understand the concepts of pot odds, either calling based on them, or betting in order to remove them, I would suggest reading up on it ASAP!
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Mark
