5 Poker Tournament Myths Way Too Many Players Believe

June 6, 2017 by Miikka Anttonen #2

MTT Myth 2. My Short Stack Forced Me to Commit

I was recently at the final table of a live turbo tournament in Australia. The only halfway decent opponent left was this local woman who was playing tight-aggressive poker. Then the following hand happened:
7 players left, with three players sitting on stacks of 4 big blinds or less(including myself). The average is 12 big blinds. The chipleader — who has all the chips and has been playing nearly every hand — opens 3x from UTG. The lady responds with a shove for 10 big blinds from UTG+2 holding 5-5. She ended up losing the race against A-K and busting in 7^th place, much to my delight.
In her spot, I’d have folded 9-9 without hesitation. She immediately shrugged it off as a cooler, saying ”I only had 10 big blinds and a pair, I had to go with it”.
The rest of the table nodded in agreement, and I chuckled on the inside. She was in second or third place before or the hand, and was almost guaranteed a few pay jumps. Her only job was to play tight and let others bust first. Instead she decided to adhere to a non-existent rule-of-thumb that says you have to shove any pair if you’re short enough.
Let me assure you this about push/fold tournament play: There’s no rule forcing you to do anything at all just because you’re short.
There are situations when it’s correct to go all-in holding 7-2o with 10 big blinds, and others when you need to fold a hand as strong as 7-7 with the same stack. Those are both extreme examples, but these spots do come up.
As a broad generalization, when you’re short (say, less than 15BB) and aren’t holding a monster, you’re looking for one of two things before you shovel your chips into the pot:

Fold equity
Lots of dead money in the pot

Let me expand on the latter with an example:

Mid-Stage Poker Tournament. Hero has a 10BB stack.

Hero is in the big blind with
tournament misconceptions mtt myths

MP raises to 2BB. HiJack calls. Cutoff calls. Button calls. sb folds. Hero…?

You’re going to get called virtually every time when you shove here — and it will usually be a coin flip — but the amount of dead money in the pot justifies the play because you have a chance to triple-up with (probably) ~50% equity.
If that raise was bigger than 2BB, or if there were no overcallers, going all-in with 5-5 is a less appealing play.
If I were in the Australian lady’s chip position, I’d have been much happier shoving 7-2o blind vs blind against the nit to her left — who was suffocating under ICM pressure — than shoving those fives into the chip leader.

It’s noteworthy that pretty much regardless of how loose the opener was opening, she’d still only be flipping against that range. Thus, going all-in with fives was pure ICM suicide. She could’ve picked the blinds and antes a bunch of times later on by shoving into the other players, increasing her stack with much less risk.